Rise Above will drop plenty of jaws, and, like Deerhoof, Dirty Projectors are restructuring rock on a compositional level rather than a sonic one.

Wiley has kept his formula mostly intact: skittering, hiccuping bounce rhythms, synths that sound like a turbocharged Super Nintendo with a subwoofer attached, and a manic, borderline-toasting flow that plows through everything in its path.

SMD's excellent debut album as a stand-alone group, Attack Decay Sustain Release, is for dancing, not moshing.

Help Wanted Nights finally finds Kasher challenging himself again, imposing constraints and seeing how well he can work within them.

While Yow's performance is consistently excellent, it doesn't always seem to further the cause of the music; there are too many moments on Love's Miracle that effectively reduce Qui's extremely talented instrumentalists to a backing band and the inimitable Yow to a sideshow.

If there's a gripe to be had with them, it's that a surface listen reveals a whole lot of lovely tones and not much else, and Autumn of the Seraphs is just as uniformly gorgeous and tasteful as any Pinback record.

Pollock is clearly in her comfort zone here, both vocally and musically.

Good Bad Not Evil is the record where naysayers, disinterested friends and acquaintances, and anyone else within earshot has to sit up, shut up, and listen.

The sound is as warm and rich as could be expected from a craftsman of this caliber--David Piltch's upright bass tone alone should be bottled and sold to the highest bidder--but musically and melodically Civilians falls short of making much of a connection itself.

The more succinct songs on North Star Deserter sound like a return to the dark woods after years in the city.

Unless you're a diehard retro-rock fan, you might want to leave this figurine in its natural environment: on the shelf.

The album is not as wholly satisfying as either "Clandestino" or "Esperanza," mostly due to a handful of truncated, underdeveloped tracks toward the end, but it's still full of excellent songs and inspired collisions.

Harris reduces pop's limitless possibilities to one-joke self-parody, his youth his most distinguishing characteristic, an unremembered yesterday always more vibrant than today.

Going Way Out With Heavy Trash is a lot of things-- wild, aged, loose, dangerous, ridiculous, respectful-- but it's not a joke. Even if it is kinda funny.

If it doesn't quite confound like "They Were Wrong" or thrill like "Drum's Not Dead," Liars still finds the band ignoring whatever you thought you wanted or needed from them, and doing what they damn well please.

Beats-first, lyrics-second people have enough here to return to, and lyric freaks know there's plenty here to unpack.

It was a mistake for VHS or Beta to subjugate their dance beat into a perfunctory structure for the guitars to smash against; the riffs sound like they're there for their own sake, biding their time and waiting for a moment of catchiness that never really arrives.

Madson finally strikes an equitable balance with Level Live Wires, a tightly constructed soundscape that hangs together more cogently than anything he's conceived to date.

Calling them wack MCs isn't saying much though--they're the only MCs of their kind, competing only against themselves. No wonder they make music that sounds like it was made in a void: heart in the right place, perforated with off-key singing and C-grade rapping.

On We Are Him--Gira's sixth and arguably most engaging album as Angels of Light--he lands some of the best of those complete releases.

The abbreviated runtime of Places Like This makes it seem as though they could have given their ideas more space to breathe, rather than piling them up like a stack of pancakes.

Kala is clattering, buzzy, and sonically audacious.

Challengers tracks end with uncharacteristic whimpers instead of bangs.

Either they're utterly serious about their flirtation with the mainstream or they're taking the piss with a wink. In both cases, the songs suffer a smothering slow death by context.

Andorra will undoubtedly win Caribou a lot of new fans and rightfully so; it's a big, bold, tuneful collection that impresses with its ambition and meticulous arrangement.

He's made a nice to return to form, crafting a mature album that nods to his past without being a retread.

Hair finds Imperial Teen in full-bore navel gazing mode, talking both obliquely and directly about where they are and, more importantly, how they got there.

There are still bands like Earlimart, quietly chugging away in Los Angeles and preserving the West Coast sound with a spirit that's more than just curatorial, as Mentor Tormentor elegantly shows.