Times changed; Dntel, less so. Aimlessness, his third album of new material, arrives without context, scene, or convenient narrative.

For the second time in one year, both on a large label and on their own, they've released a record ruthless and rewarding enough to animate that image.

Feed Me Diamonds is best, though, when it gets emotionally heady.

Appropriately named, Movement feels like a progression and challenge from one of the year's most exciting new voices, producers, and composers.

The problem is that the strangely smug We Don't Even Live Here feels more like P.O.S. preaching to the converted than attempting to make a believer out of anyone, lacking any palpable resistance necessary to justify the constant underdog pose.

Ghost demonstrates well enough Ferreira's versatility, certainly her stylishness, but even more than those, it shows her empathy.

The Odds is, in every way, the product of scaling down operations rather than of giving up or throwing the fans a nostalgia trip. It's fair to say that the Evens have set their target low and close; you could also call that intimacy.

Pale Fire doesn't command your attention so much as wait patiently until it drifts into your view and then goes away.

Right now Sequitur feels like a step forward for a genre that could happily stay the same forever.

For all of the stylistic hopscotch being played, the individual songs on Nebula Dance cohere into an impressively solid whole.

As big and bold as it can sound, there's little here that's especially flashy or blatantly attention-seeking.

The group's first album since 1996 just sounds like the one they would've churned out in 1998.

Few can match their feel for arrangement or sense of structure.

The tracks themselves are, per Reznor and Ross's pedigrees, immaculately pieced together, richly detailed and suitably moody. Maandig, however, continues to stick out of this mix.... She still hits all the right notes, but brings a generic prettiness to her delivery that doesn't gel with the moody futurism going on around her.

He's no longer hiding in clever loops or layering. This sensual album suggests a producer at the height of his powers.

Despite its three-disc bulk, it exhumes too few buried-but-necessary takes and does little to illuminate what Isis did, why they did it, and what it all means.

Though imperfect, Hill's intensifying sonic clarity presents the Babies as a group that still believes in rock'n'roll as a powerful language, one that can help sort out mortal complexities and say something about the way we live.

Tame Impala prove far more exciting because, by maximizing the use of the available technology, they tap into the progressive and experimental spirit of psychedelic rock, and not just the sound.

Power and Passion is blighted by a rapper who seems too distracted by his woes to sit down and write more than a couple of full songs.

Perhaps this release is their own way of dispensing with some lingering ghosts before moving on to something new.

Ital's sense of abrasion and his notion of groove are both finely tuned, so it's all for the best when they work in parallel.

Trilogy's triumph is in how it makes its three hours feel necessary to fully embrace it all, to acknowledge its existence inside ourselves and to vicariously live through it as art.

It turns any living room into an art installation where interesting things may or may not happen, and its lack of direction and specificity is in its own way brave.

While not as immediately striking as either Crystal Castles (I or II), the streamlined sound allows more maneuverability and subtle variety in the actual songwriting.

It sounds exactly like what a fan of Bailiff would hope for, while offering something new and distinct.

This is a cherry on a cupcake.

The Bears for Lunch, however, is the most consistent of this year's trifecta. It may not boast an instant, indeliable earworm like Class Clown's "Keep It Motion" or Factory's "Doughnut for a Snowman", but there are no buzzkill duds like "The Big Hat and Toy Show" either.

As Free Reign shows, when Clinic take their time, they can build up a bewitching groove.