This record meanders through a set of passable songs that ultimately decline to move or enthrall you.

Ultimately, The Fountain is an echo of an echo, inessential to all but the band's most devoted followers.

Internal rhyme schemes, halting phrasing, thoughtful self-exploration; this is Wale at his best. Not as a preening star filling in the gaps for a king-making debut. A regular person, with doubts and sadness, joy and confidence. There's just not enough of it on Attention Deficit.

Only staunch Volta cultists would claim every minute of Xenophanes is worth your precious leisure time. But damn if the best bits don't make an excellent in-car soundtrack for pretending you're on your way to something more dramatic than your day job.

Though it's lightweight, Rewolf gives me a bit of hope that they'll push themselves outward a bit more next time.

It's one of those odd albums where nearly every track sounds good, but it's all so singleminded and monolithic in its approach that taking it in as a whole almost feels smothering.

The biggest problem, though, isn't the outright clunkers; it's the sheer length of the thing. Snow Patrol's basic sweep isn't the type of thing that holds up over two hours, and after the 20th straight-faced lovelorn hymn, you'll start climbing the walls.

The compelling yet skimpy new material feels mostly like an occasion for the remixes, some of which are actually quite worthwhile.

Wingo recorded Belly of the Lion in his apartment, playing all the instruments himself (although he did hire a drummer for four songs), so the range of sounds is limited. Their range of use, however, is not.

The droning effect of the guitars-- all that static strumming-- might be more effective if they didn't sound so rounded-off and sanded down into a blur. It saps the life out of the songs, which come off more drab than they should.

By the Throat demands those kinds of complex distinctions, though. Its radiance is a dark one, and its most sinister moments lead to deliberate calm.

Chimeric sounds like the product of less tense and more spacious recording sessions. The band considers the record raw, broken, and unpolished, but they have nothing to be apologetic about. By loosening up they sound invigorated.

Climb Up is filled with an odd (for indie listeners, at least) brand of stadium-sized rock that can't quite escape the notions of cheese and bloat that accompany that term.

Ultimately this is smart but unfinished work.

A record of achingly gorgeous dance-pop that captures both the joy of nostalgia and the melancholic sense that we're grasping for good times increasingly out of reach.

The irony is that Phrazes for the Young is so smoothed over--nearly all of Casablancas' trademark vocal roughness is airbrushed into oblivion--it instantly sounds like a plexiglass-covered museum piece.

Raditude doesn't have that stench of minimal calculation on it; if anything, it's as earnest as the famously confessional Pinkerton, just written by someone whose age doesn't match his POV.

There are a few bright spots on this otherwise monochromatic album, most crammed toward the beginning.

You see, as Swords, mopping up of the stray B-sides and bonus tracks from the comeback years, suggests, Morrissey now has a dilemma: Following group glory, solo vindication, political notoriety, sullen exile, and dramatic revival, what on earth does he do for an encore?

Live at Reading effectively grants you side-stage access to the band in their mosh-pit-stoking, drum-set-toppling, putting you as close to the action as the band's mysterious friend Tony, who's seen flailing onstage throughout the show like an epilpetic Bez.

Slayer being timely is not Slayer being timeless. But the way they're still playing, they sure sound like it.

Though briskly paced, Bleach is a front-loaded record, the maniacal/melodic contrasts of its stellar first half--anchored by the epochal anti-love song 'About a Girl'--ceding to the more period-typical grunge of its second.

By enlisting noise goblin Ian Dominick Fernow (Prurient) and Xiu Xiu-graduate Caralee McElroy to pitch in, their full-length debut, Love Comes Close, manages to stand out as a successful collaborative effort with a clear sense of purpose.

Something you might say about even the best stuff on Invisible Girl. Khan and Sultan move between the trappings of doo-wop to skid rock so fitfully it's easy to miss that some of these tunes aren't all there lyrically.

Guests reinforces its inessential nature by presenting, for the most part, a one-dimensional rendering of DOOM as a lyricist.

It is an alluring collection that hints at greatness but halts at achieving it, instead teasing listeners for its sequel.

As appealing as it is challenging, Extended Vacation is the sort of album that might even make those Wilco fans who can sing only "Kingpin" believe it.

Like those first-wave rave producers, Arbez wants to have it all: to make listeners smile, shake their shit, and still walk away a little shaken by the music's intensity. Flashmob pulls off this near-impossible combo with more skill than even Vitalic's fans may have expected.

Now, by denigrating this Ya-Ya's reissue as a commodity and by questioning the album's canonization in general, I don't mean to imply this set doesn't cook. Even if it's not larded with 20-minute workouts, Ya-Ya's is manna for guitar freaks, thanks to the fiery interplay between the immortal Keith Richards and inarguably the greatest lead guitarist the Stones ever boasted, Mick Taylor.

As a compilation, Greatest Hits offers few surprises other than that Grohl somehow resisted the temptation to title this thing The Best of Foo. Though the record conspicuously lacks the band's breakthrough single, "I'll Stick Around", the first 13 tracks make good on the promise of the title and provide a relentless hit parade of modern rock radio staples.

Night Music's rawness--Jaumet even manages to make a saxophone, that treacly emblem of kitschy synth-pop cocktail bar culture--sound visceral and disturbing on "At the Crack of Dawn"--is what separates the album from the glut of 80s jackers.

The first half of Boys has all of the action, and the second side can't help but drag a bit.

Virtually every track on You Are the One I Pick showcases Felix's remarkable instinct for knowing when to ramp up their instrumentation and when to hold back. Yet when an album is this carefully arranged, there are also moments when all the fingerprints on a given track become distracting.

Yes, the high points of the previous record are duplicated here-- but so too are the same problems that occasionally bogged down that record.

Earthly Delights shows their career is less a series of sprints than one exhilarating marathon.

More focused on offering Banhart's international and oddball bona fides than crafting songs that feel at all like home, What Will We Be finds Banhart in need of direction and editing.

The tracks don't sound forced or awkward as they follow well-trod lyrical roads littered with wounded "you"s and "I"s, they sound honest, and an honest love song as always is hard to resist.

The album's infectious, but with enough edge to temper its undeniable desire to connect.

The notion of a 2xCD set of rehearsal recordings smacks of unnecessary indulgence, but whether you take this as an alternative canon of R.E.M. music or a document of a band working hard to find its future by revisiting its past, the album is successful in providing a new perspective on a classic group desperately in need of a new narrative thread.

Hudson can definitely do tweaked, but he has work to do before being transcendent.

Divest the Smashing Pumpkins or Hum of their singers, give the bands room to jam, and this album might have ensued. Without vocals, it feels slightly empty.

Ay Ay Ay is a sticky-sweet, unbounded mess, but only the priggish and unimaginative will hold that against it.

Witch Cults is like the sound of Broadcast and the Focus Group trying to cast their spells at the same time: Some of the record is great, plenty of it is cross-chatter.

Goldstein's voice could use a little shaking up. Even in the first-person stories Goldstein feels like an observer, albeit one with a negative bias. Still, ARMS makes for an interesting contrast to Harlem Shakes' eternal optimism.

Heavy Trash never get too heavy on Midnight Soul Serenade. It might be Spencer's lightest and breeziest album to date, a testimony to his stick-to-it-iveness despite the advancing years and changing trends.

So while two straight discs of Fela is exhausting, it's probably the most suitable way to digest him.

Fits feels like the band's formal first LP--lots of what makes them unique, and then those somewhat awkward "growth" points. That initial itchiness, in other words, never really goes away.

Lungs is a cloud-headed introduction to Welch's world, where It Girl hype, coffins, violence, and ambition combust on impact; it's a platinum-shellacked demo reel drunk on its own hi-fi-ness.

Perhaps unintentionally, Turning the Mind feels chemical itself--it's a cheap buzz that ultimately should have no problem finding its way into the wheelhouse of people who just can't get enough whooshy sound effects.

"Street Horrrsing" was a great record, but Tarot Sport is a cut above. Perhaps surprisingly, it's also a welcoming album--and one of the best of this already fruitful year.

Logos feels familiar and assuring, another affecting dispatch from a corner of indie music that is increasingly starting to seem like one Cox pretty much owns.

Whether inspired by lovers, each other, or the warmongers of the world, Kings of Convenience's latest is ultimately just what its title says: a bold and beautiful assertion that we are better off together than apart.

The BQE is probably best classified as an unusually successful vanity project, as well as evidence of Stevens' restless creativity.

The separation anxiety that Freaky induces is its unfortunate undoing, though we can least be glad that someone had the good sense not to include dialogue interludes for context's sake.

The music is a clear step up from his nadir on Monsoon, but it's only a lateral move in terms of quality compared to the first two Preston School releases.

The album falters slightly when the music becomes more abstract and inscrutable, but on the whole it is not difficult to relate to Nagano or slip into the mood created by her bandmates.

A huge array of guests help out, representing acts like Disfear, 108, Genghis Tron, and Neurosis. They are too many to list, but the bottom line is, they work. Whether they're yelling, singing, or laying down leads, they fit their songs. And that in itself is fitting.

Trapped Animal is nothing more than an odds-and-sods record being passed off as "business as usual" by a band that doesn't seem to know what that business is anymore.

Geneva's a record with dirt underneath its fingernails and resolute urgency at its heart, and like the place from which it hails, it's worth the bluster.

For an album about a doc about a book about going into the wilds of California, One Fast Move sounds awfully sleepy.

I prefer the more minimal style of Them, which was sharply critical--and deeply personal--without being hectoring or bombastic. But listeners who enjoy picking apart seam-bursting sonic worlds will find plenty to explore here.

El Perro's brand of pop is certainly easy to love, and a cozy sort of organic warmth--characterized by thick, resonant drums and keys, and treated guitars that seem to lurch and lumber with the slightly irregular rhythms of real life--pervades the new record.

If you're able to view it through that lens, then New Clouds has much to offer as an unscripted, decidedly un-pop kind of album: mood music and drug music, yes, but more than that, the uncompromising work of a dude making sounds strictly on his own terms.

The result of Ounsworth bottling this "flow" and working it into a set of songs is an album that showcases the breadth of his talents much more than the limited palettes of Flashy Python or CYHSY.

The interplay here is more complex than You, You're a History in Rust, showcasing restraint and more subtle shifts.

Under Stellar Stream is filled with such fertile repetition.

The songs on III seem to want to be simple folk songs. And unlike on previous albums, the players aren't always pushing each other higher into new celestial realms. Sometimes, they're just getting in each other's way.

With the exception of the lone cover in "Gypsy Davy", Perkins has assembled a small sampling of songs here all with their own very healthy set of bones.

Armonico casts the molten steel of meaningless syllables into machine-gun bursts, sonar echoes, radioactive dirges, and girl-group coos of the group's best work.

The New Moon OST has all the touchstones of what is considered, by many who consider themselves cognoscenti, "good" music-- from Yorke to Grizzly Bear to the more populist Death Cab, Killers, and Muse--but it uses its tastefulness to solidify the borders of what is acceptable, not to broaden them.

What the Temper Trap do devastatingly well is drape post-office-party mistake-hookup tackiness in the lofty imagery of global struggle....Elsewhere, the Temper Trap's pairing of sweeping portentousness with mundane douchebaggery is trickier to overlook.

We can only hope that, as we enter the 2010s, Embryonic portends yet another new phase for the Flaming Lips--one that's equally as improbable and rewarding as the ones that have preceded it.

It's his unhinged vocals that make Christmas in the Heart interesting, and, in some ways, appropriate to its subject.

Complex enough to reward repetitive listening and compact enough to encourage it, Blue Record is one of the year's most generous hours.

Iyer and his cohorts have spun the piano trio format into great art here, acknowledging their contemporaries and their musical ancestors.

Overall, Psychic Chasms is something like a dream collaboration between the Tough Alliance and Atlas Sound, the latter of whose Internet-only Weekend EP shares a delinquent theme with one of Psychic Chasms' best songs.

Know Better Learn Faster is a more mature record, slightly disillusioned with the world, but no less playful and with no less personality.

Rejoicer is a quality album with some especially strong tracks, but as much as it is refreshing to hear a relatively young band nail sounds from a previous era, the record is more enjoyable than it is interesting.

That feeling of being held at arm's length persists no matter how much time you put in with Voidist, and it's the record's only significant shortcoming.

As a musical statement of intent to the throngs of the newly interested, Music For Men shows a clear picture of who Gossip want to be--a New Millennial Madonna for whom Danceteria never closes. But for those who have been following Gossip's career, waiting with bated breath to see how the band will evolve, this new record may feel a little too much like they are still Standing in the Way of Control.

It is so fully formed and thoughtful that it feels like three or four lesser, noisier records should have preceded it. The xx didn't need a gestation period, though xx is nuanced, quiet, and surprising enough that you might.

As a lyricist, Fink's too reliant on indistinct yearn, and while you might relate to some of Spring's bummed-out bromide, Fink's moping seems too scopic to hit anyone very deep for very long. Sometimes you just put it in a letter.

Thing is, it still sounds entirely like an Air album--just a remarkably bland one.

While he might elicit the specific from his listeners, his music--especially here--is general. This is his gift and the gift of effective storytellers: to build toward the general by using the specific.

The end result is easily the best Built to Spill album of the decade--an improbable late-career reawakening and heartening evidence that becoming dependable doesn't mean having to settle for being predictable.

When things do begin to feel a little too familiar, Control manages to pull clever punches that keep interests piqued.

Goodnight Unknown feels comfortable and, to a point, casual, too, but it bears the kind of exploratory vigor that "Emoh" lacked.

The back half picks up where the debut left off, full of inspired pieces of paranoia-inducing industrial guitar noise and moribund pop textures--it too often seems like a misguided attempt to connect dots for the listener.

It would've been easy to let The Sound cruise from there, filling it with solid also-rans. But the energy level and commitment continue unabated.

What makes Losing Feeling so solid is how it begins and ends.

The Clientele aren't vain or foolish enough to try rocking out for a whole album. And even the ersatz shit sounds lush as hell.

On their debut LP, Mind Chaos, Hockey seem to be having a little fun with it, keeping things casual, cracking jokes at their own expense. You'd be surprised how well it works.

Vile certainly has the talent and ability to churn out tunes, and with a little focus and editing his best batch is most likely ahead of him.

This is an album that suffers in the context of Fink's career. She is an obviously talented artist working well below the standards she's set for herself as both one half of Azure Ray and a solo artist, and if that makes for a disappointing album.

So yes, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers is just another Califone album, but it's also a reminder of just what a special thing that is.

While the album as a whole doesn't wallop the way "She's the Dutchess" does, its more spacious, ambiguous, and, yes, adult songs are intriguing and affecting.

So many ways for it to go wrong, but instead it's a unique, catchy and lovably weird record, with highlights that could hold their own with the best indie singles of the year.

Faced with a child star's dilemma of symbolizing infinite irresponsibility, Pearl dips into adulthood admirably on Break It Up.