Like much of Magnolia before it, the songs lope along quiet, lazy rhythms in no particular hurry to get where they're going. But while the Wooden Birds never quite arrive anywhere special, that's not to say Kenny isn't pointed that general direction.

The Church are still producing at a high level, and Untitled #23 is a must for anyone who's followed them this far.

Willis still viciously circumnavigates his drumkit with authority and adventure. Warren still manhandles a viscous bass tone that he funnels into heavy themes. Kasai adds texture and dimension, augmenting what's there instead of adulterating it.

This is a singer's album, highlighting Hukkelberg's voice above all else.

OK Bear is a good album--it won't blow you away, but I get the sense from listening that Enigk is confident enough in his music not to need to blow you away.

Barring the occasional mid-song bridge that might have you checking your watch, most of it works, too: Even when Desire Lines slows, it's because it's wandering or straggling, not because it's hamming out same-y minutes in some ill-forged notion of filling up a 12".

Call it retro in service of sweat and smiles, celebrating the ridiculousness of dance music at its loudest and most unmannered.

Street produces again, and Robyn Hitchcock is among the guests, but even they can't make up for repetitive, one-dimensional songs--mostly sleepy folk, occasionally fuzzy psych.

With that in mind, the album is perfectly titled, as Actor proves St. Vincent as an artist capable of crafting believable, complicated characters with compassion, insight, and exacting skill.

Ultimately, even when she veers into previously unexplored aesthetic territory, every track feels just like Peaches, which is rather remarkable given how rigid and predictable she had been in the recent past.

The way Roberts' often high-pitched brogue wraps itself around sentences is pretty as hell; his voice has never sounded better, nor has it been recorded this clearly before.

Perhaps it's partly a factor of Oberst's essential attention-grabbing nature, but none of these gentlemen offers up a composition that snags the ear better than the most mundane effort from their fearless leader.

The band's now-routine gospel-like chanting grows tiresome by album end (they miss Vanderhoof's vocals), and, as was expected, Set ‘Em Wild doesn't necessarily expand the band's sound so much as further splinter their interest.

A few brilliant left turns that feel almost accidental mixed in with a sort of end-times hunger for a top-40 audience that doesn't seem to exist anymore.

So Entertainment might be music for their performances, it might be for others' dance performances, but it's not for the dance floor.

The Horrors' shoegazer makeover aside, the real story here is Badwan's growing confidence as a singer, and his willingness to sound more scared than scary. Primary Colours loses its radiance when he reverts back to bogeyman type.

With Outside Love, McBean takes this theme on an adventurous journey to surprising heights, and the fully realized sound allows his ideas more room to breathe.

Easily the band's most accessible effort, hipsters and headbangers will likely agree it's also their most intricately imagined.

With their dirty mouths and pretty faces, pop perspicacity and knack for making a bloody racket, there's no question the Vaselines were worth rescuing from obscurity.

Patrick Watson doesn't do foundation work exceedingly well. Yet this is not to say that there aren't moments on Wooden that suggest songcraft was the foremost urge.

It takes only a few listens to realize that this album is its own beast. Even with healthy doses of unruliness and a few far-off wanderings, this is Magik Markers' most coherent, self-contained effort to date.

Awe is in the ear of the beholder, sure, but after being predictably pounded into the ground for half an hour by Rodriguez-Lopez/Hill et al. and their bag of heavy tricks, it's hard to tell if we're meant to walk away impressed or oppressed.

Replica Sun Machine is an exceedingly simple thing--with tunes so familiar-feeling to be easily ignorable--but it's presented with a false sense of intricacy, gussied up and disguised as something more than it really is.

A Ways Away, O'Neil's fifth solo album and first on the K imprint, draws together her considerable experience as a producer, singer, and songwriter in a fleetingly beautiful 36 minutes that washes over the listener in an introspective haze.

Invisible Cities serves as something of a breath-catching moment for a band that's taken a giant leap on each of its albums, bringing some of the thunder back while further elaborating on the progress made on Ghost Rock.

Colonia is mostly careful to use its expanded palette of sounds for subtle shading rather than gratuitous effect.

Together Through Life isn't without its charms--Dylan never is. It's just very minor, especially by his standards.

Instead of focusing on one idea and shaping it into something unique, though, the album tries its hand at everything that is "now" (noise-pop, dance rock, etc.) and owns none of it.

The band's music is spot-on for soundtrack work precisely because it's moody yet unobtrusive, evocative of something, yet noncommittal enough to conceivably fit any emotional tableaux.

A letdown after Fables; whether haughty, homesick, or ha-ha, on the way toward frankness, the album gets bogged down in simplicity.

Given its one-off status and unique format, Are You In? is probably a diversion rather than a reinvention, a mixtape-style curio given big business backing, but hopefully some of its reinvigorated sonics find their way to the next proper De La Soul album.

For one reason or another, Modeselektor seem unwilling to trim the fat and here again, are a handful of just-okay songs that probably should have been lopped off. Cut some of them and you've got a great record instead of just a darn good one.

On When I See the Sun, they seem to want to prove they also recognize great songwriting, and it turns out they not only have impeccable taste, they also have an instinctive understanding of the type of songs that tend to increase in mystery and intimacy when swaddled in an impenetrable fog of guitars.

If you're a lifelong garage-rock purist or just enjoy the occasional Jay Reatard track, there's a good chance you'll get a lot of mileage out of Help. It's hard not to: This is like meat and potatoes prepared by a master chef--totally familiar but utterly delicious.

Frenetic, mercurial, and of wildly variable listenability, theFREEHoudini feels like a retrospective and a retrenchment of forces, but it also serves as yet another step in Anticon's breathless, never-ending push forward.

Although Empire tries mightily, they collapse underneath too many ideas before the record is even half over.

Tennant slaps his heart on his sleeve and gets on with things. The result isn't awful, although none of it is as spooky and playful as the cover of the Passions 'I'm In Love With a German Film Star' that the Boys produced for Sam Taylor-Wood last year.

The results are as free-wheeling and inspired as the group has sounded in years-- Super-er and Furrier.

Ultimately, the whole of Tinted Windows is so much less than the sum of its considerable parts that it's almost tragic.

Ending with a brief, queasy reprise tease of 'Wrong,' Sounds of the Universe concludes anticlimactically, an echo of its promising start.

Although only one song passes the five-minute mark, Touchdown overflows with ideas imaginatively sifted from a range of genres, and feels honest, infectious, and personable from beginning to end.

Black gets the Art Brut spirit down on record better than anyone has before, with the blazing pop-metal vainglory of Weezer, the scruffy cheekiness of early Rough Trade bands, and lots of enthusiastic backing vocals. Fun for them, fun for us.

Asleep feels less like an album of music meant to entertain than an assumption that you can actually bump a marketing plan in your cars and house parties.

When they're satisfied with rocking the fuck out, they do it exceedingly well, but when they try to acquire the adult answers, they'd do well to chill out and enjoy being young.

Maturity is a central concept to Camera Obscura--Campbell's found it in her singing, but in her lyrics, the search continues. The asymmetries in her personality give her songs their distinct character.

Unfortunately, the ratio of thoughtful zeal to clunky screed this time around is decidedly not in his favor.

Finding unique ways to handle empty space and unorthodox arrangements has always been Cohen's greatest strength, and here that skill helps to mottle his most straightforward material to date.

If Never Gonna Touch the Ground is less a party album and more an album as party--self-contained, relentlessly upbeat, rowdy, self-celebratory--too many of these songs come across as kegs of near beer.

Still, overreaching is a forgivable flaw on an otherwise accomplished debut, which usually sounds so confident in its creator's insecurities.

Take the repeats out of the equation and you're left with a decidedly mixed bag; just a few of Dance Mother's newbies manage to rival their older siblings' success.

As strong and unusual as The Law of the Playground is, especially out of step in 2009, it never quite feels as inspired, as fraught with conflicted beauty, as past songs 'Paper Cuts' or 'Be Gentle With Me' or 'Monsters.'

His vantage from Eagle is one of textured ambivalence; his images split and shimmer like double-exposures, immediately releasing an obvious meaning quickly followed by a subtler one that equivocates the first.

The story here though is the album's simmering, intimate moments--and despite the fanbase-building qualities of their new-wave past, the more the group embraces an inky, ambient future, the better it could get.

Swoon ultimately delivers the exact same results as its predecessor mostly because it's written in nearly the exact same way. The problem all along for the Silversun Pickups isn't that they sound too much like the Smashing Pumpkins. They just sound way too much like themselves.

If these songs are low-voltage wires that hum, buzz, whir, purr but rarely jolt, they yield just enough electricity to light the way forward.

Every track on The Future Will Come that hasn't already appeared as a single last year is a relatively short and succinct piece of work; think a bunch of radio edits instead of the 12" mixes. The good news is that brevity keeps some of these tracks from getting stretched thin.

The album is full of similar tableaux: These songs are dioramas depicting the New Mexico wilderness as a reverberation of the couple's desires.

The highlights of Ampexian suggest that if he did want to use the moniker for easier listening, the results would genuinely beguile, rather than demand your full attention and hope for the best.

The whole record is a smart little left-turn for everyone involved. And if it's not quite an unalloyed triumph, I would totally play a video game with this soundtrack.

The rest of Dos can't quite keep the pulse of those initial salvos. Staying inventive within the confines of repetition is sometimes too much for the band to muster. But Johnson's fiery playing is impressive throughout.

Despite Woods' humble production values and their fondness for living room ambiance, Songs of Shame has that almost subliminal ability to make one want to move in to listen more closely.

A significant step forward from her debut, Two Suns is home to some of the year's most thrilling music so far.

Levi and her band sound more like the future than the past, at a moment when we desperately need some more future, and as much as I've come to dig this album's awkward, brash cacophony, I want to hear what they do next even more.

Doves' fourth album is another sterling example of why the Doves should be household names and why they probably won't ever be: their unwavering flair for producing mountainous, Wembley-worthy pop anthems that are nonetheless invested with a palpable degree of grace and humility.

Like Skinner's recent work, instead of woodshedding on the mixtape circuit like smarter and hungrier rappers, we're treated to lightweight albums that are three years in the making and still feel like a rushed jumble of bad ideas that just get worse as they go along.

It's a contemplative work setting the stage for Mould's upcoming memoir, whose hooks will for once have to connect without the almost comforting bark of his vocals or buzz of his guitar behind them.

Jada's too talented to produce a completely worthless album, of course, and there are the usual one or two frustrating glimmers of the promise that keep getting him record deals.

So when I call Begone Dull Care a "mature" album, know it skirts both the positive and negative connotations of one of the most divisive adjectives in pop's lexicon.

Now We Can See is bursting with clear-headed explorations of the ways that fear and neuroses hold us back from truly living, winkingly clinical examinations of the rote machinations that consume our lives, and tales of the savagery at the basis of modern existence.

Crystal Antlers' proper debut is, more than their EP, the sound of a band still with more potential than goods.

Repo is still abstract in a similar and smeary way, but it sounds like Black Dice have gotten a better handle on their gear.

Sun Gangs is less a break-up record, and more a "relationship" record, in that it has the ups and downs of a love affair, with moments of joy, boredom, and viciousness sandwiched in closely next to each other. And while that makes for a challenging and complex listen--Andrews has certainly proved to be adept at wringing bitterness or misanthropy from bruised melodies--one can't help but hope that his next relationship is a happy one.

Ashworth takes us on a joyride with a succession of mostly doomed outlaws and derelicts, with a couple of side excursions into familiar disaffected-slacker-ballad territory. It all adds up to easily the most mature and thematically ambitious Casiotone release to date.

The result is a sparkling debut for her and one of his most interesting collaborations.

There is nothing original or novel about Telekinesis' music, but somewhat counterintuitively, its by-the-books professionalism is what makes it so effective.

A Positive Rage isn't much of an opening gambit. It's a memento for the fans, for better or for worse. But if you were too loaded on Halloween 2007 to remember much from this show, maybe this is the album for you.

Swift has figured out how to make pretty music, but he hasn't found anything compelling to say through it.

The group add nothing new to pre-existing genres, but are successful in customizing familiar sounds to suit their taste for clean tones and an abundance of negative space.

The Coathangers keep the back-alley post-punk party going strong on a scratchy, shrieky, foul-mouthed sophomore album, Scramble, their first for Seattle-based Suicide Squeeze.

Not to get all protectionist here, but it seems pointless to import so many 1960s-mining indie rock outfits to America when we've got plenty of perfectly good 60s-mining acts right here at home. Yet Norway's I Was a King offer a welcome twist on the same ol'.

In its own combustive way, it's weirdly memorable.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs still create great, compelling pop-rock, largely because of the way the songs themselves are organized, with conventional verse-chorus structures repeatedly eschewed in favor of detours, miniature grooves, and lengthy asides that produce the sensation of a band and a singer impulsively following their own emotional whims.

The disc succeeds as a public testing ground, but as an album it's ultimately unfocused. One problem is that Parish simply isn't the songwriter that Harvey is.

Living Thing sounds like a noble but flawed attempt by Peter Bjorn and John to test the fortitude of their songwriting using the most barren and broken of arrangements. But more often that not, it sounds like they settled on the drum-machine presets first, with the lyrics and melodies thrown on top as afterthoughts.

It's a showy album with very little to show.

While this sort of proactive fandom hardly qualifies as bad art, you'd have to get pretty smashed to ignore the album's missing spirit and just dance, which, sadly, may be the point here.

Though probably not the best UGK album, it might be the strongest illustration of what they do best.

As catchy as much of Rules is, that hesitancy brings about an imbalance of mood.

So although Labyrinthes further establishes Malajube as French Canadians worth following, this time you may not make it far enough to save your brother from the Goblin King.

All of Black Cascade pounds away with a similar notion for four tracks and 50 minutes, offering four black metal tides that occasionally shift into some texturally bankrupt, wintry drone.

Good Evening is minuscule and precious, both of which are charming descriptors, but its fragility is taken to an almost palpable extent.

Altogether, Lost Channels marks a step forward for the Swimmers, one that--along with their relentless touring (and there's no questioning the indie-ness of that)--should be sufficient to keep their star on the rise.

But when I say "neutral," unfortunately I mean pretty much exactly what you probably think I mean. The only track with an immediately memorable hook is his cover of 'Crimson and Clover.'

MPLSound is (surprise) momentarily enjoyable and completely inessential, happy to provoke Palovian responses since the hard work of honestly juicing your head, heart, or hips is antithetical to the whole idea.

Elixer runs the gamut of bland-but-classy R&B, from antiseptic slow jams to rote dance-pop, slick as you'd expect and completely failing to suggest what bunched Prince's panties when he initially discovered Valente.

This album is an affirmation of global connectivity and an emerging global culture that transcends and repurposes tradition as it sees fit--the sound of Mali merging with the world at large.

The album moves at roughly the same pace and with the same general tone, rendering some of the songs indistinguishable at first, but committed listens will reveal this to be as nuanced and as rich of a production as anything either Dreijer has done.

Problem is, the more traditionally reflective Grace/Wastelands just manages to make his solipsism double over on itself and your memories of listening to "Up the Bracket" are more rewarding than his memories of making it.