The album has no grand arc; it's just a collection of pretty okay jams for people who already own everything Pentagram ever recorded. It's fine, but it's nothing more than fine.

While Descending Shadows (their second full-length and first for Vice) is leaner and mellower than anything they've done, it still barrels forth with the same haggard, long-fanged intent that made Dead Moon so great.

Strange Keys is generally relentless and tremendous, burying its themes in kaleidoscopic distortion. It's as if the comparisons that Bower has earned in the last seven years--Merzbow, Wagner, second wave black metal--finally took magnificent hold.

For all Madlib's eclecticism and supposedly short attention span, his work here sounds focused and sharp. The beats aren't wasted here by any means, but a different crew could have brought out even more potential.

The subject matter subverts her inherent sensuousness, but this is still Charlotte Gainsbourg singing-- at times, she can't help sounding like the cooing French goddess her father helped popularize. It's dead sexy, reborn.

Romance Is Boring smacks of that feeling, knowing more than before but still trying to hash out just where to go with it. It's fun watching bands grow; it's been a pleasure watching this band grow up.

This is both the most diverse and most listenable of their three full-lengths, and yet it never seems like a compromise. It feels like the product of careful, thoughtful growth, bringing in new influences--bits of mid-1970s Fleetwood Mac, sparkling indie pop, even a few soul and gospel touches--while maintaining the group's core sound.

There Is Love in You always has just enough going on to pull you back in any time you feel like relegating it to the background. It works best taken whole, rather than broken into individual tracks.

This isn't the kind of stuff you're going to walk around humming. It's too weirdly shaped to really abide in you--you have to be willing lose yourself in it instead.

Merritt's songs are as delicate and meticulous as porcelain miniatures. Unfortunately, Realism holds more tchotchkes than museum pieces.

Icy and stiff has been the band's M.O., but its new material demands performances that command that sparseness rather than toy with it. Had the band drawn on some of that confidence from R&B as well as the instrumentation, it could have made this record even more compelling.

Despite its nonchronological sequencing and song-cherrypicking, it never really comes together as an album; it's more like "the many moods of Fucked Up," or, rather, their many variations on one mood.

Beyond its canonical interest, Campfire Songs has its own charms. Though rigorously composed, it feels deceptively spontaneous. The atmosphere is both inviting and severe, and startlingly vivid.

Citay remain controlled and careful. Songs are constructed so that each line plays a certain role, every note tells its tale. Maybe that's where it will lose some listeners, too: It's not tough and rough and wild around the edges like Green's old band could be, or a lot of heavy metal can be. And it's not open at the ends like jam-band music. But this is Feinberg's third album of eight tracks in about 40 minutes, all exploring the same excitable intersection of psychedelia and pop.

Heart's production work, again by Bilerman, isn't always successful....But the album shakes such shackles often enough to maintain an atmosphere of warm intimacy.

Niblett's music is very much an acquired taste, and there are few ways to enjoy this other than on her terms. She's not oblivious to this, and she has a sense of humor about it.

The result is comfortably atonal--a headphones listen that's difficult but ultimately more haunting.

It's sort of a perfect concept for Thompson: it's not particularly clever or abstract but to actually gather the efforts, time, and resources to release this album-- straight-faced-- seems mad. At this point, though, those who delight in Thompson's particular madness will need no explanations.

Occasionally the devotion to six-string mayhem overwhelms the songwriting, and unless you really get off on reams of guitar raunch, Major Stars on CD may still not be for you.

A darker album, a slightly clumsier album, but an album with a strong unifying themes and a few songs worth stepping away from the bar for.

It's sort of a catch-22 that Editors can write songs sticky enough to be memorable in unfortunate ways.

The Colossus, as its name implies, strives for scale, but also strains a bit under a heavy burden. While Rjd2 excels at sonic collages, the mixed motives on this album--a current spin on past techniques, a synthesis of old songs and a turn toward the future--are difficult to balance.

Ambition can just as easily manifest itself as a desire to create a relentlessly catchy, "classic indie" album in your own dorm room, and if that's what Surfer Blood set out to do, Astro Coast succeeds wildly.

It can be a bit of a let down if you come in expecting another blockbuster like "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga," but something of a revelation if you meet them halfway.

A foreboding chronicle of the unpleasantness to follow, the typical arc of a break-up tale never materializes as "The Beginning" promises.

Real Life Is No Cool isn't just the achingly stylish and neatly accessible dance record to end all that, it also constitutes a fresh new take on the strand of retro-futurism that Lindstrøm helped create.

What seems like a perfectly swell concept for a surprise gig at the local pub-- where sloshed spectators can join in on the hero worship-- feels much more suspect when reified into a permanent record.