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.

The music becomes something like a natural process: one clean, simple sweep, but built from an insane complexity of detail. And there's enough to un-knot in there to make this a terrific step for Deacon--out from the sticky basements into a space where he can try to tackle the sublime.

Enough happens musically on The Hazards of Love that I can still see it being fun for fans in a live setting, especially if you know the lyrics. On disc, though, it's largely missing the catchy choruses and verisimilar emotions that previously served as ballast for the Decemberists' gaudy eccentricities.

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.