Led by singer and songwriter Wesley Patrick Gonzalez, this band of early twentysomethings comprehensively captures the mindset of young men kicking and screaming against their inevitable transition into adulthood.

The set devotes each of its four discs to performances from a specific decade, but even if you don't think Iggy has produced a front-to-back great album since 1979's New Values, Roadkill Rising is still worth your time.

Heavy Rocks does the things you expect a Boris album to do.

Attention Please at least offers something fresh for Boris.

Davila 666's sophomore album is still rowdy enough for an impromptu weekend binge with a few friends, but it also offers enough carefully crafted tunes and feedback-streaked textures to fill your headphones.

There's plenty of zoned-out atmosphere on the tape, but it's a strong, focused, unified piece of work, not just a lava-lamp soundtrack. It stands on its own.

It might not be your cup of tea, but there's little denying its charm.

Murderbot could conceivably do more to smooth out his productions, but what he wants to do is duct-tape his record collection together and find pleasure at the resulting contraption. If you share his obsessions--or are merely curious about them--you're invited to smile and dance with him.

Diotima's glory is often in its details. It has fewer stops, starts, and redirections than its predecessors. Rather, the big shifts are now often misleadingly subtle and slight, created more by the way the musicians move against and with each other than how the band moves as a unit.

Director's Cut provides a unique opportunity to do an A/B comparison between a late-career artist and her younger self. But which you'll prefer likely depends on whether you favor a more assured artist working within her strengths, or a brash younger artist delighting in the defying of pop conventions.

Mountains are great at maintaining tension--their tracks never feel aimless or inert, even at their most toweringly monumental, like on Air Museum's "Newsprint". So if you liked Choral, here it is with more of everything, for better and for worse.

If it's any consolation, the songs are interchangeable and accomplished enough that long-time fans will be relieved that they didn't embarrass themselves. Newcomers, if any, will almost certainly wonder what the big deal was.

An album full of fake rap, famous-people cameos, and scatological jokes shouldn't have any replay value whatsoever, but Turtleneck & Chain holds up awfully well, partly because the music is almost always, at the very least, listenable, and partly because the jokes depend more on earwormy hooks and absurdities spinning out of control than on simple punchlines.

It's gritty and honest. Beneath the surface-layer thrill of some of these songs are subtle character shifts and brave one-liners, all of which confirm VanGaalen's status as gripping songwriter as well as a producer.

As great as all these songs are individually, they sound best together, and hearing them in relation to one another reveals things about them that are harder to catch when they're separated.

The dividedness of the record is especially plain here. Acher generally gets calm and luscious music, and then all hell breaks loose whenever Dose shows up.

Aesthethica is inventive, alive, and shrieking with more ideas than many bands explore over an entire career.

You may drift through recent Sea and Cake records more than you engage with them, but you still tend to want to drift for longer than a half-hour. Nevertheless it suggests the band is still master of the niche it's carved, and not out of new ideas just yet.

As with their other work with Michio Kurihara, False Beats and True Hearts is a slow bloom, an album whose rewards can become fully apparent only through thoughtful immersion.

On Feel It Break, they've got that creeping cinematic synth-psych style down cold. Moving forward, I'm curious to hear what else they can do.

White's natural eeriness and Jones' diffident eroticism certainly fit a sound built around mystical melodrama and chilly Euro heartbreak, but their voices are such complimentary opposites that they turn out to be what gives Rome much of its distinctness, keep it from being just another record collector (or film collector) exercise in getting everything period-perfect.

There is no scrape, no tension, no noisy bullshit, and Destroyed is eminently un-replayable as a result.

Wild Beasts have remained an act with no intention of blending in. Smother, their third full-length, is just as the above quote promises: completely uncompromising. And that's why it succeeds.

Stylish as Kirk's songs can be, they aren't always well suited by Creep On's contrasting patterns.

The Antlers won't hold your hand through Burst Apart, which will inevitably make it more of a grower, but stick around -- it's all the more affecting for how it allows you to pick your own stumbling, lonely path.

James Pants is his third album, less goofy and party-focused than 2008's Welcome, and a little less brooding and funky than 2009's Seven Seals.

There are still a couple of puzzling decisions--"Backwards Time" is such a pitch-perfect evocation of the Police that it's actually distracting--but The January EP succeeds where the other Here We Go Magic releases have mostly failed; instead of handing you a couple of shiny baubles, it provides you with an inviting headspace to fall into.

Like most of Kilgour's solo work, it has a relaxed and quietly accomplished air.