At its best, Astrological Straits is a mashup of Liars tribalism, Boredoms bombast, Smell-scene art-punk, Lightning Bolt repeti-grooves, and Frank Zappa prog-overload. All this sonic hyperactivity can be exhausting, and Hill's fondness for effects, especially in his Vocoder-ish vocals, makes some tracks robotic, more like exercises than songs.

The Faint are sounding way out of their depth on the Important Concepts front, while seeming perfectly at home on material about relationship-muck.

Oberst has traded in a lot of his post-adolescent trembling for a calmer, less unbridled melancholy, but Conor Oberst is still packed with disheartening realities, and Oberst refuses to temper his pessimism, even when it starts to feel heavy and contrived, more like a narrative tic than anything else.

A whole album of these sort of showy gestures would likely prove exhausting, but the Strips are careful not to overdo it, and Girls and Weather is stacked with singles that condense the band's energy and enthusiasm into more compact bursts of joy.

Brazilian Girls have no problem making their mish-mash sound downright normal, which in a way it is.

Even if Preteen Weaponry is one more left turn out of many in the band's catalog, it nonetheless reaffirms what makes Oneida stand out.

The Airborne Toxic Event is an album that's almost insulting in its unoriginality.

Re-Up Gang is sort of like going out for a nice meal and filling up on bread.

'Someone Like You' is the stand-out track on a fairly solid album, but how much better would they have sounded with a little judicious editing and a sharper focus.

Bits is streaked with irreverence, whether for C&W formality (the intuitively simple melodies of 'Featherbeds' and 'Young Love Delivers'), instrumental tightness (at times, they can make No Age sound like the Famous Flames) or lyrical artifice.

Most of the seven tracks crammed between these fine bookends, including two undistinguished instrumentals, run together in a modal drone, lacking urgency or emotional inflection.

Old Days features all the objective elements of useful rarities disc, but it's doubly valuable for reminding us of a Mirah that might've grown up too fast.

The result is pale, beefy, and contemptuous.

Oh! Mighty Engine is endlessly pleasant but oddly faceless, a record strangely free of feeling.

Double Bubble is neither deep or dense enough for electronic connoisseurs, nor is it brash enough to spawn another "Connected" with kids sprung off of Justice or Hot Chip.

Instead of a symbolic death, The Slip feels much more like a possible rebirth.

This stands pretty much alone in Weller's catalog in terms of sheer eclecticism and unpredictable, dream-like flow.

Every part of Life Processes seems meticulously calculated with such antecedents in mind, laid out in every detail and implemented exactly to referential specification.

The joycore bricolage of CSS is all but missing on Donkey.

Fate still manages to be a master class in illusory "good" songwriting. The bulk of it is so fenced into classicist templates-- chamber-y pop meets maximum R&B with the occasional smidge of "tasteful" gospel/parlour games ("Hang On") that, even when merely competent, it can still win over those unimpressed with all that punk and hip-hop riff raff of the past three decades.

Mostly, Something lives up to its everyman title by removing the truly heart-pounding moments of a BSS record and replacing them with a sense of community, easy friendship, and a kickass guitar pedal collection.

The songs here are almost all identical: polyrhythmic miniatures built by small drums and shakers, clouded by blankets of echo and reverb; deliberately basic structures; short, and in their own way, catchy and pretty.

Muhly has talent and an eager curiosity; the problem is, this inquisitive intelligence often finds more meaningful expression in his interviews (or on his gabby, regularly updated blog) than in his music.

This meandering quality might put off some listeners, but to my ears, Azeda Booth have figured out how to reconcile pop music's infectiousness with ambient music's nebulous aura, and have produced one of 2008's most unique and immediately pleasurable albums.

While Bodies of Water are always noted for their vocal prowess, those guitar parts, like the fuzzy garage-rock figure that drives 'Under the Pines' alongside a psychedelic organ vamp, showcase a newfound muscularity to David's playing and riff writing.

Laulu connotes this youth, motion, and playfulness in various states of repair and construction, and it does so by alternating well-formed, multi-faced pop songs with abstract head-scratchers, each component as warmly evocative and strangely necessary as the last.

Its stylized, specific, and unflinching sound roars with a singular menace, at once terrifying and captivating.