The bulk of The Suburbs focuses on this quiet desperation borne of compounding the pain of wasting your time as an adult by romanticizing the wasted time of your youth.

It's major-key and resplendently colored, owing as much to Orange County skate-punk as it does to the Beach Boys.

Transit Transit maintains a puzzling lack of urgency for an album so long in the works.

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band wasn't a good record, but its exuberance and overstuffed arrangements at least helped counter its derivativeness. But Messengers drips with resignation and defeat-- the record actually sounds depressed.

There's a weird outdated feel to the album; too many of the songs feel like attempts to cross over to a rap mainstream that barely exists anymore.

While Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3 had all the indications of starting out as a stopgap project to stave off between-album downtime, it wound up being a solid exhibition of his chops.

Even if this album plays hard to get, there's plenty to love for those willing to listen.

Even without the heavy emotional resonance of those mixtapes, Str8 Killa works as a showcase for a ridiculously solid rapper. Gibbs knows his craft inside and out.

Hoop is an undeniably charismatic musician, but her music will benefit from a more natural and organic absorption of these impulses. In other words, she doesn't need to work so hard to prove anything.

There's a lot of room for your ear to roam on Mines, and it reveals itself over the course of a few listens as a very satisfying album worth exploring and revisiting.

This record is carefree and instantly likable--even if it doesn't seem to care what you think of it.

The Brooklyn-based foursome spends a lot of time here style-pinching, connecting dots already drawn by contemporary indie acts. And yet Miniature Tigers are often able to pull it off.

The remixes feel equally vital to the EP, because after all, the great appeal of Major Lazer is watching these dancehall concoctions transform, as elements of dub and hip-hop and reggae are also smashed into one freaky, juiced up mutant (kinda like the fictional Major Lazer himself).

The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness may attempt to forge a common ground between two trans-Atlantic artists, but even when working from the same instrumental base, the sensibilities at play here are still oddly segregated.

That's How We Burn's sonic normalcy would all but consign the record for the used record bins if this band didn't sound so damn good when they break out of the mold.

Here, they shuffle through one stylistic experiment after another. The fingerprint on the album's cover art seems a little ironic, since for the first time, the Magic Numbers seem hard to identify.

Ross knows his lane and stays in it on Teflon Don.

For Grizzly Bear fans and Department of Eagles devotees alike, Archives 2003-2006 is a document rich with revelatory moments and educatory touchstones--but as an album, it functions even better.

The tempos remain rigorously uniform across these 13 tracks, as though quickening the pace might change the genre or break the spell. It makes for a warmly moody, albeit strangely static album.

Infra works as an enveloping and moving work even absent any knowledge of its beginnings. Others may glean different feelings from it than I do, but that is part of the point.

As down-to-earth as Secret Cities can be, at points you wish they'd be more direct: "Vamos a La Playa" and "The End" play so loosely, they border on disintegration, rounding out Pink Graffiti in overly cloudy manner, both sonically and lyrically.

As disjointed as that sounds on paper, The Long Shadow is the band's most focused and cohesive work. That's partly because it maintains a consistent mood, and partly because it maintains a danceable, frenetic pulse.

Dark Night is a well-sequenced and unique album that ingeniously balances its contributors' strengths with the overall theme of the work--self-examination, often under stark circumstances, in the interest of understanding one's own existence.

Where those newcomers privilege the nostalgic, indefinite, and noncommittal, the vets in SVIIB make a confident gesture towards the future.

The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade.

Despite some lyrical cliches and careless redundancies ("Come out from the burning flame" being the most glaring example), Kozelek's songs change mood fluidly, and the contrast between the serene settings and his own tumultuous thoughts raises even the most languid instrumental passages above mere aural wallpaper, lending it the gravity of his best work while giving it a character all its own.

Flaws is well-produced, many of its songs nicely augmented by fleet drumming and intricate guitar figures, but Steadman's lack of having anything interesting to say and inability to say it distinctively ultimately sinks the endeavor.

Luckily, you don't have to write genius lyrics to make reliable, stadium-ready rock. The tics of weirdness that made this band so initially affable may be gone, but they're now a cut-rate pop act instead. Nothing wrong with that.