Perhaps as a direct result of I-Sound's presence, Music is a Hungry Ghost is a looser, more abstract affair than previous efforts.

I suppose that the backstreet Black Market Music will endear itself to gender-exploring teenagers who find the girl-on-girl action in Buffy the Vampire Slayer "fucking awesome."

The Cliff's Notes of classic rock.

Granted, it's not mind-blowing, and it's not nearly as masterfully executed and affecting as their earliest work. But there are only a handful of bands out there that can put out an album as well-constructed as Rock Action and still expect people to bitch and moan about it.

While previous albums gave a studio sheen to the noise, Dilate has a looser, more spontaneous feel to it.

Coquelicot, like most Of Montreal albums, is at times sublime and lovely, at times infuriatingly catchy, at times simply infuriating, at times overly twee, and at times seriously fucking scary. What sets this record apart from its predecessors, though, is a level of intricacy and detail that Of Montreal have never previously attained as a band.

Overall, Sad Sappy Sucker feels as if it was sort of put together in a hurry, despite it having sat around in the warehouse for seven years. The album part has plenty of good songs, though, and any completist will want to hear it.

If the additions are what make this record distinctive, what's left out is what makes it brilliant.

Know Your Enemy finds the Manics attempting to write a protest song in just about every genre. This project, stretched out over 16 tracks and 75 minutes, quickly reaches epic proportions, with an ambition approached only by the magnitude of its flaws.

The excitement is sustained so consistently over the hour-long running time that you'll almost begin to wish the six-minute songs were even longer.

There are a few key moments of guilty pleasure, and the overall aesthetic of the record is appealing on the surface. But underneath the scratchy record sounds and the canned Casiotones, Fountenberry hasn't got enough substance to sustain him for ten minutes, let alone the length of an entire album.

In many respects, Leaves Turn Inside You is the band's most ambitious, sweeping, and difficult outing yet.... I'm convinced that, if you've been following this band's development, the initial bewildered expression on your face will give way to total enchantment, and this new, boldly different Unwound album will have you in its grip for months to come.

Considerably tamer than their stadium-rocking, chart-topping previous albums, Just Enough Education to Perform sounds less like a band voluntarily growing into their new-found maturity, and more like a pet's first, forced visit to the castration clinic.

Really, if your parents don't dig this, there's something wrong with them. This is music for the drive to pick up the kids from soccer practice, or to the doctor for dad's yearly prostate exam.

Lemonjelly.ky's nine tracks consist largely of samples from atrocious Nana Mouskouri songs and soundclips nipped from 100 Strings mood music albums. What binds these samples together is a series of predicable hip-hop beats and root-note basslines.

Many slower outfits-- Low, American Music Club, Codeine, et al.-- are sometimes pinned with the theory that if you've heard one of their albums, you've heard them all. Such is no longer the case with the Red House Painters.

Goddamn if he doesn't sing like a cranky Neil Diamond here...

Everyone needs to have a doomed romantic stage, but Lloyd's is going on twenty years.... The lyrical juvenilia is a bit of a shame, because this is a solid collection of pop songs otherwise.

Consistently excellent and deserves to be heard by fans of 70's glam and shoegazer alike.

A solid, riff-driven rock record that may disappoint those still awaiting Bee Thousand II, though it offers plenty of treats to those who are willing to approach it with open ears.

Its best moments come with the one-off experiments that propel the band further from traditional dance music.

By bombarding the listener with innocuousness, Alpha forge a test to determine exactly when the pedestrian becomes excruciating. By the third track, they more or less have their answer.

It's all extremely pretty, and without seeming completely manipulative or cloying. Black Box Recorder, however, are still a bit dopey when it comes to lyrics.

The test of any conceptual record is how well it stands on its own, removed from the angle. And A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure is a first-rate work, even if you're unfamiliar with the backstory.

In truth, Discovery rarely invokes its predecessor's slap-bass funk, and few other tracks resemble the obviously single-designed "One More Time." Instead, Daft Punk focus on fusing mid-80's Kool and the Gang R&B beats with post-millennial prog flourishes and more vocoders than you can shake at Herbie Hancock.

This is a great album to throw on when you need something to enhance the mood or otherwise fill the air when working on something else.

The Posies, if you'll recall, used to compose entire songs of understated pop brilliance, instead of just moments.

Though much of Driving a Million rides along on a similar, slightly heavy new wave pop groove like "Neon Tom," it's the subtle lapses into more diverse sounds that are perhaps the record's most welcome aspect.