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

And yet all these reworks and revisions stay in the general vicinity of the original album's tone of massive yet starkly open spaces, adding a few new facets but always staying close to the fine line Waiting for You treaded between bleak and euphoric.

Instead of Lungs' largely charming yet discombobulating diversity, Ceremonials suffers from a repetitiveness that's akin to looking at a skyline filled with 100-story behemoths lined-up one after the other, blocking out everything but their own size.

What's here is brilliant, beautiful, and, most importantly, finally able to stand tall on its own.

Audacious to the extreme, but exhaustingly tedious as a result, its few interesting ideas are stretched out beyond the point of utility and pounded into submission.

This isn't the sound of a band closing up shop so much as tidying up the workbench before stepping out for a while.

A Very She & Him stands guilty not of being oppressively adorkable, but of being not nearly adorkable enough.

Deer Tick try to score points simply by sounding like they could drink all those bands under the table, and the self-absorbed and even downright hateful Divine Providence ends up drinking at you, not with you.

Apokalypsis turns out to be a kind of book completely different from what its cover promises.

If Bruiser's more straightforward rock turns mostly disappoint (one notable exception: the late-game adrenaline shot "Everybody's Under Your Spell"), the album does find the band showcasing its dynamic range in new and intriguing ways.

While so many bands at their status revert to bloated contentment or some vague idea of rockist salvation, Mylo Xyloto finds Coldplay successfully continuing to explore the tension of wanting to be one of the best bands in the world and having to settle for being one of the biggest.

Cloudy and labyrinthine at times, airy and placid elsewhere, People cuts a pretty wide swath, an approach that feels a bit more mature and confident than the bending over backwards he sometimes had to do to reach the disparate genres on his earlier solo records.

They spent all their daring on concept, with little to spare for execution. Even for a duo as image-conscious and savvy as these guys, there is little style in their reduction.

No particular melodies, images, or moods really stick out from the vast, dreamy atmosphere that washes over you while you're listening.

The songs here are shorter, less cluttered, and just generally easier to listen to than Bitte Orca, which will disappoint you only if you love Dirty Projectors because of their relentless complexity.

Tarot Classics' popcraft proves well beyond promising, and these songs are certainly sturdy enough to handle their lusher productions and knottier sentiments.

For all his indulgences, Waits never lingers too long; these tracks are concise and expertly edited, and Bad as Me feels as new as it does ancient.

When you're operating on such a grand scale, and the exultant, openhearted Enemy/Lover is rarely outpaced by its lofty ambitions.

Kinshasa One Two is worthwhile both as a cause (all proceeds from sales go to Oxfam) and as an experiment, albeit one that requires some judicious editing to extract the tracks that really count.

While it often lacks the moodier, polyrhythmic highs of Great Lengths and the character that came with it, Martyn's efforts to make it back through no-nonsense propulsion nearly make up for it.

There's a sharp contrast between the twin peaks of Coracle and the rest of its material, especially when they try to pointlessly channel Spacemen 3 circa "Honey" and shackle that sound to some perfunctory beats on "Ecstatic Truth".

Class Actress still sound a little too weird to truly break through (and if they toned that weirdness down, this record just wouldn't be as interesting).

Gauntlet Hair lasts only nine songs. But they're all potential singles in their own right, all different.

Taking the long view, the fact that WAND feels a bit overstuffed is more exciting than it is disappointing.

In a couple of decades, when you're looking for an instant hit of what electronic pop felt like in 2011, you'll be able to throw on Glass Swords and get a dose of that feeling in its purest form.

It's another merely fine, expectation-meeting entry into Boratto's discography, a stopgap until the next knockout single comes along.

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

All Things Will Unwind, both suffers and succeeds in relation to its scope.