Like the other white rapper he will never escape comparisons to, Cage exhausts the patience of even his faithful followers at times, and Depart From Me almost reads like a plea to whoever might be left checking for him in 2009.

I'm going to let the band off the hook for the holding pattern; in the meantime, we'll simply revel in the general loveliness of these 10 compositions, which utilize the debut's blueprints in the creation of sublime melodies, absorbing lyricism and delicate harmonic interplay.

With more intensely vigorous drumming, more obviously personal lyrics, and a more blatant interest in glossy electro-pop, Edenloff's band carves out their own niche. It is one that masterfully blends the masculine and the feminine, the refined and the coarse, the dark and the bright.

They don't have the lyrical complexity of the bands that they will be compared to (from a young U2 to the aforementioned Frightened Rabbit), but they do have the energy and that's a promising place to start.

Oneida are the only band running that I could tell a listener with a straight face, yes, it's worth three discs, and it's worth your time.

Despite the sparser arrangements and increased focus on direct lyricism, it's every bit as aurally hypnotic as his previous work. It seems like he realized there was someone he really did want to sing to.

Chemical Warfare is a rap version of Speilberg's Minority Report; it draws upon a gritty underground past while embracing more modern craftsmanship, where new smooth edges are balanced by the felt-authenticity of its caliginous vision.

There are plenty of signs that UUVVWWZ are on track to become a better band, but "Castle" is the song that will make you impatient for them to hurry up and get to their next level right away.

jj's full-length debut is as easy to enjoy as whatever the last CD was you brought home with a giant cannabis leaf on the cover. They're as naive as they are cynical-- or is it the other stupid way around?-- and they manage to be pretty, touching, funny, and motivating, in different ways, in all the right places, for nine songs lasting 28 minutes.

This is not the music of men trying to be cool; it is the work of veterans unafraid to express mature emotions with an appropriate level of musical depth and nuance.

It's too listenable overall to be outright dismissed as some sort of flop. But it's too willfully unobtrusive and happy with its lack of ambition to try and sell as good pop, even in a year thin on the mediocre kind.

This second-hand facelessness runs throughout Volta, which still reads oddly rote and cold with this addendum. Even with its hulking abundance, Voltaïc is flesh without bone.

If Wu-Tang Chamber Music is a hackneyed cash-grab, it's a pretty good hackneyed cash grab. Because once you get past the brevity and the non-Wuness of it all, there is some beautifully executed hardhead grown-folks rap shit on here.

One of those albums where a couple of creative renegades flip out over every stylistic possibility available to them, overextend their ambition, and still come away from it making its missteps sound exciting.

There is a unique magic to the sounds of the Sahara. Imidiwan captures that magic with skillful grace.

The depth and breadth of the tracklist are commendable but often work against the band.

As catchy and well-crafted as these songs are, they never feel restricted or overly polished. Each track is given room to grow, stretching into extended intros, impulsive solos, and oft-repeated verses.

Is Octahedron the band's best album? No, but if you dig on MV's unrepentantly "big" and meandering suite-driven concept-album thing, you won't necessarily be disappointed.

Unfortunately, all this talent behind the boards often feels like a waste because of Spektor's inability to let her songs stand on their own merits without the persistent interjection of vocal curlicues or verbal flights of fancy.

Nothing here totally upends what we already know of Hood's talents via the Truckers, but it does serve as a supplementary capsule capturing how he ticks.

She shows greater range than expected, but the clatter of Johannes' busy production too often obscures her charisma and renders her odd punk melodies sadly lifeless. She's better than this perplexing project.

Dragonslayer is a lither, more athletic Sunset record--easier to like, easier to understand.

The funny thing is that for most bands, Beacons of Ancestorship would be the very definition of an ambitious record--commanding, aiming for conceptual unity and broad scope. But this mode seems to come naturally for Tortoise, and their mastery of it accounts for the record's broad successes and slight drawbacks alike.

Deer Tick's primary shortcoming is that the band evokes authentically gutty music from the past without noticeably inserting much of themselves into the equation, achieving superficial mimesis and comforting recognition while failing to put their own stamp on their creations.

Rewild is how an average debut album should pan out. It might outstrip its ambition and wear its influences too blatantly, but Amazing Baby could be something special once it all clicks.

In addition finding new ways to snarl in their music, the lyrics go beyond mere cleverness into sharp, thoughtful introspection, making Travels a document of a creatively restless band out to prove something to themselves, and not just the fans they’ve picked up along the way.

While Ambivalence Avenue is an excellent album by any measure, Bibio deserves extra credit for venturing outside of his established comfort zone.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend the LP for anyone who can't make an hour on the treadmill, but there are a few tunes here worth hearing. Too bad you can't exactly make out who's cranking them out.

Let's chalk it up to growing pains and watch how early learnings further develop into an adult style.

God Help the Girl is a spirited expansion of some of Murdoch's best ideas, but until the film finishes shooting--set to start next year--we'll probably just have wild-ass guesses like mine as to the real story.

You can tell that these songs were shaped and sculpted and polished ten times over, the attention to detail and space a welcome step away from the often sloppy clumps of no-fi ruckus clattering up from garages and out of bedrooms everywhere right about now.

Even as the band sticks to the path of least resistance, it skirts the MOR sandtrap that sinks so many indie rock acts that manage to last a quarter century.

Even as a record of adequate, vaguely politicized mook-rock, it mostly falls flat, whether by lazy lyrics or some uninspired drumming from Galactic's Stanton Moore, who adds plenty of percussive touches like the judicious cowbell of 'Clap For the Killers' but sinks more straightforward tracks such as 'The Oath' like a stone.

Whatever the case, he and Switch are kicking off summer with an armful of perfect cookout-, top down-ready songs, like the daytime soundtrack equivalent of all of the summertime night's rooftop music that's been coming from Swedes Air France and the Tough Alliance and their new wave of American indie disciples, such as Real Estate and Memory Cassette in the past year-plus.

There is an alarming lack of imagination in evidence on Skeletons, and virtually nothing in the way of strong emotion.

Here, it stands behind so many other newly apparent strengths--a testament to the leaps and bounds Longstreth has made as a songsmith and Dirty Projectors have made as a band.

At the very least, some excellent songs lurk among these 12 tracks, and there's enough potential for debate about which are which to make The Eternal worthy of Sonic Youth's singular canon.

They've jettisoned just about anything that ever made them perversely enjoyable.

Looks like we finally got the Mos Def we were waiting for.

When taking advantage of the opportunity to be as dumb as they need/want to be, West Ryder succeeds, which is another way of saying acoustic guitars have absolutely no reason to be involved.

Like much of Rhett Miller, and unlike much oft-unctuous power pop, it's music seemingly made to softly impress rather than outright inspire.

Ranging from translucent psych-pop to pummeling garage-rock, they're alternately assured and vulnerable, direct and subtle, light and dark.

The debut album by these producers-turned-trio comes after blog-bait remixes galore, including a nice enough Postal Service-ish Vampire Weekend makeover, but there's little of those fine young Columbians' infectious exuberance here.

The shift in perspective necessary to "get" it, though, does work on that level: at the least, it's a fitting testimonial to British Sea Power's partially effective relocation of a classic film into a modern aesthetic scheme.

Kurupt seems so committed to the idea of saying not that much in a very complicated way that it's utterly compelling. Quik, on the other hand, is consistently literal, dealing in the concrete with memorable, loosely connected run-on raps.

Jhelli Beam manages to be a completely cerebral experience and at times overwhelming in a satisfactory way, but then again, you could say the same about ice cream headaches.

When I take The Loud Wars as a justifiably forgotten but enjoyable enough record from a bygone era, I'm soothed; it's a little better than, oh, Fake French or something, and I'm sure as hell not going to dig around to find that one with this thing floating around.

There are sonic Easter Eggs for a thousand listens here, and it would take six pairs of headphones and an equal number of high-grade strains of weed to track them all down. Happy hunting.

Catamawr Yards, then, gets better as it gets more adventurous, and it gets more adventurous as it leans more on that backing band.

Kowalsky's work so far is mostly for hardcore drone-fans, and even they might not be blown away by Tape Chants. But anyone can appreciate Kowalsky's attention to detail.

The Little Match Girl Passion is as much a devotional piece as the Bach Passion it is modeled on, and with it, Lang has produced the most profound and emotionally resonant work of his career.

By being boring on purpose, Iggy ironically proves himself oddly more compelling than on his many past accidents. If it's not an album for the ages so much as for the aged, at least it's one you may want to hold on to a bit and give another shot when you get closer to where Iggy's at himself right now.

At its worst, this is effectively a contemporary acoustic neo-No-Depression record with Costello's signature vocal tics slapped on top.

It would be too easy to dog Hombre Lobo as a case where going back to the well leads to diminishing returns, but the problem is just that Hombre Lobo is too easy.

Certainly Archives' first volume contains enough audio and visual stimuli to keep a Neil Young fan busy till the next edition arrives (presumably) in 2029.

Jay Stay Paid's biggest strengths don't lie in its guest roster, impressive as it is. It's the way these reconstructed, reassembled beats so vividly show off how left-field he was willing to get in the service of finding new ways to make a beat knock.

Franz's music is usually as crisp and tight as its constructivist cover art, and though reformatted, stretched out, and slowed down on Blood, it still maintains a strong pulse.

This is a decently crafted, moderately hooky, fairly vacuous power-pop album, and under the right light, you could do a whole lot worse.

While the whole package is marketed as a "love letter" to fans, true followers will quickly be able to sniff out its inferiorities. If anything, this latest selection from the dwindling Buckley vaults subverts his talents and ultimately insults the same hardcore fans it's aimed at.

It's accomplished and impressive always, but sometimes to the point of verging on an overstuffed din.

Really, in a world far too concerned with backstories and far too lacking in good old dedication to craft, Grizzly Bear's just about as boring as they come: four guys who very quietly set out to make a fantastic record. And so they did.

They're pleasure-pushers, filling tunes with riffs, phrases, and beats a five-year-old could love. But, on Wolfgang, those same songs are unfulfilled--and this band wouldn't have it any other way. There's beauty in a sunset. Phoenix are wringing it out.

"Dandelion Gum" was speckled and silly and high as shit. Eating Us feels more like the baseline: collected, repeatable, respectable.

It's mellow and smooth and relaxing, sure, but it's also unpredictable and full of little revelations and turns of sound that make it one of space disco's crowning recent achievements.

Under and Under dispatches the charge of repetition and "samey" songcraft very quickly.

Per Sunn O)))'s long-standing dogma, "Maximum volume [still] yields maximum results." But this time, there's enough musical range and temperance to usher even the most resolute naysayer into this intricate wonderland.

Although Alpers has found a winning sound, she's still scrambling to gather her notes and draft a theme she can deliver with conviction.

Fake Surfers doesn't continue these new adventures in hi-fi. Rather, it plays to the Intelligence's extremes, casting a more pronounced British Invasion pop influence in warped, peak-level lo-fi sonics, emphasizing a connection between post-punk and psychedelia that stretches from Clinic and Guided by Voices through the deconstructionist pop of Swell Maps and Wire and back to the whimsical wordsmithery of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence.

Created in mere weeks, it doesn't sound fussy or fussed over, and manages the tricky balance of audible intimacy without crappy bedroom acoustics.

Tiga's still not a dancefloor chameleon like Basement Jaxx and he's not yet as pop-oriented and clever as say, the Pet Shop Boys, but Ciao! at least sees him glancing in those directions.

There's something almost voyeuristic in listening to such an intimate musical relationship built on exchanging confidential messages to one another, but it's this warmth that gives the record its spirit.

Blackshaw's musical ideas are interesting enough that it's easy to see his piano pieces progressing as his technique comes along, opening another avenue to explore his musical concepts.

Ultimately, it's the dynamic between melodic resonance ('Young Diamond') and found-sound obfuscation (the four minutes of 'You Are a Force' are pregnant with stay amp hum) that defines a debut that I'd call "promising."

Yet like last time, there are plenty of sturdy, major-key melodies that go straight for the jugular. But whatever sing-along quality they have, their effectiveness is almost always determined by context.

The music is so immaculately tasteful that it's hard to figure out how they chose such a silly band name. (It's from a song by the Belgian band dEUS, which makes it no less silly.) But they got the album title right--they've arrived.

For the moment, cherry-pick the highlights from this album, and cross your fingers for her sophomore release.

Relapse can be an intermittently thrilling sonic experience until you realize everything sounds like a variation of 'What's the Difference,' 'If I Can't,' or even fucking '30 Something.'

The script might contain plenty of familiar elements, but they're ably, and occasionally superbly, shuffled and recast.

Manners is deceptively consistent even beyond its singles--if you like one Passion Pit song, you'll probably like them all.

Around the Well is a great retrospective that heps fans to a lot of difficult-to-locate material from one of this decade's finest songwriters. While there is some fairly flat stuff on the first disc, it really gives the listener the sweep of his development as a writer, musician, and arranger.

As with previous albums, Yours Truly benefits from creative sequencing that winks at expectations.

While his songwriting remains funny and incisive at 45, ostensibly ballsier numbers like 'Fuckingsong' and 'Angela' veer dangerously close to bar-band boneheadedness.

It's also quite good, despite the possible failure of nerve on its creator's part.

Vanderslice hasn't made a bad record, but he's only made a couple that are this good. If you've never dipped an ear into his world before, Romanian Names is a great place to do it.

The band's egalitarian and mutually supportive dynamic pays off on the harmonious Still Night, Still Light, their third and best album.

A good deal more Lange and a good deal less Muns would have brought out the best in Scott Herren.

So 'Em Are I is a frontloaded album. But anyone who ever bought a Sebadoh record despite really liking only Lou Barlow's songs should still consider checking it out.

The album spends nearly its entirety trying to revive a sound prevalent in 1994.

There may be some excellent tracks on this record, but it mostly hints at better things to come down the line.

Where Deacon infuses his day-glo riots with brainy intent, EAR PWR recycle the worst tendencies of electroclash: the lackluster rapping and willful inanity. It's frustrating because there's ample evidence that EAR PWR aren't compensating for being shitty at music, they're just dumbing down.

As the next step in Kittin's conflicted evolution, Two is not that much different from (or more enjoyable than) what's preceded it. As a supposed remembrance of the heyday of electroclash, it's a nostalgia trip that's best left untaken.

As a whole, Eats Darkness feels haphazard in a way that shades into self-indulgence.

Druggy records are never all that good when they don't convey anything about the experience other than the blur. That's not to say you couldn't get swept up in The Mirror Explodes' churn under the right influence, but it's not something to inspire the formation of many new memories.

With only six songs on offer--one of which is a 75-second interlude called 'The Curlew'--it's hard to feel like this is the assertive, confident statement Fake has it in him to make. As a strategic move out from the ghetto of nostalgic IDM Nowheresville, though, it'll suit just fine.

The performances are blandly professional, because any major-label rock band of Green Day's abilities could shit this stuff out in their sleep, and emotionally inert. This is the crafting of a modern epic as a dreary day-job routine.

Townes, though well intended, shows neither of these formidable artists in his best light.

Crime Pays has a lonely, defensive, and vaguely desperate Kirk Van Houten vibe--more noticeable than a lack of breakout bangers or guest spots is a palpable and inexcusable lack of excitement and spark.

The painstaking introspection here seems to stem from a need to use their success and exposure to deliver some definitive, U2-sized message when really they're so much more relatable when they're awkwardly sorting out their psychological messes on the fly.