Where the old Bondy would sometimes show his hand too blatantly, the new Bondy is playing his cards with greater aplomb and much greater skill. When the Devil's Loose, A.A. Bondy's second album, is evident of this ever-growing skill. But that's not to say there isn't room to grow.

Unsurprisingly, the rarities on The Fine Print could make a good album, but the oddities are often distracting.

He's only a middling guitar player, but insists on soloing and showboating endlessly, drawing out songs to unnecessary lengths.

Their equipment may be largely restricted to percussion, vocals, and the occasional embellishment of keyboard, but their ability to fully eclipse these limitations and create music with a strong improvisational pulse and so much vitality is a no small feat, and proves that they are continuing to experiment in magnificent, dynamic ways.

Humbug isn't better than either of its predecessors, but it expands the group's range and makes me curious where it might go next.

Mew has succeeded in developing a good sound from some of the least hip ingredients imaginable, and No More Stories... feels like a consolidation of every stride they've made to date.

Unfortunately a whole album of similarly DJ-pitched material, all the quote-unquote pop frills shaved off, wouldn't have allowed blog readers to devote the few days their attenuated attentions can muster for He Was King's singles, before the next this-is-kind-of-okay-I-guess electro-pop album arrives to distract them.

It's a sad case of an artist forgetting what makes her great, settling for what makes her merely good instead.

The results are perfectly pleasant but rarely inspiring, hardly sterile but at the same time too smooth.

Yehezkely, with her limited range and slightly detached delivery, effectively bridges that gap between the music's indulgent/escapist tendencies and our desire to connect with it despite that distance.

By dividing the sessions into what amounts to an overview of his career, My Dusty Road detracts from the recently discovered source material, making it both an incredible find and a missed opportunity.

That mischief is largely missing from Origin: Orphan, and the lack of lyrical cleverness seems to have infected the music as well, making for a mostly cloudy listen from a formerly sunny-day band.

It's wide-eyed pop minus the fizz, demonstrating that sizzle can still be subtle.

Fortunately, whether she's sifting through the anguish she's caused her mother and the trouble she's having finishing her album, or realizing that good sex can make for bad boyfriends and that even sucky jobs serve some cosmic purpose, she generally cuts through the crap without pretending to have easy answers.

Watch Me Fall is neither a reinvention nor a holding pattern for Reatard--walking the line between them is tricky, but he continues to make doing so look easy.

Benson emphasizes the raw power of his riffs instead of polishing them into a smooth sheen. It's not as DIY charming as his earlier works, but it's pretty darned effective.

The Cave Singers' mild, moseying tunes aren't without their minor charms, and they're unfailingly good at conjuring images of wide-open fields and dust-caked lanes, but nobody wants to walk down the same road all the time if they can help it.

Hospice answers silliness with solemnity, jitters with nerve. Their band name simply describes their music: a delicately branching instrument of force.

King of Jeans successfully consolidates these two strengths, harnessing the earlier record's sometimes directionless fire-extinguisher splatter into shake-appealing rock action, and cohering Korvette's ramblings into a more complete picture of wage-slave misanthropy and alpha-male inadequacy.

Luminous Night doesn't challenge "School of the Flower" or "The Sun Awakens" for Six Organs' best albums, but it is a solid addition to a big catalog that gets more interesting all the time.

Phil has moved well beyond the often formless experiments of the early Microphones releases--this is still by no means a record to be digested lightly. And thank goodness for that.

As overblown as You Can't Take It With You is musically, Nigro's not one to be upstaged by guitar pedals.

They're like a combination of Where the Wild Things Are, a fever dream, a pagan woodland ceremony, and a notebook doodle. The music is worth taking in, too, over and over again.

I'd assume Bay of Pigs' disco diversion to be just that in the long run, but after the relatively wagon-gathering summary of "Trouble in Dreams," this certainly feels like a break and, perhaps, the first blush of something new. Cheers to that.

Season Dreaming is the sort of record that could, in the wrong hands, easily drift off into formless bedlam, but the group's employment of simple melodies and tunefulness when needed keeps that from happening.

It's chewing up something familiar and making it weird again. Life gives you lemons, so you make Alien in a Garbage Dump.

Too often its soundtrack atmosphere is too thick, its arrangements as obvious as a painted backdrop.

It creates an album weighed toward showcasing masterful execution that leaves a pretty muted general impression. Unless you're predisposed toward technical prowess and solo bass recordings, it's probably going to come off as more of a clinic than a collection of great songs.