The results are as free-wheeling and inspired as the group has sounded in years-- Super-er and Furrier.

Ultimately, the whole of Tinted Windows is so much less than the sum of its considerable parts that it's almost tragic.

Ending with a brief, queasy reprise tease of 'Wrong,' Sounds of the Universe concludes anticlimactically, an echo of its promising start.

Although only one song passes the five-minute mark, Touchdown overflows with ideas imaginatively sifted from a range of genres, and feels honest, infectious, and personable from beginning to end.

Black gets the Art Brut spirit down on record better than anyone has before, with the blazing pop-metal vainglory of Weezer, the scruffy cheekiness of early Rough Trade bands, and lots of enthusiastic backing vocals. Fun for them, fun for us.

Asleep feels less like an album of music meant to entertain than an assumption that you can actually bump a marketing plan in your cars and house parties.

When they're satisfied with rocking the fuck out, they do it exceedingly well, but when they try to acquire the adult answers, they'd do well to chill out and enjoy being young.

Maturity is a central concept to Camera Obscura--Campbell's found it in her singing, but in her lyrics, the search continues. The asymmetries in her personality give her songs their distinct character.

Unfortunately, the ratio of thoughtful zeal to clunky screed this time around is decidedly not in his favor.

Finding unique ways to handle empty space and unorthodox arrangements has always been Cohen's greatest strength, and here that skill helps to mottle his most straightforward material to date.

If Never Gonna Touch the Ground is less a party album and more an album as party--self-contained, relentlessly upbeat, rowdy, self-celebratory--too many of these songs come across as kegs of near beer.

Still, overreaching is a forgivable flaw on an otherwise accomplished debut, which usually sounds so confident in its creator's insecurities.

Take the repeats out of the equation and you're left with a decidedly mixed bag; just a few of Dance Mother's newbies manage to rival their older siblings' success.

As strong and unusual as The Law of the Playground is, especially out of step in 2009, it never quite feels as inspired, as fraught with conflicted beauty, as past songs 'Paper Cuts' or 'Be Gentle With Me' or 'Monsters.'

His vantage from Eagle is one of textured ambivalence; his images split and shimmer like double-exposures, immediately releasing an obvious meaning quickly followed by a subtler one that equivocates the first.

The story here though is the album's simmering, intimate moments--and despite the fanbase-building qualities of their new-wave past, the more the group embraces an inky, ambient future, the better it could get.

Swoon ultimately delivers the exact same results as its predecessor mostly because it's written in nearly the exact same way. The problem all along for the Silversun Pickups isn't that they sound too much like the Smashing Pumpkins. They just sound way too much like themselves.

If these songs are low-voltage wires that hum, buzz, whir, purr but rarely jolt, they yield just enough electricity to light the way forward.

Every track on The Future Will Come that hasn't already appeared as a single last year is a relatively short and succinct piece of work; think a bunch of radio edits instead of the 12" mixes. The good news is that brevity keeps some of these tracks from getting stretched thin.

The album is full of similar tableaux: These songs are dioramas depicting the New Mexico wilderness as a reverberation of the couple's desires.

The highlights of Ampexian suggest that if he did want to use the moniker for easier listening, the results would genuinely beguile, rather than demand your full attention and hope for the best.

The whole record is a smart little left-turn for everyone involved. And if it's not quite an unalloyed triumph, I would totally play a video game with this soundtrack.

The rest of Dos can't quite keep the pulse of those initial salvos. Staying inventive within the confines of repetition is sometimes too much for the band to muster. But Johnson's fiery playing is impressive throughout.

Despite Woods' humble production values and their fondness for living room ambiance, Songs of Shame has that almost subliminal ability to make one want to move in to listen more closely.

A significant step forward from her debut, Two Suns is home to some of the year's most thrilling music so far.

Levi and her band sound more like the future than the past, at a moment when we desperately need some more future, and as much as I've come to dig this album's awkward, brash cacophony, I want to hear what they do next even more.

Doves' fourth album is another sterling example of why the Doves should be household names and why they probably won't ever be: their unwavering flair for producing mountainous, Wembley-worthy pop anthems that are nonetheless invested with a palpable degree of grace and humility.

Like Skinner's recent work, instead of woodshedding on the mixtape circuit like smarter and hungrier rappers, we're treated to lightweight albums that are three years in the making and still feel like a rushed jumble of bad ideas that just get worse as they go along.