An album that prizes both goofiness and growth, one that takes the long view of emotional vacillation without sacrificing forward momentum.

It’s a perfect union if anyone finds the former too glossy and the other too gritty, but in occupying this middle ground, nothing here would qualify as potentially divisive protest music. In fact, there’s nothing divisive about Twentytwo in Blue at all.

Long rows of evenly pulsing notes paired with streaming harmonies make for a low-stakes default mode. But when an album's mild downsides are all relative to its overwhelming strengths, it's hard to complain.

On Chalice Hymnal, they’ve added another solid story to their growing skyscraper.

The Stand Ins continues that ambitious musical development [in "The Stage Names"], further roughing up the group's sound while sharpening its attack to an even finer point, and refining some of their old tricks while introducing new ones.

There's also the fact that you won't hear another record like it this year, possibly ever-- all the comparisons that can be made to Tom Waits, Lambchop, Grandaddy and Vic Chesnutt will only tell a small part of the story.

True to that nighttime scene-setter, Nocturnal Koreans ranks among Wire’s most musically relaxed releases, with Newman mostly singing in calm, sometimes hushed tones. But it’s only relaxed in the sense that a sleepless night in your bedroom is relaxed.

If there's anything wrong with Positive Force, it's that it's better suited as background music than bearing up to intense listening; while the guitar lines on most of the songs here are deliciously difficult to whistle, they're all essentially fairly similar.

It’s a discomfiting listen: In bearing witness to her agony, there’s a kind of transference of pain that occurs in her shredded screams—the sound of an artist stepping into her shadows in order to find her light.

Even at their silliest, even when they're treading water, no one else sounds quite like Shellac, and anyone who professes to be a serious music fan without having spent quality time with the band's albums should be forced to familiarize themselves. This just wouldn't be the first record I'd force on them.

Vasquez’s new album, Criminal, batters down the restraints that choked back his voice in the past, letting him break from a whisper into, finally, a scream. If it isn’t his most nuanced record, it’s certainly his most decisive.

The album's most convincing when tackling the push-and-pull conflict between the individual and his hometown, as Common's good intentions are buoyed by memory, generosity, and attentiveness to his craft.

Brown’s the sort of singer who’s starting a new sentence before finishing the previous one, and she seems less interested in our apocalyptic headlines themselves than in how we receive them.

The chemistry between the two bands isn't so perfect that a second collaborative album would be preferable to whatever either of them has up its sleeve next. When FFS does click, though, it's a little delight.

It's a great debut for a band with an impressive, distinctive sound.

As with their last two albums, Clinging to a Scheme stands to further expand the Radio Dept.'s cult. Economy has never been an issue for the band, but here, things are further tightened up.

On his self-produced debut, Crossan works the city’s spidery Tube maps into an exhilarating electronic framework where the conflicting sounds of the modern-day Tower of Babel can harmoniously coexist.

It’s neo-neo-noir music that draws you into its discomfort. If its vast expanses leave listeners vulnerable, at least there’s more space to let yourself roam.

The album would be tiring if were nothing but a sincere homage to the cheesy pop of yesteryear, but F&L temper Channel Pressure with abstract vocal exercises and overcast instrumentals to keep the balance right.

PS I Love You mire tentatively between jams and songcraft--there's some truly ingratiating melodies scattered throughout the first half, and Saulnier's lyrics have substance and weight, but too often they fail to coincide simultaneously.

The record grows soggy with Veirs' over-reliance on nautical themes.

Electric Cables is the sort of album whose deceptively placid presentation belies the richness of detail and sense of purpose at work here.

Behind this happy clash of stylistic preferences is a subtly but surely revivified Malkmus, confident to experiment more deliberately than ever.

The band's latest extends their newfound confidence to content as well as delivery, and stands as the finest full-length by Stuart Murdoch and his shifting collaborators since [If You're Feeling Sinister].

While they've made great use of deconstructive syntax, repetition, gibberish, and in-jokes in the past, too much of Relax simply feels like dead air.

Rankin possesses the sort of radiant but deceptively deadpan voice that lets her to infuse these lovelorn laments with sly, sometimes sinister wit.

Any Hanna-related project is prone to vanishing beneath her mighty specter, but the deeper collaborative process that went into Hit Reset shines through.