Street produces again, and Robyn Hitchcock is among the guests, but even they can't make up for repetitive, one-dimensional songs--mostly sleepy folk, occasionally fuzzy psych.

With that in mind, the album is perfectly titled, as Actor proves St. Vincent as an artist capable of crafting believable, complicated characters with compassion, insight, and exacting skill.

Ultimately, even when she veers into previously unexplored aesthetic territory, every track feels just like Peaches, which is rather remarkable given how rigid and predictable she had been in the recent past.

The way Roberts' often high-pitched brogue wraps itself around sentences is pretty as hell; his voice has never sounded better, nor has it been recorded this clearly before.

Perhaps it's partly a factor of Oberst's essential attention-grabbing nature, but none of these gentlemen offers up a composition that snags the ear better than the most mundane effort from their fearless leader.

The band's now-routine gospel-like chanting grows tiresome by album end (they miss Vanderhoof's vocals), and, as was expected, Set ‘Em Wild doesn't necessarily expand the band's sound so much as further splinter their interest.

A few brilliant left turns that feel almost accidental mixed in with a sort of end-times hunger for a top-40 audience that doesn't seem to exist anymore.

So Entertainment might be music for their performances, it might be for others' dance performances, but it's not for the dance floor.

The Horrors' shoegazer makeover aside, the real story here is Badwan's growing confidence as a singer, and his willingness to sound more scared than scary. Primary Colours loses its radiance when he reverts back to bogeyman type.

With Outside Love, McBean takes this theme on an adventurous journey to surprising heights, and the fully realized sound allows his ideas more room to breathe.

Easily the band's most accessible effort, hipsters and headbangers will likely agree it's also their most intricately imagined.

With their dirty mouths and pretty faces, pop perspicacity and knack for making a bloody racket, there's no question the Vaselines were worth rescuing from obscurity.

Patrick Watson doesn't do foundation work exceedingly well. Yet this is not to say that there aren't moments on Wooden that suggest songcraft was the foremost urge.

It takes only a few listens to realize that this album is its own beast. Even with healthy doses of unruliness and a few far-off wanderings, this is Magik Markers' most coherent, self-contained effort to date.

Awe is in the ear of the beholder, sure, but after being predictably pounded into the ground for half an hour by Rodriguez-Lopez/Hill et al. and their bag of heavy tricks, it's hard to tell if we're meant to walk away impressed or oppressed.

Replica Sun Machine is an exceedingly simple thing--with tunes so familiar-feeling to be easily ignorable--but it's presented with a false sense of intricacy, gussied up and disguised as something more than it really is.

A Ways Away, O'Neil's fifth solo album and first on the K imprint, draws together her considerable experience as a producer, singer, and songwriter in a fleetingly beautiful 36 minutes that washes over the listener in an introspective haze.

Invisible Cities serves as something of a breath-catching moment for a band that's taken a giant leap on each of its albums, bringing some of the thunder back while further elaborating on the progress made on Ghost Rock.

Colonia is mostly careful to use its expanded palette of sounds for subtle shading rather than gratuitous effect.

Together Through Life isn't without its charms--Dylan never is. It's just very minor, especially by his standards.

Instead of focusing on one idea and shaping it into something unique, though, the album tries its hand at everything that is "now" (noise-pop, dance rock, etc.) and owns none of it.

The band's music is spot-on for soundtrack work precisely because it's moody yet unobtrusive, evocative of something, yet noncommittal enough to conceivably fit any emotional tableaux.

A letdown after Fables; whether haughty, homesick, or ha-ha, on the way toward frankness, the album gets bogged down in simplicity.

Given its one-off status and unique format, Are You In? is probably a diversion rather than a reinvention, a mixtape-style curio given big business backing, but hopefully some of its reinvigorated sonics find their way to the next proper De La Soul album.

For one reason or another, Modeselektor seem unwilling to trim the fat and here again, are a handful of just-okay songs that probably should have been lopped off. Cut some of them and you've got a great record instead of just a darn good one.

On When I See the Sun, they seem to want to prove they also recognize great songwriting, and it turns out they not only have impeccable taste, they also have an instinctive understanding of the type of songs that tend to increase in mystery and intimacy when swaddled in an impenetrable fog of guitars.

If you're a lifelong garage-rock purist or just enjoy the occasional Jay Reatard track, there's a good chance you'll get a lot of mileage out of Help. It's hard not to: This is like meat and potatoes prepared by a master chef--totally familiar but utterly delicious.

Frenetic, mercurial, and of wildly variable listenability, theFREEHoudini feels like a retrospective and a retrenchment of forces, but it also serves as yet another step in Anticon's breathless, never-ending push forward.