The kicker is that, without their live/electronic shtick to distinguish them, Midnight Juggernauts don't seem to be anything other than gifted mimics.

Never merely meager, this project delivers, both when you're waving your orgy-snorkel all blotto on-the-town, and for a soundtrack to serious rumination at your midday desk of harsh reality.

It's hard to actually consider Welcome a bad album, mostly because it has this inexplicable likability: It's bizarrely comic without coming across as cheap irony, and it's pretty clear Pants lays down these semi-instrumental jams because he wants to have fun and make noise with some once-expensive, now-dated (and, subsequently, currently underheard) musical machinery.

Nothing to Fear might be the surprise highlight of this collection, even accounting for all the classic stuff on the first disc.

What the title describes is just as ineffable as their sound: you can see it coming down, but somehow it fails to leave any tangible impression.

What All the Saints lack in rhythmic variation, they make up for with absorbing atmosphere--their sound truly is subterranean, a dimly lit, cavernous rumble that gets more suffocating as the album progresses.

Their sources are varied, yet the pleasure isn't recognizing the different sonic elements, but in relishing their almost supernatural co-exist

On several songs, Johansson gets lost in Sitek's swelling production, which may suggest a weak interpreter or a dearth of vocal personality but adds to the album's pervading dreaminess.

No envelopes are pushed on the quartet's latest, The Lucky Ones. But there's an increase in firepower that makes it their best effort in a while.

These songs may be less immediately catchy, but all of them have a moment in which they break away from their straightforward guitar-rock underpinning and allow strange, spacious moments to burble up from within.

II Trill is a solid and occasionally great record, an album more directed toward car-stereo utility than bedroom contemplation.

In a way, they don't even try to [reconcile their spotlight-swallowing energy], and that makes No, Virginia... an album on par with the Dolls' two fully conceived LPs.

Unfortunately there aren't a lot of opportunities to get caught in that lovely crossfire on Re-Arrange Us, a record that, for all its lush bells and whistles, finds the pair sounding as bare-boned and sparse as you'd expect a two-person band to be.

Freedom Wind includes three of the four songs on the Explorers Club's original EP, and it partly fulfills that record's promise.

Lie Down may be Oldham's most country record of new songs in years, and it's also one of his most accessible and least academic records.

El Rey has its share of surprises, mostly in the vein of its particular subject, which is the cruelty older men visit on younger women, and vice versa. But mostly it's merely another Wedding Present record: witty, randy, guitar-heavy, and not quite satisfied.

Trading layers of mood and melody and meaning for layers of Pro Tooled artifice, French Kicks have razored off the bullshit, leaving a core of beguilingly honest tunes.

Unfortunately, Inherit tries to give the listener both of these great tastes at once, resulting in a combination that's less like chocolate and peanut butter, and more like toothpaste and orange juice.

As far as mainstream pop-rock records go, Brain Thrust Mastery occasionally gets the job done.

At times, the maturation feels forced; the more adventurous moments here are experimental only for such a high-profile group, and they don't play to Gibbard's sentimental, word-weighing strengths.

Thing of the Past is a perfectly pleasant, well-produced album that offers an authorized version of what Vetiver fans already unofficially know about the band.

If you isolate any random 45 seconds of Directions to See a Ghost's 70 minutes, you'll definitely be compelled to listen for another few minutes--after which time you'll probably start waiting for a solo or a shift in tone that might not even come.

For what is in essence the ultimate expression of inadequacy, self-loathing, failure, and impotence, 12 Angry Months is a tough little thing.

Throughout the album, glimmers of invention and humor are allowed to shine through.

With their frantic, rushed rhymes, and beats which are a bit too eager to please, the Kidz may be popular. But if they want to any cred they're going to have to learn to be themselves.

Way is a humble first step in what sounds like a glorious new trip, where the really well played guitar becomes something else entirely.

What it lacks in a unified style it makes up for in a referential (and reverential) enthusiasm that anyone with a subscription to Wax Poetics should recognize as an individualized, well-crafted love letter to funk gone by--and funk yet to come.

The good news is that the band's official debut (following the 2007 collection "Wind And The Swell") is still a solid art-pop album at its core, and importantly, more "American Gangster" than "The Crane Wife."