Plants and Animals may not be the first band to put Montreal on the musical map, but, with this album's there's-no-place-like-home vibe, they are certainly the first to celebrate it so warmly

While Cave represents a return to form, the band hasn't recaptured the beauty of early highlights like 'When the Red King Comes' or 'A Dream in Sound.'

Overall, it's this sense of forced importance that makes the album no fun: You feel like it's meant to do something to you, not for you.

Sixteen meaty songs strong, the album is part slightly-fictionalized tour diary, part rumination on unrealized success and finding fun in the day-to-day.

Guillemots cram themselves into awkward fits, and Dangerfield has to squeeze the hardest--whether he's tying himself to a straightforward ballad instead of clamoring for the rooftops, or standing up for a fight when he's so much more comfortable slipping into a dream.

The guitar work here is still ten times rangier and more inventive than you'd expect, but it takes a few very professional steps back, nailing down its snappy flourishes amid ecstatic "whoo!"s, new-wave poses, and occasional clouds of glitter and confetti.

Beat Pyramid proves to be an affirming and promising first step.

It's a great trick of rearranging that pulls back the curtain dramatically, but nearly every other song on Midnight Boom seems to be waiting for this kind of moment, losing it to a pile on the cutting-room floor.

TID might be Bejar's most pompous, profane, and pastoral record, but it's also his least "intelligent," rational, or linearly clever.

Something mysteriously blocks this very good record from being great.

Sounds and ideas repeat constantly, yet Street Horrrsing never feels redundant.

After a handful of other singles and remixes, the full-length debut Reality Check still can't match the Teenagers' first time, but it shows a developing group with their own distinct take on misspent youth in the era of free internet porn.

This album might be more focused than its predecessor, but what it's focused on is a the kind of murky, paranoid weight and depth that doesn't much make for chart-climbing singles.

Deschanel is more convincing when she's on an extreme end of romance--either losing it or being swept into it--than when she's trying to rationalize it.

They don't stay in one place for too long, but the body of the album can be distilled to an essence of the glassy, ten-lane stare of Last Exit with Ed Banger's egg-frying EQ.

Listeners looking for lyrical meaning will still be disappointed, searching in vain for hidden significance in these nonsensical love song lines. A word of advice: It's best to just accept his words as conduits for his dreamy voice, and give in to his charming tunes.

Magnetic Fields-like numbers 'Winter' and 'Undeclared' seem vanilla by comparison to some, but by making room for both, Visiter ends up being one of the most welcoming (and welcome) records of 2008 so far.

Now, uneven or not, the songs seem to breathe on their own, benefiting from a shot of rhythm and a healthy sweat.

As for his lyrics, it's wrong to call them stream-of-consciousness, since that implies Wolf is a poor self-editor; nothing about Alopecia is lazy. It's more like 5 a.m. journal entries cut up and turned to collage.

"Why Did You Leave Me' and 'Can't Say Goodbye' are some grown-up songs, and Snoop probably has a whole album of them somewhere in him. But as long as the pothead-pimp shtick keeps selling, we'll probably never hear it.

Trilla, Rick Ross's inexplicable second album, is every bit a fatty contemporary American disaster.

Still, for an album that pushes the limits of how much you can say about so little, the stuff that's said rarely fails to be entertaining in the pure linguistically structural sense.

Rife with suspense, drama, and a grisly cast of characters, Voyager's probably more likely to ignite your inner playwright than get your foot tapping, but it's still a cathartic rush all the same.

There's more to diskJokke than bulletproof connections; his spacey electro-disco is technically impressive and effortlessly appealing.

It's a decidedly bummer affair, and even though the aggressive tempos suggest they're willing to fight against the crushing weight of existence, there's no relief to be found anywhere in Dartnall's lyrics--not in material goods, not in your fellow man, and certainly not in romance.

Bauhaus can hold their head high, mission accomplished; but with no victory-lap tour, no more studio albums, and several awesome new tunes pointing at an un-actualized future, it all feels rather anti-climatic and lacking closure.

Like hearing DLR's lonely voice doing its best in the absence of accompaniment, most of Robotique is just sort of depressing.

Real Emotional Trash is determinedly unified, even if it isn't always clear to what ends. At its best, the record hints at opening a whole new musical world for Malkmus--one in which his well-worn style is effectively played down in the service of a mighty rock'n'roll band.