Lots of people use music to try and escape their living rooms, but Lady Lazarus seems more interested in inviting us into hers.

It's to his credit that he never seems too in awe of his most obvious antecedents, instead simply choosing to flex his own capabilities within the tight constraints that musicians like Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Moebius have operated within for decades. Still, it's a shame Manley didn't choose to filter more of his own ideas into the myriad eulogies on offer here.

Compared to the last two albums, Zonoscope has precious little guitar crunch, which makes it hard to even call Cut Copy a dance-rock band anymore.

Though there have always been plenty of bands mining the same era, with reverbed vocals and drummers that don't sit down, Stay Home captures attitude and devil-may-care confidence better than most of today's bands worth their weight in Nuggets compilations.

Minks adapt the style that the Clientele matured into over their recent full-lengths, which adds a foreboding touch to these love-and-regret-focused songs.

Their personality-bereft voices take on a chameleonic quality in which, when surrounded by the accompanying music, they eventually become nothing at all.

Hopefully, Rolling Blackouts marks the moment in the Go! Team's career where the idea of moving forward becomes less of a literal concept and more an artistic one.

If Samson's voice had the full-blooded verve of her old bandmate Hanna, she might be able to sell this stuff. Instead, she delivers all the album's lyrics in the same flat monotone, and she just sounds bored the whole time.

In its brief onslaught of sneery fun, Vicki Leekx only occasionally reaches the dizzy pop heights of Arular and Kala. But it does give us an M.I.A. who, once again, seems to be having a blast doing what she's doing.

On the new Party Store, the band leaps even further into uncharted territory, turning in a full hour of classic Detroit techno covers.

Spiritual, Mental, Physical-- a follow-up collection of grotty practice tapes and studio goofs culled from a set of tape reels recently unearthed in a Detroit basement-- is a bit less awe-inspiring.

Were they based in an indie rock hothouse, it's easy to imagine Eternal Summers feeling somewhat pressured to streamline or smooth out their sound in a way that would be more easily describable and digestible. Instead, the duo happily flits back and forth between nervy, combustible raves and languorously pretty head nods without a care for thematic cohesion.

Ventriloquizzing places undue emphasis on David Best's sing-spiel to move the action along.

We get truckloads of overzealous horns that sound ripped off from his buddy Conan's late-night band, White's own fuzzed-out guitar, bustling drums, and cartoon-y slide work. The wild excess often ends up shoving Jackson to the sidelines on her own album.

certainly have the energy to go a little crazy musically; no one can say Monotonix lack physical effort on Not Yet. But to get people to care as much about listening to them as witnessing their live shows, it's time to work on the muscles of their imagination.

In short, it's familiar without feeling rote.

They're sticking to their M.O. of repeating a single odd musical or lyrical phrase ("I did crimes for you, they're coming true!") again and again until it sounds like a hook; beyond that, you can tell that they're trying to wriggle out of what they've been doing in the band's previous phase, but haven't quite figured out what comes next.

Despite the emphasis on atmosphere that pervades the album and that seems like a necessary byproduct of its creative technology, The Fall may be the most earthbound Gorillaz album yet--and at times, therefore, the most banal.

If the sentiments are tough, the music itself is tender, borrowing from Belle & Sebastian and Brill Building pop to create a sound that is both pastoral and urbane, straightforward yet sophisticated.

The band that brought the funk to punk isn't in much of a dancing mood here.

More streamlined than their older music, Mine Is Yours' relative simplicity allows its songs to more transparently deal with love lost and found.

These songs are generally not the type to grab you right away, but there's enough mystery and melody there to call you back.

The result is another fantastic step forward, though not without some growing pains. In the transition from basement to studio, one component has yet to come into full focus: Baldi's voice.

Bejar's essential complexity ultimately feels human.

There Are Rules isn't a return to form sonically [...] but a return to results, a just-all-right record from a band that always felt a step behind even in their own genre.

Pollard and company seem especially unfiltered when it comes to ideas, yet unusually patient in bringing them to life.

This is a subtle refraction of the Ducktails aesthetic, where the brittle abstraction and detours down lo-fi cul-de-sacs are siphoned into songs that are breezier, less inward looking, more in thrall to the possibilities of pop.

Problem is, for the second straight album, they do so with the same exact set of tools as every other band in this sphere. So critiquing Ritual threatens to be a process of listing obvious influences that's just as dull as actually listening to the thing.