Rarely has a genre sounded so tried and tired, so forced, formulaic and reliant on its own mythology as country music is made to sound on Regard the End.

This album sounds like it was recorded and released as a favor from someone at the label. Truth is, the lighter that ignited All This Sounds Gas is long out of butane.

Profound, innovative, and absolutely vital.

Just as fuzzy and unpredictable as its namesake suggests, with high, hissing vocals, archaic-gone-futuristic blips, pedal steel, keyboards, glockenspiel, and a barrage of other noisemakers helping to build a thick, spacy stretch of soft 60s psychedelia.

The real problem with Volcano, though, is not only the fact that they aren't really doing anything inventive with their music, but that the music itself is utterly forgettable.

To say one of these albums is better than the other is basically beside the point-- anyone who buys one will certainly want the other, and both are fairly comparable as far as quality is concerned, anyway.

They've rediscovered their broad range and proud, sleeve-worn strangeness.

On the whole, this is the quietest Neubauten album to date, frequently lowering to a mere whisper, but don't let this fool you-- no album this band has made in the past has bristled with so much latent violence or been haunted by a more palpable sense of unseen menace.

With better lyrics and a longer attention span, McKay would be a jaw-dropping songwriter, but it's difficult to get sucked into a song if you don't connect with the singer.

On Magic & Medicine, the band's frenetic freakout leanings have been stripped away in favor of a more humble approach, placing subtlety and songwriting above the sounds being produced. It all sounds far less interesting.

The most disappointing aspect of Probot is that many of the songs sound more like Foo Fighters turned to eleven than actual metal.

While it's unfair to directly compare Courtney's solo work with Hole's shifty discography, America's Sweetheart demonstrates a fairly monstrous decline in both quality and conviction.

A flawed, overlong, hypocritical, egotistical, and altogether terrific album.

Forget Yourself is no small resurrection, and though it owes a great deal to The Church's traditionalism, that's nothing to apologize for.

Ghost have emerged as one of the most formidable (and important) rock bands I know. And Hypnotic Underworld is their rollicking masterwork.

Equally inspired by The Raincoats and Jacques Brel, The Power Out veers from one inspired genre tribute to the next, if it never quite cements the band's identity.

We Shall All Be Healed is complacent, formulaic for a trailblazer, lapped by Destroyer, optimistic-but-joyless in that it is pessimistic-but-punchy, and gooped with the silly putty of vagueness and cliché.

Each of these songs displays a mastery of craft rarely heard.

Me First proves to be a remarkably consistent and memorable listen.

While The Grey Album is truly one of the more interesting pirate mashups ever done, it ultimately fails at the hands of perfectionism with several pieces sounding rushed to beat some other knucklehead to his clever idea.

This is music just about anyone can enjoy, either for close listening or simply ambient sound.

The Posterkids sound positively ageless through No More Songs about Sleep and Fire, not having missed a flailing beat through the intervening years of decreasing tempos.

This may be Herren's least accessible project to date.

The album's chilling resonance is due in part to Godrich's anagogical recording of minimal instrumentation and digitally etiolated detail.

So while Delìrivm Cordìa is filled with great blocks of sound, it too often loses sight of direction.

It's here, about halfway through this four-disc set, that most people will turn off Join the Dots.

Cast of Thousands rides the borders of sentimentality expertly-- Elbow's new-found hope in unity may seem like idealistic drivel on paper, but is carried off on record with refreshing determination.

Obviously, Twista's not breaking down any walls with his wordplay on Kamikaze, but along the way he kicks over a few garbage cans while letting Kanye West, Toxic and the rest of his production crew move some crowds and elevate their status, one slow jam at a time.