Here's to Taking It Easy is a great record, but I feel like Houck's best is still in him-- the one where the deep roots of tradition will finally be inextricably fused with his own weird, shambling soul.

While Grey Oceans is less caustic than their other work, it still has that lay-it-all-on-the-line quality that's worked for Antony Hegarty, Devendra Banhart, and Joanna Newsom. The difference is that the album never feels like anything's at stake, whereas past records embraced experimentation at any cost.

If every track on the album had the unforced lyrical clarity of "Little Houdini", Sage could have the album of his life on his hands here. But Sage is still the type of guy to name an album Li(f)e and a song "Polterzeitgeist", and the album comes packed with yeesh-inducing lines

Nothing Hurts is full of that kind of excitement: the sound of a fast, fuzzy rock band racing from hook to hook, plowing happily through breakdowns and guitar blasts, springing through scrappy melodies with style. It's one of the happiest surprises of the year so far.

So Relayted is both better than it had any right to be, given the concept, and about as good as you could expect from the musicians involved.

Even for a committedly lo-fi aesthetic, Warm Slime is rough going at times; listening to it back-to-back with the relatively cleaner Help is startling, like blasting a bug-spattered windshield with a jet of wiper fluid.

The Optimist too often gets lost in non-committal melodies as Bulmer tries and tries again to capture quote-worthy elegant wastefulness.

Everything pops, but the gloss never makes the songs here feel processed or too glossy. It simply fits them well. And the songs are strong, too.

Despite the confidence of that opening track, Heaven Is Whenever sounds like a transitional album, hopefully paving the way for something stronger, more cohesive, more specific.

While there's rarely been a correlation between the accessibility of a given Fall album and the profile of the label releasing it, the lean, brute-force rockers on Your Future Our Clutter suggest that the Fall might actually be taking this upgrade to Domino seriously.

Forgiveness Rock Record's thematic bent is mature, and that sense of gravity is embedded into the music, too.

Cosmogramma is an intricate, challenging record that fuses his loves-- jazz, hip-hop, videogame sounds, IDM-- into something unique. It's an album in the truest sense.

Aside from "Valkyrie", Together is a solid collection of well-crafted songs. However, in spite of the quality, the album isn't entirely satisfying.

It's overproduced as hell, filled with all manner of electro doodads and backmasking effects, but it also boasts an immediacy and pop smarts heretofore unheard from the band. Unfortunately, that directness applies to the lyrics as well, and they simply cannot be ignored.

For the most part, the beats and the synths are the stars of the show here. They're not as compelling as in the past--maybe only four albums into their career, the duo is preferring to color inside the lines.

Drawing from a few different traditions while making them their own, Future Islands prove here to be a well-versed group of wild, woolly storytellers.

What we've gotten instead is a forgettable collection of fairly generic, overproduced rock songs that feel, oddly, like a put-on.

Avi Buffalo have every reason to be sure of themselves; this sneakily complex, unsappily sentimental, thoughtfully naive debut is a very early success.

Results are mixed--"Sun Is on My Side" offers lovely accordion and a weary, haunting refrain, but the midtempo "Uma Menina Uma Cigana" feels flat and perfunctory, while the lugubriousness of "When Universes Collide" actually undermines Hutz's harrowing, poverty-tinged lyrics.

The Adventures of Bobby Ray is a curiously lonely affair, the sound of a singular talent being drowned in a tidal wave of cheerful banality.

The arrangements stick to an effective coast-and-surge model of development: The tracks skim low and then tilt upward with the addition of a drum or synth part. It's a stock trick that works well, and Lali Puna use it with unusual tact.

Nothing sounds overworked. If anything, Burhenn and Swift present the songs in an understated manner, confident in the quality of the material and the strength of her voice.

A disappointing pattern begins to take shape in each of these long chapters, as the band begins on a promising note during the first three minutes, but exhausts itself over the last nine.

This is exactly what Cornershop has always been so good at, and which occasionally comes through on Lemon-- expecting us to be on the same page, and feeling no need to explain anything to those who aren't.

Sleep Mountain's lack of originality is made worse by the fact that few of its songs actually go anywhere.

Despite his chameleonic tendencies, Dan Snaith retains his singular identity as an artist--and Swim is a reminder that even at his most challenging, the man's compositional capabilities can dazzle.

The only things you hear on the album are Wainwright's voice and his piano, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that he wants you to luxuriate in both when it's far more likely you'll feel like you're drowning, given how rarely Wainwright buoys the listener with an actual melody or memorable lyric.

The album moves from infatuation and jealousy to lust and betrayal to real, young love. And it does so with not just the best of intentions-- feminism, anti-homophobia, artistic experimentation-- but also, in the storytelling style of the Streets or Sweden's Hello Saferide, a set of distinctive, well-crafted songs that should strike a chord with self-deprecating teens and twentysomethings.

There's certainly no shortage of well-crafted, playful, memorable tunes here, and that-- matched with Schneider's willingness to try on a few new sounds for size-- adds up to the best Apples in Stereo record in more than a decade.

So while La La Land may not be the stellar follow-up that Parc Avenue deserved, it does offer something for fans willing to look beyond its tarted-up exterior.

As with their last two albums, Clinging to a Scheme stands to further expand the Radio Dept.'s cult. Economy has never been an issue for the band, but here, things are further tightened up.

They still gets bogged down in places, padding the album with go-nowhere interludes and a six-minute centerpiece that's mostly too chaotic to make any impact, but on the album's best tracks, it's great to hear them again, doing what they do best.

At their best, Sweet Apple sound like they're trying to emulate the lovable-loserdom perfected by one of Petkovic's unsung Cleveland rock peers, Prisonshake. At their worst, such as "Goodnight", Petkovic goes on and on about him and his hard-luck honey while the group tediously grinds away in the background.

It's good to hear him still recording, even if he's deeply entrenched himself in his own wheelhouse and barely has a single surprising moment in the album's whole hour. But if the album never existed, nobody's life would be much poorer for it-- possibly even Devin's.

indulge his every whim and mood and which emphasizes his songwriting range. As a result, the album repositions Erickson's psych rock as the foundation for a diverse sound.

So ignore the melodrama and enjoy the littler pleasures that are provided on Thistled Spring-- and there are quite a few.

le there are bits of great humor and wordplay scattered throughout (occasionally spat out in dizzying double time), the fogged-over choruses, tough-guy posturing ("In Gotti We Trust"), and spurts of disquieting misogyny ("Scrape") feel like too much padding.

Most of Weathervanes is serviceable modern rock, so it will find an appreciative audience despite its egregious derivativeness and a lyricist who seems like he'd use the word "inebriated" to talk about how drunk he got last night.

Every track here has successful passages, but frustratingly, they too often turn out to be detours or trap doors. In general, the less cluttered and more focused their tracks are, the better they turn out.

The project's shortcomings are even more pronounced this time out since The Dark Leaves sounds like it's striving and somewhat succeeding in being the band's most rhythmically vital record.

Matsson is both a romantic and a realist, and on The Wild Hunt, he uses the barest of pop-folk settings to give mundane moments--another break-up, another tour, another change of season, another Dylan comparison--a grandeur so disproportional that it's difficult not to identify and sympathize with him.

Amidon and his cabal of collaborators-- Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, Shahzad Ismaily-- have been merging chamber music with indie rock for awhile now (see also: Sufjan Stevens, Thomas Bartlett, Owen Pallett, Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National), and their touch is nuanced and, on occasion, delightfully odd.

Dosh has indeed graduated from the sketchbook-like arrangements that marked his earlier work-- but Tommy's occasional tedium is a reminder that there's nothing wrong with doodling in the margins, either.

Most of the songs are toss-offs, but it's plenty of fun to be along for the ride as long as some restraint is issued. Without it, ForNever alternately struggles to keep its head above water with washed-out cautionary tales ("The Problem Is...") or slums it in the shallows with mildly tawdry goofs ("Asian Girl").

It's best to think of Prins Thomas not as a speedbump but as another iteration, slightly undercooked, of his still-developing style.

This reissue-- available in a 2xCD, budget-priced Legacy Edtion set and as a more elaborate $60 4xCD Deluxe Edition-- doesn't attempt anything quite so ambitious. Instead, the main impetus is bringing a remastered version of the original Bowie mix back to market.

While Animal Feelings has good instincts, it is still too cerebral and impressed with its own production flourishes to actually be fun.

No one should begrudge them their cleaner, smoother sound, but straight-laced songwriting has sapped the band's well-worn eccentricities. Tunng have outgrown and outlasted the restrictive genres they were once boxed into, but Saw Land struggles to find its place in a larger context.

Her sophomore effort, I Speak Because I Can, finds Marling, still only 20, shrugging off virtually all traces of girlishness and wide-eyed charm, instead delving into darkly elemental, frequently morbid folk. And yet, astonishingly, the expected growing pains never come.

Much of Go matches the uplift of Sigur Ros at their most dramatic. There's more sonic density here than ever-- Go's cacophony of flutes, piano, horns, strings, and bird calls beg for a 5.1 mix.

Byrne and Slim never misstep here, but they also never surprise. At best you may wind up distantly admiring their craftsmanship.

It all comes together to make an album that stands up as a varied and well-sequenced work, and as a collection of songs you can scatter through a shuffle and dig just as deeply.

Portions of Shame, Shame might prove to be just a little too effervescent--certainly not a bad thing for a band with a track record that usually ran contrary. The important thing is that these songs hit more than they miss, occasionally with shimmering resolve and a couple of really big choruses to back it all up, often quite memorably.

Without fail, The Fear rides that button down to a nub, going so far as to circle back on longer tracks to give the button another unnecessary push.

If Hippies has a flaw, it's only that it overstays its welcome by just a few minutes.

Growing's approach is uncharacteristically undeveloped here, as the trio never seems to know for what exactly what it's aiming.

Javelin's best tracks may hold up under professional production in a year where many a group's cassette-tape flaws will likely sabotage similar leaps, but trading in their boombox for a proper stereo isn't necessarily an upgrade.

hey've never been as good or as distinct as they are on Steal Your Face.

The result is a more accessible version of Dum Dum Girls, bolstered by terrific harmonies (three of the four girls contribute vocals) and a crisper rhythm section.

Most of the lyrics here dwell on relationships, which Badu handles with a confidence and informality that most of square-ass, tax-filing society just hasn't caught up to and probably never will.

Nothing on Outbursts turns out to overblown sonically, but "Sea Change" does signal a straining quality that runs throughout the album.

Twenty-five minutes of these three on autopilot still hits more often than not, ultimately making this disc a mixtape-y More Fish-style companion to Cuban Linx II-- hardly necessary, but not inconsequential.

If the younger Black Francis might have transformed a cover of the Flying Burrito Brothers' "Wheels" into a cool surf epic rather than a Velvet Underground-inspired reconstruction, the elder delivers an intriguing mix of vitality and cool detachment. It's easy to take those seemingly at-odds qualities for granted, but here Black Francis sounds not just comfortable with that aesthetic but surprisingly and paradoxically in control of it as well.

You'd be forgiven for expecting little more than fan-bait out of a release that gathers the band's between-album singles and rarities. But the big draw of Wooden Shjips is the way they go about streamlining multiple strains of psychedelic rock with the single-mindedness of a band more interested in refinement than experimentation, and there's plenty of refined material on Vol. 2.

That Complete Recordings has long gone out of print makes Black Tambourine an essential acquisition for current In the Red, Woodsist, and Slumberland loyalists. And even for old-school adherents, the bonus tracks included warrant a repurchase.

The lyrics' yearning for something tangible and substantial ultimately feels at odds with what Sweet Sister, promising surface and all, actually brings to the table.

2004's Miss Machine and 2007's Ire Works offered an ever-broadening sound that kinda-sorta skirted crossover-friendliness, a sometimes awkward mash of traditional, melodic rock and hideous shrieking and bashing. Option Paralysis continues in that vein for better or worse.

Coconut seems to be a "transition album": A sometimes-exhilarating, sometimes-WTF layover between a possibly played-out formula and exciting new sounds on the horizon.

What makes the album so distinctive isn't just the sound of her voice, the quality of her songwriting, or even the resourcefulness of his arrangements, but their joint insistence that these old sounds have as much to say nowadays as they ever did.

Two Thousand and Ten Injuries buzzes with joy.

There's plenty of highly stylized fun to be had here. Just don't expect to remember many of the details when it's all over.

Oversteps finds them working in a comparatively less rigid fashion, almost organic compared to something like Confield. Focusing on creating tension and release within their compositions, they're still incorporating new designs, not merely repackaging the previous products.

The "Americana" tag sticks thanks to the general country-rock tropes and all the natural imagery, but as usual the group excels at blurring the edges of an already blurry genre with spacey (but never indulgent) psych leanings, controls set for the heart of the sun but anchored comfortably down to earth.

Instead of the earlier sample-heavy style, Barber incorporates more live instrumentation, and as a result High Places feel more like a band.

As on that album ["Loveless"], the songs feel like they're whirling so far into the stratosphere that they might fly apart any second.

The tension between those two poles--refusing to grow up and yearning to move on-- is the emotional engine that drives the band and its impressively confident record.

This is arguably Oldham's most austere record to date, but there's much to dig into.

As Manifesto runs through its forbidding 20-track playlist, it unsurprisingly falters when it chases Hot 97 spins that are laughably out of reach.

Callahan's work seems of its time and makes you aware of the artist behind it. And Rough Travel, though ultimately only for established fans, turns out to be a very good snapshot of where that artist's music stood at the end of the last decade.

The Truckers demonstrated with 2008's Brighter Than Creation's Dark that they don't need non-stop yuks and grotesqueries to reach greatness, but the best moments of The Big To-Do nonetheless offer tantalizing proof that these guys still possess fascinatingly warped minds when they feel like showing 'em off.

While the songs certainly do the Whigs no favors, the production and mixing on Dark are downright unconscionable, making one long for the relative restraint of Don Gilmore or Andy Wallace.

The album sounds ridiculously heavy, with many songs-- including the gurgling "I'm Slowly Turning Into You" and the Dusty Springfield cover "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself"-- easily trumping their studio counterparts.

Bjorke is clearly an artist-producer who likes to put his finger in lots of different pies, and he should be commended for such restlessness and flexibility. Still, it would be nice to see him pursue some of these avenues a bit more thoroughly as opposed to cramming so many detours into one 48-minute trip.

Lyrically, Wolf is convincing when sticking to the grief-stricken script. It's when he goes off-book that things start to get awkward.

At their best, Rush to Relax's songs maintain a firm grip even when they meander.

Thomas glues the pretty (Garbus' vocals) and ugly (his own screeching, see also: his work singing in Witch) together with fantastic melodies, at times so plentiful they bury one another.

For Shy Child, synth-pop short-circuits the space between unreality and truth, the artificiality of its expanses allowing a sort of wide-eyed honesty that naturalism forecloses. That bittersweet sincerity sticks much harder than Liquid Love's sleek surfaces would ever suggest.

The one-time Blur frontman has transcended some of the post-modern artifice of this project, and created the group's most affecting and uniquely inviting album. Joke's over, Gorillaz are real.

Admittedly, some parts are easier to admire than they are to enjoy. But stick with Sisterworld as it builds, let it seep into your brain while you wait for its bulging seams to burst, and you might find yourself unable to turn your ears away. Eventually, Liars' commitment to their own creepy cause proves contagious.

Unlike its creators' best prior accomplishments, Broken Bells doesn't seem prepared, or even attempting, to cross over. Nor does it feel like a new direction or outlet for either artist-- it's more of a nice detour.

"Midnight Organ Fight" announced with its title that its underlying concern was sex (not getting it, not getting it from who you want, being unfulfilled by it), and the songs on this new album, though more lyrically complex, seem neutered by comparison.

This is deeply un-portable music: It either demands your complete attention or invites you to shut it off. Once through that opening stretch, your attention will frequently be rewarded. There is powerfully evocative, richly imagined music to be found here.

Catharsis is Stickles' fuel, and The Monitor is a 65-minute endorsement of angst and opposition as the best way to present that combustible sorrow.

Late in the record, the perky "You Know" also stands up to the quality of jj n 2, but between these tracks is mostly B-side fare. It's a shame, but I don't get the sense listening to jj n 3 that jj's best work is behind them.

Sixth studio outing Beat the Devil's Tattoo is already getting billed as the one that brings all these prodigal sons' (and daughters'-- ex-Raveonette Leah Shapiro is now on drums) stylistic detours back home. It kind of is, but if BRMC's sound has cohered, their songwriting has unfortunately done the opposite.

Leo's still exceptionally adept at saying a lot in a small space but there are more than a few lines that feel a little too forceful no matter how many times you run into them, sitting slightly askew next to the richer images and more pointed jabs here.

Are the Roaring Night sounds richer, and while it doesn't rewrite the formula, it contains many small refinements to the band's songwriting and production skills.

Quarantine the Past doesn't replace the albums, but it's a highly listenable alternative that is as much a treat for nostalgic older fans as it is a valuable gateway for new listeners.