Earthly Delights shows their career is less a series of sprints than one exhilarating marathon.

More focused on offering Banhart's international and oddball bona fides than crafting songs that feel at all like home, What Will We Be finds Banhart in need of direction and editing.

The tracks don't sound forced or awkward as they follow well-trod lyrical roads littered with wounded "you"s and "I"s, they sound honest, and an honest love song as always is hard to resist.

The album's infectious, but with enough edge to temper its undeniable desire to connect.

The notion of a 2xCD set of rehearsal recordings smacks of unnecessary indulgence, but whether you take this as an alternative canon of R.E.M. music or a document of a band working hard to find its future by revisiting its past, the album is successful in providing a new perspective on a classic group desperately in need of a new narrative thread.

Hudson can definitely do tweaked, but he has work to do before being transcendent.

Divest the Smashing Pumpkins or Hum of their singers, give the bands room to jam, and this album might have ensued. Without vocals, it feels slightly empty.

Ay Ay Ay is a sticky-sweet, unbounded mess, but only the priggish and unimaginative will hold that against it.

Witch Cults is like the sound of Broadcast and the Focus Group trying to cast their spells at the same time: Some of the record is great, plenty of it is cross-chatter.

Goldstein's voice could use a little shaking up. Even in the first-person stories Goldstein feels like an observer, albeit one with a negative bias. Still, ARMS makes for an interesting contrast to Harlem Shakes' eternal optimism.

Heavy Trash never get too heavy on Midnight Soul Serenade. It might be Spencer's lightest and breeziest album to date, a testimony to his stick-to-it-iveness despite the advancing years and changing trends.

So while two straight discs of Fela is exhausting, it's probably the most suitable way to digest him.

Fits feels like the band's formal first LP--lots of what makes them unique, and then those somewhat awkward "growth" points. That initial itchiness, in other words, never really goes away.

Lungs is a cloud-headed introduction to Welch's world, where It Girl hype, coffins, violence, and ambition combust on impact; it's a platinum-shellacked demo reel drunk on its own hi-fi-ness.

Perhaps unintentionally, Turning the Mind feels chemical itself--it's a cheap buzz that ultimately should have no problem finding its way into the wheelhouse of people who just can't get enough whooshy sound effects.

"Street Horrrsing" was a great record, but Tarot Sport is a cut above. Perhaps surprisingly, it's also a welcoming album--and one of the best of this already fruitful year.

Logos feels familiar and assuring, another affecting dispatch from a corner of indie music that is increasingly starting to seem like one Cox pretty much owns.

Whether inspired by lovers, each other, or the warmongers of the world, Kings of Convenience's latest is ultimately just what its title says: a bold and beautiful assertion that we are better off together than apart.

The BQE is probably best classified as an unusually successful vanity project, as well as evidence of Stevens' restless creativity.

The separation anxiety that Freaky induces is its unfortunate undoing, though we can least be glad that someone had the good sense not to include dialogue interludes for context's sake.

The music is a clear step up from his nadir on Monsoon, but it's only a lateral move in terms of quality compared to the first two Preston School releases.

The album falters slightly when the music becomes more abstract and inscrutable, but on the whole it is not difficult to relate to Nagano or slip into the mood created by her bandmates.

A huge array of guests help out, representing acts like Disfear, 108, Genghis Tron, and Neurosis. They are too many to list, but the bottom line is, they work. Whether they're yelling, singing, or laying down leads, they fit their songs. And that in itself is fitting.

Trapped Animal is nothing more than an odds-and-sods record being passed off as "business as usual" by a band that doesn't seem to know what that business is anymore.

Geneva's a record with dirt underneath its fingernails and resolute urgency at its heart, and like the place from which it hails, it's worth the bluster.

For an album about a doc about a book about going into the wilds of California, One Fast Move sounds awfully sleepy.

I prefer the more minimal style of Them, which was sharply critical--and deeply personal--without being hectoring or bombastic. But listeners who enjoy picking apart seam-bursting sonic worlds will find plenty to explore here.

El Perro's brand of pop is certainly easy to love, and a cozy sort of organic warmth--characterized by thick, resonant drums and keys, and treated guitars that seem to lurch and lumber with the slightly irregular rhythms of real life--pervades the new record.