For a record this simple and, even at its punchiest, seductively serene, it might seem far-fetched to compliment it for being daring. But considering its own orbit--and her eschewing lo-fi recording techniques--Rose cuts right to the chase, making lean, elegant music that practically glows in the face of exceptional fuss.

As Epic progresses, her vocals couple with an array of sonics and styles (see: the pedal-steel country saunter of "Save Yourself", the electric punch of "Peace Sign"), though it's the slower, more atmospheric numbers that remain the album's most arresting.

Dull tempos, disengaging moments, recycled ideas--all egregious offenses, yes. Luckily, Les Savy Fav have earned a decade's worth of goodwill to cushion a just-OK album or two landing in their discography, which makes Root For Ruin a well-deserved victory lap, if nothing else.

You can't deny that Cuomo feels no shame and is making exactly the kind of music he wants, and there's ultimately something disarming about that.

Solo ultimately reveals little we didn't already know about Vijay Iyer as a pianist, but to hear him explore these facets of his sound on his own, with no one to lean on, is still interesting. The central suite is where the album and the artist truly shine.

He's sad and pathetic and needy and yet somehow still smooth, which is sort of the central animating paradox at the heart of the Walkmen. They make these wounded, anxious songs, but they make them so confidently, with such unearthly rich-guy assurance.

More money means more studio time, and more studio time can lead to more experimentation; as such, Business Casual's most successful moments are the result of genre-related leg-stretching.

Like much of Cave's work, there is an ominous sense of dread always creeping. But unlike previous work, there's a speed and intensity to Grinderman 2 unheard before.

False Priest is billed as a more collaborative effort, both on the production end with musical savant Jon Brion and in the spotlighted duets with divas Janelle Monáe and Solange Knowles.

Phosphene Dream is a step up, if only for the little bit of variety that the tighter arrangements and genre-hopping provide.

For an album that presents a more assured, swaggering Black Mountain, it's a minor disappointment that Wilderness Heart doesn't so much climax as gradually wind down, without a show-stopping finale to crown the victory lap. But even in their quietest moments, the band can still leave you unsettled.

Significant artistic development of any kind probably would've been a bad idea for this band-- they were, as the saying goes, small but perfectly formed. Still, it's also not quite satisfying to hear 40-year-olds come back to what they were doing half their lifetime ago and approach it exactly the same way.

Rather than protest the state of the world, Staples is toasting human endurance-- hers as well as ours.

Summer of Hate felt meek at times, content to retreat into its own shadow; Sleep Forever's many oversized melodies and wider-reaching sound prove that these guys do a lot better taking a few steps into the light.

Outside of a distorted vocal on "Not Getting There" and a slowly blooming and surprisingly gripping waltz ("Everything Is Wrong"), the arrangements seem done up like hospital rooms, every sound picked for maximum sterility.

Much of Majesty Shredding seems to concern the importance and difficulties inherent in maintaining a fantasy life as you get older, but it's not a morose or self-involved album. Instead, they've made a total wheelhouse record, and a very good one.

On the other hand, Fields' dearth of surprises makes it a little disappointing even for those with more conventional tastes -- listeners who generally value stuff like quality and consistency more than the shock of the new.

So Barking stays the course, with the added prospect of a fitter, happier Underworld on the horizon. It's about time.

They tease out old ideas and combine them with new ones, affixing Appalachian folk to classic rock, ambient, avant garde, and a kind of musical entropy that pushes many of their songs into sputtering, oddly compelling noise.

While there was an unspectacular battle-rap anonymity to his past lyrics, they were at least spit in the service of a strong overall style. Now he's grown a bit, upping the emotional dimension subtly and letting some more specific humanistic details come through, even in the lines that read like average boasts on paper.

The upside is that it sounds warmly familiar, a reminder of why we missed them in the first place, but the downside is that the album gives very few indications of what Fink and Taylor have learned during their hiatus.

Pop Negro feels transitional. El Guincho has a clear abundance of talent; he simply didn't harness it this time around.

People who've appreciated the band's last three albums will find time for this once it has a chance to sink in, but it's not essential for people who got a charge out of Ta Det Lungt and passed on the rest.

Light Chasers improves on 2008's Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) by focusing on what Cloud Cult do best, though it lacks the colorful songwriting and hooky inventiveness of the band's most endearing songs.

Expektoration is DOOM at his live-show peak, and people who go into this knowing this set's from six years back might feel a bit more charitable. But releasing a concert album with an "Act 1"/"Intermission"/"Act 2" structure instead of a telltale tracklist, and obscuring its actual place in a years-distant history? That's not supervillainy, that's antagonism.

Were its songs more dynamic, its arrangements less haphazard, its tone more even, its sentiments a bit more clearly stated, Elf Power could really be affecting. But as it is, it just feels affected; the sound of a band in mourning seeking a musical catharsis they can't quite extend to the listener.

There aren't many hooks on this record, and the tempo shifts are sometimes subtle, so it can feel overwhelming-- kind of a constant onslaught of sound. This is a taste issue, but if you require a respite now and again, it might be a difficult listen.

There are glimmers, in the various half-ideas that surface throughout No Ghost, of a vision that the band could have taken and run with. Klausener's lyrics can be appealingly morbid.

Minor quibbles and missteps aside, Body Talk Pt. 2 is a perfectly solid-- and occasionally awesome-- record.

The good news is that they're too skilled, experienced, and important to make a record that's just a mess, and for a while there's nothing so terrible about this one.

Personal Life is hardly a failure; much of it is excellent. But it's also missing that anger-meets-energy urgency that made the Thermals' early albums so undeniable.

Though it is abstract, Old Punch Card is playful. It's like the sound of a guy bumping around in a room filled with weird noisemakers, trying out one and then another until he finds one that sounds especially interesting.

Throughout Fin Eaves, the kaleidoscopic growth of the tracks feels both natural and chaotic, and you get a good sense of the sounds and patterns evolving. Sometimes the album's lo-fi and static-ridden production can induce a dulling sensation.

Expertly paced, Cubehouse's highlights are judiciously spread out, its occasional down note always quickly offset by something more boisterous. It's the Spaceships' most consistent listen; with no lows to speak of, it's easy to see this becoming the go-to for fans.

The album is also a much more modern-sounding pop project, though it similarly owes its success to the chemistry of its creators.

So yes, on Minotaur they continue draw deeply from 60s soft-pop; if you've enjoyed the Clientele's last few albums, you're guaranteed to enjoy at least 6/8ths of this mini LP.

Fans of shivery folk music with subtle plateaus will surely find things to like, but the rest of you might find yourselves wishing the "black dog" in Selway's basement had a bit more bite. At least he let it outside.

Quest for Fire's sophomore release, Lights From Paradise, is less stoner rock than stoned rock, marked by a patient pace and a foggy-headed whimsy that lingers even as the VU levels surge into the red.

Everything Everything's debut LP, Man Alive, is proof that enthusiastic experimentation can't save your end product when the underlying elements are so incompatible and unappetizing.

Strange Weather, Isn't It?: you'll enjoy it plenty while it's on, but once it's over you might forget it ever existed.

Hawk is very much Campbell's album. She made all the big artistic decisions, her face is front and center on the cover, and Lanegan shows up on only eight of the album's 13 tracks.

Eels' latest, Tomorrow Morning, is far too insular to mean much of anything outside itself. It's an exercise in self-referentiality, which might be more impressive if the music didn't sound like the folk-with-beats path Beck was smart enough to avoid.

Ra Ra Riot sound overly self-conscious, the rural environs of their recording space failing to provide the warmth, empathy, or exuberance of The Rhumb Line.

Those great choruses? Still great, but not when songs are dragged out this long and the payoff arrives right on schedule, about four times a song. It's indulgent, but it's hard to make songs sound this big. Fortunately, it won't be enough to wring-out the magic found in a great many of these songs, and surely won't be able to stall Land of Talk who, with Cloak and Cipher, are progressing quite nicely.

The Sword's songs seem to follow the same basic blueprint: Opening-riff trudge, part where Cronise sings about magic, solo, more crunching, more magic, another solo.

Sugar is notable as much for what's missing as for what's been honed and emphasized. Morris no longer howls like Kurt Cobain, nor does he drawl so studiously. There are no 12- or seven-minute stoner epics either; instead, the songs are shorter, more compact, punchier. Almost missing: personality.

Special Moves--which pulls at least one track from all six Mogwai albums, but no more than two--strategically positions the band's latter-day material among the old warhorses to build a set list that gradually intensifies and explodes like the band's best instrumental epics.

Memphis, their debut LP, bottles all of that up with remarkable skill, but often to disappointing effect. Its many flourishes are much more satisfying than its songs, each dissolving on contact no matter how much buoyancy or sugar they boast for stretches.

Not every song achieves such effortless drama. At times, Carey comes across as more a student than a master. He has obviously consumed a tremendous amount of music, but he hasn't fully digested some of his influences.

Past Time certainly isn't background music, but the vocalists' missives might be understood as simply the core of the band's sound--and perhaps something more, if you're able to divert your attention from the charms of the music.

As a whole, the harder Wolfpack Party tries to be a fun party record, the more forced it feels. And as solid as L's beats are, they can't stand up on their own.

while Surfing occasionally fails and does so loudly, but there's something thrillingly unfashionable about how Klaxons take aim at their grayer peers with a tommy gun full of glowsticks--they don't always hit their target, but it's a gloriously fun mess all the same.

The scrapbook-like cover of All Delighted People makes sense then, as its contents serve as a humble and friendly keepsake, songs that deserve to be heard, but belonging to a chapter in Stevens' artistic livelihood that he needed to close to maintain his vitality.

Lissie's voice is haunting as always, but the band doesn't match this tone, and as a result it no longer sounds like Lissie's song. Hopefully these missteps aren't enough to put people off, because Lissie is still a significant new voice.

After a supreme early demonstration of pastiche, Alive As You Are's back half reveals a capable pop band writing capable pop songs.

The production is as inventive and immersive as ever, but what separates this album from the last is that Dear mostly sticks with one theme all the way through.

SSLYBY have every right to feel like they have a chip on their shoulder, and if they can somehow manage to inject some grit next time out, they could be looking at a success that's an even greater revenge than "Critical Drain".

The transcontinental breadth of the band's influences keeps Chief from coming across as pallid piggybackers of any one scene, but for a group that hasn't yet demonstrated an ability to nail down a particular sound, keeping so many balls in the air could be stretching its talents too thin.

Whereas many modern film soundtracks are glorified compilation discs with a seemingly random track selection, the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World soundtrack is very thoughtful in its curation and stands as a very accurate interpretation of O'Malley's fictional world.

This album's predictability isn't the same thing as complacency, and if this music catches you unawares, it'll strike you right where you're vulnerable.

It's no great discredit to the album to say that Kaleide peaks with its first song. The remaining material rarely pushes Harkin to the dramatic heights of "Still Windmills", and the singer is guilty of leaning too heavily on vague metaphors. But Goodmanson's unfussy production is the ideal complement to this young band's fidgety energy.

Emphasizing the notion that this is brainy music would be ignoring the fact that PVT frequently achieve melodic catharsis on Church With No Magic. A lot of this is due to Pike's considerable vocal register, which can convey low resonance and high-frequency wailing alike.

While there's variety from track to track, the group continues to mine the common ground between Silkworm's tasteful classic-rock inclinations and the pastoral majesty of Seam.

The bulk of The Suburbs focuses on this quiet desperation borne of compounding the pain of wasting your time as an adult by romanticizing the wasted time of your youth.

It's major-key and resplendently colored, owing as much to Orange County skate-punk as it does to the Beach Boys.

Transit Transit maintains a puzzling lack of urgency for an album so long in the works.

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band wasn't a good record, but its exuberance and overstuffed arrangements at least helped counter its derivativeness. But Messengers drips with resignation and defeat-- the record actually sounds depressed.

There's a weird outdated feel to the album; too many of the songs feel like attempts to cross over to a rap mainstream that barely exists anymore.

While Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3 had all the indications of starting out as a stopgap project to stave off between-album downtime, it wound up being a solid exhibition of his chops.

Even if this album plays hard to get, there's plenty to love for those willing to listen.

Even without the heavy emotional resonance of those mixtapes, Str8 Killa works as a showcase for a ridiculously solid rapper. Gibbs knows his craft inside and out.

Hoop is an undeniably charismatic musician, but her music will benefit from a more natural and organic absorption of these impulses. In other words, she doesn't need to work so hard to prove anything.

There's a lot of room for your ear to roam on Mines, and it reveals itself over the course of a few listens as a very satisfying album worth exploring and revisiting.

This record is carefree and instantly likable--even if it doesn't seem to care what you think of it.

The Brooklyn-based foursome spends a lot of time here style-pinching, connecting dots already drawn by contemporary indie acts. And yet Miniature Tigers are often able to pull it off.

The remixes feel equally vital to the EP, because after all, the great appeal of Major Lazer is watching these dancehall concoctions transform, as elements of dub and hip-hop and reggae are also smashed into one freaky, juiced up mutant (kinda like the fictional Major Lazer himself).

The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness may attempt to forge a common ground between two trans-Atlantic artists, but even when working from the same instrumental base, the sensibilities at play here are still oddly segregated.

That's How We Burn's sonic normalcy would all but consign the record for the used record bins if this band didn't sound so damn good when they break out of the mold.

Here, they shuffle through one stylistic experiment after another. The fingerprint on the album's cover art seems a little ironic, since for the first time, the Magic Numbers seem hard to identify.

Ross knows his lane and stays in it on Teflon Don.

For Grizzly Bear fans and Department of Eagles devotees alike, Archives 2003-2006 is a document rich with revelatory moments and educatory touchstones--but as an album, it functions even better.

The tempos remain rigorously uniform across these 13 tracks, as though quickening the pace might change the genre or break the spell. It makes for a warmly moody, albeit strangely static album.

Infra works as an enveloping and moving work even absent any knowledge of its beginnings. Others may glean different feelings from it than I do, but that is part of the point.

As down-to-earth as Secret Cities can be, at points you wish they'd be more direct: "Vamos a La Playa" and "The End" play so loosely, they border on disintegration, rounding out Pink Graffiti in overly cloudy manner, both sonically and lyrically.

As disjointed as that sounds on paper, The Long Shadow is the band's most focused and cohesive work. That's partly because it maintains a consistent mood, and partly because it maintains a danceable, frenetic pulse.

Dark Night is a well-sequenced and unique album that ingeniously balances its contributors' strengths with the overall theme of the work--self-examination, often under stark circumstances, in the interest of understanding one's own existence.

Where those newcomers privilege the nostalgic, indefinite, and noncommittal, the vets in SVIIB make a confident gesture towards the future.

The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade.

Despite some lyrical cliches and careless redundancies ("Come out from the burning flame" being the most glaring example), Kozelek's songs change mood fluidly, and the contrast between the serene settings and his own tumultuous thoughts raises even the most languid instrumental passages above mere aural wallpaper, lending it the gravity of his best work while giving it a character all its own.

Flaws is well-produced, many of its songs nicely augmented by fleet drumming and intricate guitar figures, but Steadman's lack of having anything interesting to say and inability to say it distinctively ultimately sinks the endeavor.

Luckily, you don't have to write genius lyrics to make reliable, stadium-ready rock. The tics of weirdness that made this band so initially affable may be gone, but they're now a cut-rate pop act instead. Nothing wrong with that.

About half the songs drift by without choruses, and the other half only barely have anything you could call a chorus. The whole thing is over in about 45 minutes. It all adds up to a woozy waft of a record--a perfect listen for mid-summer, when breathing in the humid air is almost enough to get you high.

As such, it's perhaps a little less satisfying and immediate than IV, which is still the band's finest album, but it seems to set them up to do anything they want on their next record. And it's also likely to help build their audience outward a bit.

Tellingly, the best songs on Blue Giant are also the simplest, pointing to what this record could and perhaps should have been.

That the results are as modest as Butterfly House is a disappointment, though all the skillful pieces remain in place.

It's not Reznor's best or boldest work, but it's a promising first step down a new path.

Whatever her bad luck might be down to, Kelis can take some small comfort in having made her best album since Kaleidoscope.

On Sir Lucious Left Foot, Big Boi does something even more difficult: He gives us a great album that sounds nothing like any of the great albums he's already given us. From where I'm sitting, that's an even greater achievement.