Tellingly, the best songs on Blue Giant are also the simplest, pointing to what this record could and perhaps should have been.

That the results are as modest as Butterfly House is a disappointment, though all the skillful pieces remain in place.

It's not Reznor's best or boldest work, but it's a promising first step down a new path.

Whatever her bad luck might be down to, Kelis can take some small comfort in having made her best album since Kaleidoscope.

On Sir Lucious Left Foot, Big Boi does something even more difficult: He gives us a great album that sounds nothing like any of the great albums he's already given us. From where I'm sitting, that's an even greater achievement.

A light but pervasive dusting of flanger effects and wavy-tuned synths makes the melodies sound cloudy and unfocused. Even the singles don't especially stand out.

It's just that it feels so characterless and anonymous.

Though it starts off with a set of songs that wouldn't sound out of place on the two previous albums, Night Work quickly slips into hyper-sexualized gay club mode and sticks with that vibe until the end.

Expo 86, if nothing else, feels like the realization of a Wolf Parade sound; the exquisite Apologies carried the long shadow of its producer Isaac Brock, and Mount Zoomer felt too often like two personalities careening off each other rather than finding some common ground.

While Maps & Atlases are milder and less daring than either of those bands, Perch Patchwork is eclectic and consistent enough that each detour offers its own small reward.

What makes How I Got Over work is its sense of purpose. After the jaw-clenching stress rap of their last two excellent Def Jam releases, Game Theory and Rising Down, this record operates as a slow-build mission statement on how to overcome.

The whole album works something like an expansion on the last three fuzzed-out tracks from Dig Your Own Hole. The Chems aren't in the same do-no-wrong zone they were when they recorded that stuff, but Further brings them closer than anyone could've reasonably expected.

Instead of catering to fans of that slow, sultry earlier work, she's brought in old and new songwriting partners to help her craft a fast-paced, upbeat pop album.

Out of all the depressing aspects of Recovery, the worst is the realization that for listeners the album takes the opposite arc-- the more he motors on about having reclaimed his passion for hip-hop and finally figured out who he is, the more draining the album becomes.

They know bombast and melodrama, which makes a decent amount of their latest effort, The Five Ghosts, all the more off-putting.

In both its lyrical candour and soft-rock accessibility, Boys Outside sees Mason ready to meet the public again, and in some cases, actually cater to it.

Had Fol Chen made good on those early impulses to really boost The New December's kinky eccentricities, it wouldn't have been much of a surprise to find it making serious inroads with new listeners. Though it ultimately only warrants selective revisiting.

At every turn, Total Life Forever is inviting. Much more alive than earlier efforts, it's an album with a complexion that constantly changes with time....[But] the album's second half doesn't fare so well, drowning at times in aqueous atmospherics.

Immaculately produced, fantastically sung, and loaded with memorable choruses, this eight-song effort has plenty to please everyone from post-dubstep crate diggers to teen tweeters-- often at the same time.

Even if many of the album's lyrics find Fallon looking back in anger, American Slang ultimately proves The Gaslight Anthem are not afraid to move forward.

Thank Me Later presents its star as a bottle-serviced hip-hop headcase tirelessly searching for love and good times while caught up in his own thoughts.

In the end, Barbara could've been made by a computer with a specific coding procedure: bass riffs align themselves into right angles, sharp synth lines blare, hi-hats sizzle, hooks dissolve on contact, and 2004 never ends.

When it isn't a high school poetry recital, Lustre often feels like a disappearing act-- an attempt to put on a few musical disguises to see if anyone likes them better than the musician beneath.

As strictly a listening experience, though, it's a decent document of a bunch of relatively unexceptional guys who willed themselves to greatness for a couple of years there but couldn't stop being relatively unexceptional.

As rewarding as this new album is, it's even more impressive when you consider its context: Crystal Castles may have come on at the tail-end of the blog-house/nu-rave/French-touch mini-rage, but they've now transcended it, moving from scene linchpin to indie stars.

Eyes & Nines could've come out at any point in at least the past 15 years, so if you're looking for innovation, look elsewhere. But for those of us who had formative, life-changing experiences screaming in our friends' faces in wood-paneled basements or tiled VFW Halls while bands like bands like Pageninetynine or Milhouse played, it's a real treat.

On Man Made, Teenage Fanclub seemed to be suffering a sort of rock'n'roll midlife crisis. Five years later, Shadows finds them at ease once again.

With an opener as strong as Destroyer of the Void, you could be forgiven for being disappointed that it is the collection's sole foray into spacey prog-pop territory and not the tip of the iceberg in a likeminded collection.