So Wildlife isn't exactly bursting at the seams with earworms, but it's a worthy achievement for taking a poignant, powerful emotional state and carrying its thread for 42 minutes.

Johnston devotees will get a kick out of it, for sure--out of the successful merging of Johnston and a rich, full-band aesthetic, and just out of the sound of Johnston doing well and writing well, finally rocking out on the wide screen he's usually had to imagine.

If the teaser EP Splitting the Atom is any indication, that Burial remix joint will probably make a better and more convincing Massive Attack album than the next actual Massive Attack album.

The band has pretty much stayed the course, adding some orchestral flourishes to a few songs on new LP Threadbare, but generally hewing to its acoustic guitar/secular spiritual awakening formula.

It's hard to know what Sufjan fanatics, who have been waiting four years now for a proper full-length follow-up to Illinois, will make of this one-off, but Run Rabbit Run serves as a welcome reminder that his curious, try-anything spirit is part of what got our attention in the first place.

Admittedly, if you own MGM's three 12"s, then there is nothing new for you here. And sure, there is something about Expressions that feels akin to listening to karoke--but with a voice like Meredith Metcalf's singing the sort of addicting, tangy melodies that her briny soprano was made for, even karaoke can be thrilling.

The already apparent holes in some of the Brakes' tunes, which at their worst can seem little more than a stutter from Hamilton and a steady scrape from the band, do pop up occasionally; then again, they rarely overstay their welcome, as Dodelijk sneaks 20 tunes into just shy of 45 minutes, and in a way even help the good stuff kick harder in contrast.

It's a promising sign La Roux might actually develop some range as this pilfer-pop duo continues to mature.

There's a lot of remarkable music on Celebration--the work of an artist who's spent a quarter-century in a passionate body-lock with the question of what exactly makes pop music popular. She deserves a retrospective more interesting than this haphazard piece of contract-filling product.

Okay, it's not really very good at all.

It's not that there's no room for such studio nuance in the Avetts' music, but it gives I and Love and You a quotidian sheen, making their signature sincerity seem sappy and much less special.

In general, the album is sequenced awkwardly. The first two tracks have vocals and are around 19 and seven minutes long, respectively.

There's no real standout track--no 'Fade Into You' for this decade--but it's a good listen while it lasts, a thing of slow, sad grace.

It's tough to imagine how The Wizard of Poetry came into existence in the first place.

Why There Are Mountains ends up being like any great result of wanderlust--here, the journey is the end not the means; fortunately, that gives Why There Are Mountains astounding replay value.

The Wild Things soundtrack boasts enough illuminating, atypical turns from Karen O that make it worth experiencing independent of its source.

These go-hard-or-go-home tracks are still sprinkled across Fluorescent Black... But those who've been along for the 10-plus year ride may be looking for more of them.

Unfortunately, Seconds, Higgins' first album in 36 years, doesn't match the vitality of its backstory.

There's not a lick, hook, or lyric on Echo Kid that won't give you a feeling of deja vu, but the execution is strong and the music is pleasurable enough that it hardly matters.

The Sun Came Out, whether intentionally or not, is an album for singers, but often it's the music that elevates the songs and prevents even the slickest moments from falling into the AOR mire.

The sounds of Touareg and Afrobeat and Ghanaian Highlife are rippling through the eight songs here, each a rollicking, warm reflection of appreciation.

He doesn't exactly break free on Bright Penny, but typical of Hayes, it's not for lack of trying.

No one's perfect, I guess, especially when they're trying to go from one-note to every note in the space of a single record. Sadly, though, that means that the dancier stuff, though I want to like it so much, is Wild's main casualty.

The songs are generally slow, samey, and sleep-inducing, and the lyrics, any language differences notwithstanding, are hard to take seriously, even for a guy who raved about I'm From Barcelona.

This is evidence of true artistic growth, but these successes share space on Scars with creative cul-de-sacs and uninspired genre exercise.

The opener is as intriguing as it is unexpected. It's just too bad, then, that the rest of the album continues to ask similar questions, but never again with the same vigor or innovation.

The canniness of Album's production choices and the scuzzy depression of the lyrics and the gut-level songwriting instincts, along with everything else about the record, add up to something elusive and fascinating--maybe even heartbreaking.

Between My Head and the Sky becomes a bit of a muddle in the middle, with Plastic Ono Band's free-form approach yielding less satisfying results. [...But it] simmers down considerably in its closing third, shifting away from boisterous band jams toward meditative tone poems and piano pieces.

Despite the looseness and the grab-bag approach, the best of the songs on Unmap feel right as rain, like these weird mash-ups were there all along, just waiting to be discovered.

An album like this, filled with longing and a bit of resignation, may be an uneasy fit for today's mood of uncertainty and diminished opportunities. Hawley's mined a specific vein of emotion for years, and it's a testament to his skill that his hyper-local focus maintains such a broad appeal.

Sometimes, the result is as frail and lovely as worn lace; sometimes it's just threadbare.

Eskimo Snow just feels like the right kind of album for an incredibly gifted and increasingly prolific band like WHY? to release as a quick palate cleanser, reaching an endpoint of a certain sound rather than trying to top its predecessor's unmatchable extremities.

Though there is an overall whiff of the 1980s about Vapours, it sidesteps the traps of either sounding trendily vintage or indistinguishable from the rest of today's Reagan-era impostors. It works best, however, to think of the album as a return to "Return to the Sea," only, as its title suggests, in a hazier, less opaque form.

It's an album that draws its strengths from the simultaneous expression of sympathy toward the people in the songs and anger toward the shit they've gone through.

A Brief History of Love is a study in the enormity of sound doing just that, each reverbed kick drum, phasers-on-stun guitar, and wastrel vocal refuting the idea that you need to talk about the passion to express it.

Overall, Texas Rose, the Thaw, and the Beasts is a good mood record, a midnight opus that sounds great while it's playing but doesn't much travel with the listener beyond its runtime.

Born Again Revisited is a deeply rewarding record and a worthy entry in a pretty stellar catalog.

The restraint of the musicians involved leaves Chesnutt's fragility at the center of the music and lends the album an air of refinement and wisdom that could have easily been drowned out by guitarists more eager to call attention to themselves.

With follow-up Forget the Night Ahead, Graham takes his cryptic musings into a pitch-black place, but he still connects enough to make all the fraught drama worthwhile.

Even if the overall effect here isn't terribly original, there are still plenty of nice touches spread throughout these tracks to suggest Le Loup holds the potential to become more than an amalgam of well-regarded influences.

Milwaukee at Last!!! only seems broader than it is: Almost every track, it turns out, is from Release the Stars, and the audience doesn't seem to mind.

This doesn't eclipse their non-soundtrack work by any stretch of the imagination, and it occasionally lapses into texture that longs for its visual component, but by and large it's an involving listen that telegraphs a sense of emotional and geographic space. It's good to have it all in one place.

It helps to show Pains not as period fetishists, but instead a group of indie-pop aesthetes who seem to be able to operate comfortably within several different subdivisions of the genre.

I can't deny Church is a solid craftsman capable of cranking out extremely inviting pop-rock hooks, but this ground is so well-trod that it's hard to find anything to get even a little bit excited about here unless you're relatively new to indie-rock patronage.

It's rarely boring, and often full of promise, but it's a direction that calls for further tweaks, experiments, and exploration to get the balance just right.

He sounds damn good over trashy, flashy electro that manages to keep pace with cadences as hyperactive as his own, and, above all, he's way more fun than he's often given credit for.

Virtually the whole record settles into the same formula the band's been dutifully churning out since the dawn of the millennium.

Despite the band name, the album is a guitar-driven record, relying primarily on Stillman's dexterous fretwork to lead the quintet in and out of geometric jams that sound vaguely prog-metal in origin.

Even if it were the desperate or cynical move some people have claimed it is, there's no denying that purging Edwards' old lyric folder has helped the band create its best album in a decade.

It becomes clear that for a distressingly large chunk of Temporary Pleasures, the duo has forgotten to do much of interest with the backing tracks in favor of roping in a rolodex's worth of singers and rappers and hoping the songs write themselves.

Time to Die bests it as far as consistency goes.

'Relator' aside, there's little about this duo's chemistry that lives up to Matt and Kim, let alone Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.

For the wary or outright dismissive, however, The Resistance is also a very smartly sequenced album.

Cudi too often assumes some sort of higher ground even though his self-pity is flaunted no differently than any other tacky rapper accessory.

These four discs ultimately do what any good box set should do: In tracing the band's trajectory from power-pop progenitors to post-pop tinkerers, Keep an Eye on the Sky presents a history of the band that could not be gleaned from the albums themselves, using finished studio tracks along with demos and rarities to give a fuller picture of the musicians, their dynamic, and their songs.

Central Market is a big album for an age that has acquainted itself with thinking small about the album both as a vessel for sound and as a standard-bearer for new aesthetic vision.

Sylvian is front-and-center on every song, which is good because he provides the only rhythmic and melodic stability, as the instrumentals dart and scratch and feedback around him.

They sound more inspired here than they have since... well, since they played these songs the first time. New album please.

Ashes Grammar draws you in by offering outstanding moments in strange contexts; you'll re-listen to hear specific pieces even though you're unable to remember exactly when and how they occur.

GusGus's seventh album isn't quite a hangover, and there's still a party going on--but the party is somewhere far away.

To catch a glimpse of these guys' past glories in 2009, your best option is still to go see them live; this is just a souvenir.

Kamaal the Abstract is not a great record by any means. But it is an interesting one, a unique effort by an artist struggling to mesh two disparate musical systems, gambling that inherent internal friction could spark some excitement.

It's experimental music, to be sure, but it doesn't conflate experimentation with alienation.

To those without the stomach for Joakim's waywardness, Milky Ways will often sound as much during the course of a listen. For those who are feeling adventurous but forgiving of the same, Joakim is a worthy companion.

Out Into the Snow is another solid entry in a long career for Joyner, and it seems his place as the dark observer on the indie world's fringe is pretty well set.

Wild Beasts certainly aren't the first rock band to stand up society's dregs and outcasts, but few others immortalize them on such a wondrous, mythic scale.

Experience can be a crutch, an excuse to tread water in comfortable waters. But Popular Songs wears its age well, a calm but firm reminder of an indie rock perennial it's all too easy to take for granted.

That's Signal Morning's greatest strength: It's a supremely busy record that at the same time doesn't sound fussed over.

Blueprint 3 is the kind of stuck-on-stupid, event-driven money pit that proves while Jay-Z's at a point where he's got no one to answer to but himself, he's still capable of an entire hour of failing to take his own advice.

All in all though, it's good to hear a new Os Mutantes record that carries forward the ideals and exploratory spirit that made us all love the band in the first place, even if it won't ever supplant those classic early albums.

It's weirdly kind of a grower. There's nothing that immediately jumps out and announces itself as the 'Where Do You Run' of Everything Goes Wrong.

Even if a lot of Heartbeat Radio is affable and politely poppy, a lot of it is so pointedly bland that you can't help but wonder if the good stuff stands out only because of the beige filler around it.

It's not always great--the band has a tendency to let its best ideas get the best of them--but there is a bigness of sound that is hard to approximate. And even harder to control.

So naturally the big question now is if the rest of Get Color lives up to the promise of 'Die Slow.' The answer is that it does... kind of.

Mister Pop stays the course for the rest of its relatively compact 10-song, 34-minute length, reshaping the Clean's core components into poignant bossa nova instrumentals ('Simple Fix'), propulsive Krautrock-outs ('Tensile') and, as only they can, bizarro fuzz-organ jigs that resemble White Light/White Heat-era Velvets auditioning for "Riverdance" ('Moonjumper').

In Prism ultimately sets a new standard for them: don't just make it sound like you never left, but rather make the past seem like a mere warm-up for what's to come.

Like Ghostface's modern classic, this album defies hip-hop's current atmosphere of youthful cockiness and aging complacency: instead, it's driven by the sometimes celebratory, sometimes traumatized sense of stubborn survival and perseverance, a veteran mindset that can no longer picture success without having to defend it.

Hawthorne clearly has the ability to integrate and recreate his influences in his own compositions; it would be revelatory if he added more of his own signature sounds and soul into the music.

East of Eden, in that sense, isn't so far from Studio's West Coast: a masterful, hypnotic album that draws on a world of influences but is ultimately limited by none.

As Good as Gone is Nudge's best album so far, the kind of record that indicates a band has found its signature sound, and is poised to deepen and expand it.

These 38 meticulously prepared minutes offer dozens of memorable moments. They just demand that you listen.

Tillman's intimate, close-miced voice, does lend Year in the Kingdom a lonesome, somber tone, one Tillman-- a funny, amicable dude, if you've ever heard him clowning on himself at a Fleet Foxes gig-- would do well to shake on occasion. Next time, maybe; for now, the stout, supine Year in the Kingdom, Tillman's second fine record of the year, will certainly do.

Just as you'd have to be made of stone not to enjoy at least some part of a Monotonix gig, anyone who likes garage rock would have to be an obstinate stickler for originality not to enjoy the best parts--that is, the majority--of Where Were You When It Happened?

Red contains no clunkers, only lukewarm forays that further convince me this band can nail any sound they want, cheekiness be damned.

Where the old Bondy would sometimes show his hand too blatantly, the new Bondy is playing his cards with greater aplomb and much greater skill. When the Devil's Loose, A.A. Bondy's second album, is evident of this ever-growing skill. But that's not to say there isn't room to grow.

Unsurprisingly, the rarities on The Fine Print could make a good album, but the oddities are often distracting.

He's only a middling guitar player, but insists on soloing and showboating endlessly, drawing out songs to unnecessary lengths.

Their equipment may be largely restricted to percussion, vocals, and the occasional embellishment of keyboard, but their ability to fully eclipse these limitations and create music with a strong improvisational pulse and so much vitality is a no small feat, and proves that they are continuing to experiment in magnificent, dynamic ways.

Humbug isn't better than either of its predecessors, but it expands the group's range and makes me curious where it might go next.

Mew has succeeded in developing a good sound from some of the least hip ingredients imaginable, and No More Stories... feels like a consolidation of every stride they've made to date.

Unfortunately a whole album of similarly DJ-pitched material, all the quote-unquote pop frills shaved off, wouldn't have allowed blog readers to devote the few days their attenuated attentions can muster for He Was King's singles, before the next this-is-kind-of-okay-I-guess electro-pop album arrives to distract them.

It's a sad case of an artist forgetting what makes her great, settling for what makes her merely good instead.

The results are perfectly pleasant but rarely inspiring, hardly sterile but at the same time too smooth.

Yehezkely, with her limited range and slightly detached delivery, effectively bridges that gap between the music's indulgent/escapist tendencies and our desire to connect with it despite that distance.

By dividing the sessions into what amounts to an overview of his career, My Dusty Road detracts from the recently discovered source material, making it both an incredible find and a missed opportunity.

That mischief is largely missing from Origin: Orphan, and the lack of lyrical cleverness seems to have infected the music as well, making for a mostly cloudy listen from a formerly sunny-day band.

It's wide-eyed pop minus the fizz, demonstrating that sizzle can still be subtle.

Fortunately, whether she's sifting through the anguish she's caused her mother and the trouble she's having finishing her album, or realizing that good sex can make for bad boyfriends and that even sucky jobs serve some cosmic purpose, she generally cuts through the crap without pretending to have easy answers.