While it might be oversimplifying matters to suggest that it splits the difference between the cute, poppy Royksopp and the darker, techno-friendly Royksopp, the most satisfying thing about Junior is how convincingly they've bridged that divide.

In a way, Mastodon operates something like prime-era Metallica, unleashing these huge, blistering tracks that journey over peaks and valleys and ditches and oceans before leaving you spinning.

Kicks is not the follow-up that "Cookies" deserved, but its handful of winning standout tracks also suggests that its predecessor wasn't simply a fluke.

As much as I'm looking forward to the next one from Ira, Georgia, and James proper, it's gonna have to work awfully hard to match the effortless blast that is Fuckbook.

As relatively bare bones as some of these arrangements are, the songs are as kinetic as one might hope for from such dynamic songwriters. They just wouldnt sound as rich had they been fleshed out by any other set of players. Still, the album's middle stretch sags quite a bit in comparison.

Ten deserved better than Ten Redux and the paltry bonus tracks. Fortunately, the reissue also includes a DVD of Pearl Jam's 1992 performance on "MTV Unplugged".

It's great that the band can slow down and still hold attention, and one hopes Obits will dig deeper and find new thrills in old traditions in the coming years.

Whatever caused DOOM to scale back his output and go off the grid, he's only come back from it sharper, stronger, and more powerful than before.

It's the most weirdly mesmerizing in a series of promising single, EP, and full-length releases that includes last year's shadowy, cinematic heart-tugger "A Place Where We Could Go."

Always the intrepid mind, Fink has found a promising partner in LeMoyne to bring out her weirder side, and once they do away with a few lingering old habits, the duo could prove an artistic pinnacle for both parties.

This reissue on luxuriously hefty vinyl is the first time the album's been released in the U.S.--a superb opportunity to hear a record that's been occasionally imitated but never matched.

So The Floodlight Collective is a mostly elegant listen, and one whose failings are part of its theme: Like a vague recollection, it's still a little hard to hold onto after it's over-- pretty albeit somewhat ephemeral.

Hymn to the Immortal Wind has probably caused floods of tears. That's a description, not a dis. The melodies are more sure-handed than ever. They are like missiles locked onto emotional buttons. More independence in the guitars helps sharpen this aim.

Fortunately, even if the band's lack of cynicism often veers to the opposite extreme, the Harlem Shakes' handshake-and-smile approach is hard to outright dislike.

It's a shame the Rakes stopped just as they were starting to sound fun again, but if they had to end it while they still had that last spark of fun left, it's a better decision than most successful bands can bring themselves to make.

If you liked the new Oasis and U2 records, never bought "Turn on the Bright Lights," and tend to ignore clumsy lyrics, you might enjoy raising your beer to this album just fine.

The resultant songs have a familiarity that aims them toward the back of your brain but an internal energy that prods them into prominence with repeated listens.

There's thrilling evidence of compelling, thoughtful craftsmanship.

In a way, this is representative of the album--it's got all the right moves in place, but MSTRKRFT's handle on content is still slightly lagging behind their facility for tone and form.

There is no guiding conceit to Easy Come Easy Go, no criteria that connects all of Faithfull's sources, which frees her up considerably to find the hidden passages between these disparate songs.

More often, though, lyrics fall somewhere in the middle, neither particularly offensive to one's sensibilities nor particularly inspiring. But again, it's how An Horse use their chosen tools that makes the difference.

It's a singular sound that's as trying as any of the year's scarier noise records, but it's also uncompromising: a pop-music dealbreaker, even for fiscally responsible, architecturally dashing electro-pop.

That the Strange Boys never actually blow their tops may prove a liability for garage-rock heads looking for more fierce, swift kicks, especially over the course of a 16-track album that would benefit from a few edits.

Tomorrow remains compelling through 'Static Object,' the record's closest thing to a Joy Division moment, but then limps out over its last third, mired in a tone/tempo bog that reveals the group's soft spots and least-appealing features.

Speck Mountain still have some distance to travel before they fill an album with such moments, so that whenever you hear their music, you think of them first rather than their influences. But this is only their second full-length, and it's a solid step in that direction.

Kylesa's lyrics lean towards the abstract and personal. They avoid grand gestures or obvious themes that allow for easy grasp. This time, though, grasp is almost moot. The band has etched light, dark, sky, and earth so deftly onto wax that it vibrates the very soul.

Lyrical inscrutability peppered with the occasional waft of clarity has always been a Boeckner trademark, and Face Control continues that.

There is of course a huge market for their kind of angst-ridden emo, and in many ways--particularly lyrically--this album sounds like it's been lifted straight from the emo handbook, which may well satisfy many listeners. For the less committed, however, the lack of the band's usual wit and musical inventiveness will be missed.

Grrr... seems transcribed from a distant memory or read from the pages of a script.

Heavy Ghost is, in Stith's words, "more like life:" sometimes challenging, sometimes confusing, but, in the end, rewarding.

(a)spera is the sound of a musician accomplishing the challenges she has set herself, both musically and communicatively.

The music on Thank You Very Quickly is a triumph of a different sort. Extra Golden have conquered whatever divide there once was between rock and benga to create a distinct sound of their own that respects both traditions.

Decent as these tracks are, the rest of the album never quite lives up to 'Shampoo's' potential.

Most impressive, though, is that Hecker has built for us this make-believe area to inhabit, to explore with him. While there's a bit less room in this space than those he's constructed before, it's still very much an achievement, and one to be celebrated.

Perhaps most enjoyable of all is that there's something remarkably personable about this album, as though Anni Rossi is right there in the room with you, singing her heart out about beekeeping in the Himalayas, her love for freezer units, and the troubles of driving to the west coast with no air conditioning.

Perhaps praising Heumann's improved writing plays like faint praise, but it's as significant a step in the right direction as tightening the instrumental belt is in the wrong direction.

With more experience, the group could perhaps one day drum up a more cohesive, compelling vision, something that reaches out and grabs you. For now, though, the band's grasping at straws.

No one aspect of Ali's personality really dominates. The Truth Is Here is all the stronger for it, and that can only be considered a good sign.

Windows extends the filmic dynamism and orchestral spark that carried "Recording a Tape," but instead of remaining in the background, the narrative--impressionistic and imperfect--comes to a often-unpredictable present.

Though the expected tracks of washed-out vocals, shimmery keyboards, lonely drum machine thumps, and efficiently told tales of romantic disappointment abound, there are also surprises here....[But] Advance Base Battery Life is not likely to earn Ashworth many new fans.

While it's nice to envision Western acceptance of non-Western music, it's nicer to imagine the universe's collective ass jiggling sympathetically to the best moments on Dirty Bomb--music so thoroughly uprooted that its traditions exist only as pivot points; fragments of sounds we know mashed together so intuitively that we barely recognize them.

From the first track through its final seconds, Invaders joylessly stomps through overly familiar territory. It's another lunkheaded, loud mash-up of rock and dance, a sound now so beefed-up and campy that it's perhaps only suitable for shotgunning cheap beer and practicing UFC chokeholds with your pals.

Case remains her own best muse, a strong, feminine presence who demands you meet her songs halfway (she calls herself a control freak in every article I've read), but her band deserves credit for creating the ambient, dark-night setting in which her tales of murder and animals sound natural and compelling.

The album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms.

The band has easily come up with its best set of songs since its sort-of 2001 breakthrough "Behind the Music." If not every track on the set is a winner, neither are there any outright stinkers.

The production of The Bridge sounds like it came out of an extended catch-up session, the work of a man best accustomed to the breakbeat era's techniques trying his hand at the last ten years' worth of club-rap digitalism.

Fans of mid-fi one-man indie bands and anyone who loved Elbogen's when he was still Say Hi To Your Mom will undoubtedly find things to like about it, but Oohs & Ahs is ultimately a decent record that's weighed down a bit by some puzzling sonics.

No amount of boulder-sized low-end can disguise the fact that, even when these tracks work, they usually feel like they're missing something major. And that something is a vocalist.

One gets the sense, however, that in acknowledging where his inspirations came from and figuring out where his compositions will go on Take My Breath Away, he's misplaced the present tense and the once-present tension.

We get his best on How to Get to Heaven From Scotland, an album any Arab Strap fan could love.

Unfortunately, this big-tent spirit also occasionally dilutes some of the elements that made K'naan's debut so striking.

On disc, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl is a bland, bluesy celebration you can afford to miss.

On 200 Million Thousand, Black Lips sidestep expectations and make a record less approachable than its predecessor.

There is a resigned quality to Hungry Bird that stands in sharp contrast with the sprightly, slightly goofy tack the band took on 2001's career highlight The Ghost of Fashion.

There are, almost out of obligation, some unimaginative pairings....Other pairings are much less obvious and either more satisfying or more puzzling.

Only swatches of the lyrics are intelligible ("Look at me," "Feast your eyes," "All is yours") but that's part of the enchantment of magic: A fleeting glimpse of something that might have been transcendent, leaving our minds to fill in what we didn't quite see.

White Bird Release, while not as conceptual as For Waiting, For Chasing, almost by default flows as a sort of suite, with each track named after a fragment of this quotation.

The album's production and Vermue's economical, buttoned-down songwriting offer plenty of tonal and genre variation, but everything still feels like it's hitting the same mark.

Once producing dense, complex music that rewards each additional listen, Dissolver's content as comfort food for rockists, too quickly sating the listener.

Rather than re-tracing the path that made him popular, he has hacked into the wilderness of his new inspirations, no matter how divergent, and emerged triumphant.

Hold Time is an enjoyable, well-constructed album, and as good a place as any for newcomers to start--it just doesn't hold many surprises.

A Morrissey record you can dig into without caring much about the man's lyrics.

The Century of Self turns out to be every bit as stubborn as its predecessors, even as it goes a certain way towards justifying them.

Many of the songs on Isbell's sophomore release don't necessarily aim for (or achieve) such profundity, yet they still compel through sheer verve and Isbell's unwillingness to let an unhip sound or idea discourage him.

It is a work that shows a band still struggling to come to terms with itself, discovering on record the music it wants to make, and settling for a safe middle ground in the end.

These clusterfuck all-the-cooks experiments, more often than not, add up to way, way less than the sum of their parts.

With their boundaries and ambitions by now well established, on Tight Knit Cabic and company largely succeed in luring the listener hazily back in time and into Vetiver's comfort zone.

One gets the feeling that with a little more ruthlessness about what makes the final cut, Goodnight Oslo could offer more hits than misses. As it is, it falls just a little short.

Havilah broadens the Drones' sonic palette and continues to carve out a sound that is uniquely theirs, and in that sense it's an accomplishment, but wrestling with the record's dark subject matter makes it a difficult listen.

Their catchier material that front-loads the record is so distinct and stunning, however, that it's hard not to be left wanting more after those opening tracks.

Working with material hog-tied to the past and performed with traditional trappings puts Diane at some risk for creative stagnation and worse--the kind of anonymity and irrelevance enjoyed by vast swathes of the contemporary folk universe. To Be Still avoids these traps thanks to Diane's spectacular voice and, well, the little, mostly indescribable things.

Sometimes it feels like they're playing two different songs, working from two different ideas. There's no steady view of the horizon anymore. It's disorienting, but charming, to hear their parts blend, settle, and separate over and over again.

Dark Was the Night comes off as a gray, monotone look at the current indie landscape and, as a result, works best in small batches.

For an album mostly preoccupied with cataloguing past relationships and the mistakes that did them in, it follows that Feel. Love. Thinking. Of. would manifest those feelings with nostalgic sounds, some welcome, others less so.

Ferree obviously loves his source material, and the way he weaves in the references throughout is ingenious. But something about the pleasure he takes in his obsession cloisters it away - he can't quite make his subject matter in a way that transcends Bobby Driscoll's life and death.

Choral sometimes feels staid and a little postcard-y: a pretty gesture that fails to eclipse the experience of actually going somewhere.

At times the songs can sound cold, as though they want to keep their distance, refusing to shed any armor. Although this could be a handicap on other albums, it only serves to makes Carboniferous more intriguing.

Watersports sounds terrific.

The album falls short of a diamond-in-the-rough-caliber discovery, but considering these seven songs are the remains of an aborted 12-song full-length-from a band that reinvented itself every three or four years, For the Whole World holds up well alongside, say, concurrent Blue Oyster Cult or New York Dolls albums.

When Bafus isn't pushing from the back, everything falls slack, and the album blurs into gray. Individual moments stand out, but Sholi isn't an album you immerse yourself in as much as notice from time to time.

Tapscott's specific words can get muffled, but more often than not that only helps to add a welcome sense of mystery to The Blue Depths, as for the first time it seems Odawas know precisely where they want to go and how they plan to get there.

Crafting art-house meanderings that rock turns out to be the easy part. It's sticking the landing that's hard, and no matter how much D. Rider twists, turns and tumbles in midair, they're just not there yet.

Psapp are certainly getting closer to achieving a perfect balance in their sound, and The Camel's Back is certainly lounge jazz of a higher proof than most, but save perhaps 'I Want That,' 'Screws' is the one number here that'd make you put down your drink.

As good as "Cable TV" and "Winter, That's All" sound, John Shade's main weakness was supposed to be its strength-- during the points where the tempo dies down and the songwriting hues closer to traditional forms, there's not enough personality or character in the vocals to compensate, leading to stretches of indie promo-pile filler.

So Far Gone still scans as one of the most compulsively listenable mixtapes of a great year for mixtapes.

Even if the new album can be cheaply on-the-nose and opportunistic at times, it's hard to root against Lily Allen.

As it is, the more Auerbach changes things, the more they stay the same.

Like their best, "SNL"-aired material, these songs get better as they go on, mostly because of the way the lyrics carry the joke to its logical and grotesque endpoint.

Houck's impressive effort nonetheless inevitably sends you back to Nelson's originals, only illuminating their brilliance.

Like most remix comps, Decent Work is ultimately a grab-bag.

Where their earlier records thrived on the tension between Stollsteimer's gut-spilling confessions and the band's raucous, raw-powered attack, on Love, Hate and Then There's You, we get all the pleading, but without the violent, cathartic release.

Yet unlike the more cohesive albums from those aforementioned acts, Immolate is a one-step forward, one-step back proposition, marching in place to an internal setting somewhere between chilly background mood and something more melodic and engaging.

While I certainly can't hold it against Kweller for trying something different and playing dress-up with a Nudie suit, Changing Horses nonetheless finds his half-assed over-countrification and half-assed under-countrification to be equally ineffectual.

If you can look past these cringe-inducing moments, The Good Feeling Music occasionally lives up to its title.

With The Mountain, Heartless Bastards have shown that they have the tools and the talent to take at least tentative steps forward into a more ambitious and diverse sound. But it's surprising that they sound so introspective here when they could, and occasionally do, sound world-beating.

From front to back, the album's an acquired taste, and even if it's not the big paradox that an album mixing punk ethics with rap virtuosity might risk becoming, it doesn't have a universal appeal, especially for heads leery of anything that might approach the misnomer of "emo rap."

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart simply made a slyly confident debut that mixes sparkling melodies with an undercurrent of sad bastard mopery.

The album's bluesy tenor does wonders to mitigate its shortcomings, something that the debut's spacious environs couldn't do. With Fool, the problems mostly reside in the words that Bones sings.