Even for a committedly lo-fi aesthetic, Warm Slime is rough going at times; listening to it back-to-back with the relatively cleaner Help is startling, like blasting a bug-spattered windshield with a jet of wiper fluid.

The Optimist too often gets lost in non-committal melodies as Bulmer tries and tries again to capture quote-worthy elegant wastefulness.

Everything pops, but the gloss never makes the songs here feel processed or too glossy. It simply fits them well. And the songs are strong, too.

Despite the confidence of that opening track, Heaven Is Whenever sounds like a transitional album, hopefully paving the way for something stronger, more cohesive, more specific.

While there's rarely been a correlation between the accessibility of a given Fall album and the profile of the label releasing it, the lean, brute-force rockers on Your Future Our Clutter suggest that the Fall might actually be taking this upgrade to Domino seriously.

Forgiveness Rock Record's thematic bent is mature, and that sense of gravity is embedded into the music, too.

Cosmogramma is an intricate, challenging record that fuses his loves-- jazz, hip-hop, videogame sounds, IDM-- into something unique. It's an album in the truest sense.

Aside from "Valkyrie", Together is a solid collection of well-crafted songs. However, in spite of the quality, the album isn't entirely satisfying.

It's overproduced as hell, filled with all manner of electro doodads and backmasking effects, but it also boasts an immediacy and pop smarts heretofore unheard from the band. Unfortunately, that directness applies to the lyrics as well, and they simply cannot be ignored.

For the most part, the beats and the synths are the stars of the show here. They're not as compelling as in the past--maybe only four albums into their career, the duo is preferring to color inside the lines.

Drawing from a few different traditions while making them their own, Future Islands prove here to be a well-versed group of wild, woolly storytellers.

What we've gotten instead is a forgettable collection of fairly generic, overproduced rock songs that feel, oddly, like a put-on.

Avi Buffalo have every reason to be sure of themselves; this sneakily complex, unsappily sentimental, thoughtfully naive debut is a very early success.

Results are mixed--"Sun Is on My Side" offers lovely accordion and a weary, haunting refrain, but the midtempo "Uma Menina Uma Cigana" feels flat and perfunctory, while the lugubriousness of "When Universes Collide" actually undermines Hutz's harrowing, poverty-tinged lyrics.

The Adventures of Bobby Ray is a curiously lonely affair, the sound of a singular talent being drowned in a tidal wave of cheerful banality.

The arrangements stick to an effective coast-and-surge model of development: The tracks skim low and then tilt upward with the addition of a drum or synth part. It's a stock trick that works well, and Lali Puna use it with unusual tact.

Nothing sounds overworked. If anything, Burhenn and Swift present the songs in an understated manner, confident in the quality of the material and the strength of her voice.

A disappointing pattern begins to take shape in each of these long chapters, as the band begins on a promising note during the first three minutes, but exhausts itself over the last nine.

This is exactly what Cornershop has always been so good at, and which occasionally comes through on Lemon-- expecting us to be on the same page, and feeling no need to explain anything to those who aren't.

Sleep Mountain's lack of originality is made worse by the fact that few of its songs actually go anywhere.

Despite his chameleonic tendencies, Dan Snaith retains his singular identity as an artist--and Swim is a reminder that even at his most challenging, the man's compositional capabilities can dazzle.

The only things you hear on the album are Wainwright's voice and his piano, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that he wants you to luxuriate in both when it's far more likely you'll feel like you're drowning, given how rarely Wainwright buoys the listener with an actual melody or memorable lyric.

The album moves from infatuation and jealousy to lust and betrayal to real, young love. And it does so with not just the best of intentions-- feminism, anti-homophobia, artistic experimentation-- but also, in the storytelling style of the Streets or Sweden's Hello Saferide, a set of distinctive, well-crafted songs that should strike a chord with self-deprecating teens and twentysomethings.

There's certainly no shortage of well-crafted, playful, memorable tunes here, and that-- matched with Schneider's willingness to try on a few new sounds for size-- adds up to the best Apples in Stereo record in more than a decade.

So while La La Land may not be the stellar follow-up that Parc Avenue deserved, it does offer something for fans willing to look beyond its tarted-up exterior.

As with their last two albums, Clinging to a Scheme stands to further expand the Radio Dept.'s cult. Economy has never been an issue for the band, but here, things are further tightened up.

They still gets bogged down in places, padding the album with go-nowhere interludes and a six-minute centerpiece that's mostly too chaotic to make any impact, but on the album's best tracks, it's great to hear them again, doing what they do best.

At their best, Sweet Apple sound like they're trying to emulate the lovable-loserdom perfected by one of Petkovic's unsung Cleveland rock peers, Prisonshake. At their worst, such as "Goodnight", Petkovic goes on and on about him and his hard-luck honey while the group tediously grinds away in the background.