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There's a weird outdated feel to the album; too many of the songs feel like attempts to cross over to a rap mainstream that barely exists anymore.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

A light but pervasive dusting of flanger effects and wavy-tuned synths makes the melodies sound cloudy and unfocused. Even the singles don't especially stand out.

It's just that it feels so characterless and anonymous.

Though it starts off with a set of songs that wouldn't sound out of place on the two previous albums, Night Work quickly slips into hyper-sexualized gay club mode and sticks with that vibe until the end.

Expo 86, if nothing else, feels like the realization of a Wolf Parade sound; the exquisite Apologies carried the long shadow of its producer Isaac Brock, and Mount Zoomer felt too often like two personalities careening off each other rather than finding some common ground.

While Maps & Atlases are milder and less daring than either of those bands, Perch Patchwork is eclectic and consistent enough that each detour offers its own small reward.

What makes How I Got Over work is its sense of purpose. After the jaw-clenching stress rap of their last two excellent Def Jam releases, Game Theory and Rising Down, this record operates as a slow-build mission statement on how to overcome.

The whole album works something like an expansion on the last three fuzzed-out tracks from Dig Your Own Hole. The Chems aren't in the same do-no-wrong zone they were when they recorded that stuff, but Further brings them closer than anyone could've reasonably expected.

Instead of catering to fans of that slow, sultry earlier work, she's brought in old and new songwriting partners to help her craft a fast-paced, upbeat pop album.

Out of all the depressing aspects of Recovery, the worst is the realization that for listeners the album takes the opposite arc-- the more he motors on about having reclaimed his passion for hip-hop and finally figured out who he is, the more draining the album becomes.

They know bombast and melodrama, which makes a decent amount of their latest effort, The Five Ghosts, all the more off-putting.

In both its lyrical candour and soft-rock accessibility, Boys Outside sees Mason ready to meet the public again, and in some cases, actually cater to it.

Had Fol Chen made good on those early impulses to really boost The New December's kinky eccentricities, it wouldn't have been much of a surprise to find it making serious inroads with new listeners. Though it ultimately only warrants selective revisiting.

At every turn, Total Life Forever is inviting. Much more alive than earlier efforts, it's an album with a complexion that constantly changes with time....[But] the album's second half doesn't fare so well, drowning at times in aqueous atmospherics.

Immaculately produced, fantastically sung, and loaded with memorable choruses, this eight-song effort has plenty to please everyone from post-dubstep crate diggers to teen tweeters-- often at the same time.

Even if many of the album's lyrics find Fallon looking back in anger, American Slang ultimately proves The Gaslight Anthem are not afraid to move forward.

Thank Me Later presents its star as a bottle-serviced hip-hop headcase tirelessly searching for love and good times while caught up in his own thoughts.

In the end, Barbara could've been made by a computer with a specific coding procedure: bass riffs align themselves into right angles, sharp synth lines blare, hi-hats sizzle, hooks dissolve on contact, and 2004 never ends.

When it isn't a high school poetry recital, Lustre often feels like a disappearing act-- an attempt to put on a few musical disguises to see if anyone likes them better than the musician beneath.

As strictly a listening experience, though, it's a decent document of a bunch of relatively unexceptional guys who willed themselves to greatness for a couple of years there but couldn't stop being relatively unexceptional.

As rewarding as this new album is, it's even more impressive when you consider its context: Crystal Castles may have come on at the tail-end of the blog-house/nu-rave/French-touch mini-rage, but they've now transcended it, moving from scene linchpin to indie stars.

Eyes & Nines could've come out at any point in at least the past 15 years, so if you're looking for innovation, look elsewhere. But for those of us who had formative, life-changing experiences screaming in our friends' faces in wood-paneled basements or tiled VFW Halls while bands like bands like Pageninetynine or Milhouse played, it's a real treat.

On Man Made, Teenage Fanclub seemed to be suffering a sort of rock'n'roll midlife crisis. Five years later, Shadows finds them at ease once again.

With an opener as strong as Destroyer of the Void, you could be forgiven for being disappointed that it is the collection's sole foray into spacey prog-pop territory and not the tip of the iceberg in a likeminded collection.

The new album is hardly a huge leap from Elephant Shell in most senses, but it does find TPC reaching out, growing more comfortable, and letting loose.

For those who've been following along for a few years, this is a groundbreaking record that condenses and amplifies Ariel Pink's most accessible tendencies. But the brilliant thing about Before Today is that no prior knowledge of his catalog is required.

It's too bad that the majority of The Black Dirt Sessions is so familiar, as the band dutifully strides through the same well-worn territory, perhaps even less palatable in their stubborn sameness.

Pigeons feels less divorced from the bedroom freak-folk of the project's self-titled debut (recorded by Temple all by his lonesome, with the assistance of a looping pedal or two) than it seems the logical extension of that aesthetic. Somewhat surprisingly, especially given the debut's minor faults, the woodshedded feel of Pigeons is a good look for the band.

Ratatat always aimed for the flashy yet mass-produced flavor of sub-luxe fashion and lifestyle accessories--and for at least two albums, they hit their mark. But at this point, their sound is wearing increasingly thin and producing diminished results.

[O'Brien's] portentous lyrics, falsetto-prone quaver, and Simon & Garfunkel tunefulness are essential to the album's appeal.

Nearly the entirety of Apparitions feels covered by some haze that's equal parts car exhaust and glitter.

Wild Smile is wild indeed, the band's aesthetic and feel summed up perfectly by the cover art.

There's a range of hooks and ideas at play in Splazsh that few others have approached, much less made coherent.

That's just about a half-hour shorter than 22 Dreams, but the disc in turn is twice the fun.

The combination of the music's essentials-- jackhammer riffs clipped from punk and metal, mid-tempo beats from hip-hop and electro, and supremely catchy sing-song melodies-- is striking on its own, sounding remarkably fresh and unlike anything else right now. But an even greater source of the record's appeal is how it doesn't sound especially referential.

But if The Chaos marks the point where the Futureheads admit to themselves that the past ain't so bad, closing track "Jupiter"-- clocking in at a career-topping four minutes-- points to an intriguing new direction where the Futureheads apply their eccentricities to lengthier, more conceptual pieces.

The Bride Screamed Murder is the sort of album one might expect from a long-in-the-tooth group trying to rediscover its purpose and rejuvenate itself.

Much of the material sounds rushed and half-finished, like a high schooler trying to write a research page paper during his lunch period.

Her delicate pipes may consign her to small sketches and close studies, but Merritt's at least proven with See You on the Moon that she has the lyrical goods to deliver intimately pleasurable, deeply felt folk-pop.

Sleepy Sun have learned the methods and studied the maps, but-- at least on record-- they've yet to take that knowledge into territory that feels new or, really, like it's their own.

Fly Yellow Moon just can't quite solve that old problem: how to be mushy but not mundane.

It's hard not to appreciate the karma of some of the most well-worn rock standards of LaVette's hard-fought early years rendered new again through a voice time almost forgot.

It doesn't take a lot to make old technology sound damaged and creepy. But taking the next step and making that creepiness sound appealing is what makes Maniac Meat the feel-weird hit of the summer.

Mostly, though, Jurado claims ownership of Saint Bartlett's achievements simply by turning in his strongest songwriting to date.

Segall makes quite an impression in half an hour's time, and Melted's the best foot he's put forward yet. It still seems like his best records are ahead of him, like he's still got a couple of things to nail, but as it stands, Melted could charm the sweat out of anybody.

Each composition is fleshed out as well as it can be, the end result still a kind of Appalachian wallpaper music that after further inspection and subsequent listens, leaves the record sounding much more flimsy than urgent. What impression it leaves doesn't last.

Murphy once again shows off his encyclopedic knowledge of all things post-punk and zip-tight. But he's also swimming up some serious stuff himself, including Eno and David Bowie's sacrosanct Berlin trilogy. And against his own prediction, it's far from horrible; it's actually pretty perfect.

Infinite Arms just feels less tender, less personal, more twang-by-numbers than the last couple, despite its familiar sound and many of the same principals.

When it's all said and done, the 15-track set runs almost an hour long, causing one to think that the Keys might have done the best material here a disservice by shoving so much onto one album when they could've easily saved some up for their next release.

Too often on Distant Relatives, Nas and Marley fall into a sort of middlebrow funk, kicking overripe platitudes over sunny session-musician lopes and letting their self-importance suffocate their personalities.

This is a transitional record, an in-betweener, one that Lidell may eventually look back on as a door to something else. The good news for all of us is that even when he's down, he's not out.

Where many concept albums run a high risk of being pompous, cryptic, and self-important, Monáe keeps things playful, lively, and accessible. It's a delicate balancing act, but Monáe and her band pull it off, resulting in an eccentric breakthrough that transcends its novelty.

Love and Its Opposite plays more like a conventional singer-songwriter album. The shift in gears isn't unwelcome: Thorn, as always, exercises that smoky voice to great effect.

I wouldn't mind hearing Hollenbeck use the group to explore his softer side, because the pulsing comedowns on this record are some of its most arresting moments, even though the in-betweenness makes it unique and enjoyable on its own merits.

Small Turn's greatest strength is also its primary flaw; they do this particular sort of downtrodden as well as anybody, but given all they're capable of, it's a shame that they limit themselves to such a small sonic palette. Still, it's yet another curiously strong record from one of today's most interesting bands.

Though The People's Record contains some of the best music of Club 8's career, it doesn't hold up well as a complete album. There are no outright duds, but the sequence is front-loaded to such a degree that there is an obvious drop-off in quality by the middle of the set.

By downplaying the elements that made the Depreciation Guild initially stand out from the crowd, Spirit Youth is a decidedly less distinctive album than their debut. However, by making that choice, they've made what turns out to be their best.

If allowing Jagger to touch up those vocals was the price to pay to allow Exile receive the tribute it deserves, it's still a bargain.

So Revolutions Per Minute isn't as momentous a revival as it might seem-- it's just, well, another good Talib Kweli album with more solid Hi-Tek beats, an example of good chemistry between two artists who happen to have good chemistry with lots of other collaborators.

Even if Sea of Cowards sounds more bashed-out than labored-over, it works. It's a heavy, snarly, physical rock album, and it feels like the work of people so secure in their ass-kicking abilities that they don't have to sweat the details.

High Violet is the sound of a band taking a mandate to be a meaningful rock band seriously, and they play the part so fully that, to some, it may be off-putting. But these aren't mawkish, empty gestures; they're anxious, personal songs projected onto wide screens.

No matter what their exteriors, Keane still seem incapable of anything other than the most heavy-handed gestures, peddling the same populist mock uplift that leaves you feeling pushed when it's meant to move.