Watershed has friction, and friction brings heat. Those left cold by metal's po-faced tendencies might well warm up to it.

The Bake Sale is the first commercially available product from a group that's built its rep via MySpace and live shows, and most of these tracks have been floating around the internet for a long minute. But it makes for a great little introduction to two guys who know exactly what they're doing and who do it well.

Following their first two crunching and careening albums, it may seem as if the M's have lowered the bar for themselves, but through all the detours they've made an album that sounds more like themselves than any previous work.

The best executed Harvey Milk album to date, and one of the most accomplished metal records you'll hear this year.

This Is Alphabeat feels labored, sacrificing identity in its endless eagerness to please.

Yes, it's a pleasure to hear Green articulate romantic satisfaction, and good for him if he's satisfied. But the grain and pull of his voice is all about longing for both flesh and spirit, and it doesn't quite fit here.

Songs in A&E is certainly Spiritualized's best work in 10 years.

The kicker is that, without their live/electronic shtick to distinguish them, Midnight Juggernauts don't seem to be anything other than gifted mimics.

Never merely meager, this project delivers, both when you're waving your orgy-snorkel all blotto on-the-town, and for a soundtrack to serious rumination at your midday desk of harsh reality.

It's hard to actually consider Welcome a bad album, mostly because it has this inexplicable likability: It's bizarrely comic without coming across as cheap irony, and it's pretty clear Pants lays down these semi-instrumental jams because he wants to have fun and make noise with some once-expensive, now-dated (and, subsequently, currently underheard) musical machinery.

Nothing to Fear might be the surprise highlight of this collection, even accounting for all the classic stuff on the first disc.

What the title describes is just as ineffable as their sound: you can see it coming down, but somehow it fails to leave any tangible impression.

What All the Saints lack in rhythmic variation, they make up for with absorbing atmosphere--their sound truly is subterranean, a dimly lit, cavernous rumble that gets more suffocating as the album progresses.

Their sources are varied, yet the pleasure isn't recognizing the different sonic elements, but in relishing their almost supernatural co-exist

On several songs, Johansson gets lost in Sitek's swelling production, which may suggest a weak interpreter or a dearth of vocal personality but adds to the album's pervading dreaminess.

No envelopes are pushed on the quartet's latest, The Lucky Ones. But there's an increase in firepower that makes it their best effort in a while.

These songs may be less immediately catchy, but all of them have a moment in which they break away from their straightforward guitar-rock underpinning and allow strange, spacious moments to burble up from within.

II Trill is a solid and occasionally great record, an album more directed toward car-stereo utility than bedroom contemplation.

In a way, they don't even try to [reconcile their spotlight-swallowing energy], and that makes No, Virginia... an album on par with the Dolls' two fully conceived LPs.

Unfortunately there aren't a lot of opportunities to get caught in that lovely crossfire on Re-Arrange Us, a record that, for all its lush bells and whistles, finds the pair sounding as bare-boned and sparse as you'd expect a two-person band to be.

Freedom Wind includes three of the four songs on the Explorers Club's original EP, and it partly fulfills that record's promise.

Lie Down may be Oldham's most country record of new songs in years, and it's also one of his most accessible and least academic records.

El Rey has its share of surprises, mostly in the vein of its particular subject, which is the cruelty older men visit on younger women, and vice versa. But mostly it's merely another Wedding Present record: witty, randy, guitar-heavy, and not quite satisfied.

Trading layers of mood and melody and meaning for layers of Pro Tooled artifice, French Kicks have razored off the bullshit, leaving a core of beguilingly honest tunes.

Unfortunately, Inherit tries to give the listener both of these great tastes at once, resulting in a combination that's less like chocolate and peanut butter, and more like toothpaste and orange juice.

As far as mainstream pop-rock records go, Brain Thrust Mastery occasionally gets the job done.

At times, the maturation feels forced; the more adventurous moments here are experimental only for such a high-profile group, and they don't play to Gibbard's sentimental, word-weighing strengths.

Thing of the Past is a perfectly pleasant, well-produced album that offers an authorized version of what Vetiver fans already unofficially know about the band.