Unlike ...For the Whole World to See, N.E.W. does not sound like a lost proto-punk classic; it's just a pretty good rock record made by guys who have been at it for a long time.

California Nights is a professional album: heavy-ish, filled with hooks, somewhere between "fast enough to dance" and "slow enough to sigh to while looking out of a window."

It's no great discredit to the album to say that Kaleide peaks with its first song. The remaining material rarely pushes Harkin to the dramatic heights of "Still Windmills", and the singer is guilty of leaning too heavily on vague metaphors. But Goodmanson's unfussy production is the ideal complement to this young band's fidgety energy.

Moon is plenty fine in its own right, and if this heralds a return to further music from Raymonde as well as getting Dosen a little more attention than previously, then nothing wrong with that in the slightest.

It's more of a disappointment than a failure--at the very least, it might serve as someone's introduction to These New Puritans.

Though Dej's talent is walking both sides of that divide, she's a strong enough singer and rapper that it's great hearing her not stuck on instrumentals that straddle the genre fence.

An M-80 blown up in an empty clearing--explosive, fun as hell, but lacking a clear target to give it meaning.

K.R.I.T. Iz Here captures K.R.I.T. the same as he always is: perfectly likable, admirably sincere, predictably dependable and dependably predictable.

In almost sequential fashion, the 12 tracks here capture a band trying to wiggle out of an aesthetic straitjacket one buckle at a time, evolving from a band you think you’ve heard a million times before into one you feel like you’re just getting to know.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Being is most compelling as a pop album when it’s not trying to hook you; the rest is promising, but perhaps could do with a little more dementedness.

Man on the Moon II, the sequel, is still a bumpy listen, but it tweaks his formula enough to at least hint at the massive promise Kanye sees in him.

The meat of the album is generally good, with strong vocals and decent songs, but there's enough gristle on this record that it ultimately obscures some of the pleasures of listening to it.

The album helps prove he’s a lot more than just Drake’s patois advisor. Clothes that don’t quite fit his boss feel effortlessly tailored to Brathwaite.

If a girl group’s main job is to supply harmonies for days and kick out songs that roll around your head like marble, their debut album, Access All Areas, achieves it all with a decidedly R&B edge.

In the absence of a less effable genius, there's always elbow grease. Painting With feels, more than anything, like a kind of construction project: Each sound meticulously built and only faintly familiar, each second crammed with doodads, as though the band was worried either they or their audience might get bored.

This isn't a revolutionary album for Tobin but it's a lot of fun, and works surprisingly well on its own, given the stringent requirements it had to meet.

The Spirit still play hard-to-get, which helps to avoid any ridiculous moments on this polished sophomore effort, but they're often too stand-offish to even challenge the listener, let alone push the envelope that their influences have so neatly prepared for them.

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.

It's music you might hear in a CB2 furniture store-- languorous and luxurious in tempos and tone, but without any sort of sentiment outside of the swooning used to implant the idea in your brain that you might have sex or do drugs on that reasonably priced but fashionable couch.

Particularly hoisted onto such dense production, the hooks are so big, blunt, and persistent that even my four-year-old niece counts Foster the People as her favorite band. But on Torches that plays as a crutch as well as a strength.

Frustratingly, Trust Now doesn't advance on the better ideas from Shadow Temple, particularly the elements of dance music that occasionally surfaced.

When the recycled smoke clears, Little Barrie could use more songwriting help from their patrons (Moz, [Edwyn] Collins) and less hu-huh inspiration from Ocean Colour Scene's lobotomy-trad bong.

Perceived loss of self is a risk Desveaux herself takes in making music so largely bereft of easy cultural or regional signifiers, yet the keenness of her songcraft makes these hard-won, universal sentiments far more rewarding than most lazy splashes of local color.

What makes Sun Bronzed Greek Gods work is the band's innate understanding of the power of a killer hook, and their ability to turn them out effortlessly on each of the EP's seven tracks. Sincere, sharp, catchy, funny--maybe these songs are all you need to know about Dom after all.

Everything is fast-moving, breezily entertaining, and patently ridiculous.

A lot of what's here doesn't really demonstrate what they can do to Philip Glass, but what Philip Glass has already done to them.

10 tracks of the kind of fierce, instrumental, no-bullshit techno that was as left-field popular in 1988 as 1998 as 2008. It's often witty, with a kind of robots-running-amok charm, and always attention-grabbing, at least in small doses. But friendly it ain't.

This is not by any stretch a turn toward the accessible, though there are a few great pop moments.