As producer, songwriter and persona, Dear has come into his own with Asa Breed, a bootstrapping album that not only reveals the miles walked, but an ambitious road map ahead.

Can't Wait Another Day would be easier to love if it didn't keep accidentally signposting a shortage of fresh songwriting ideas.

Even at their silliest, even when they're treading water, no one else sounds quite like Shellac, and anyone who professes to be a serious music fan without having spent quality time with the band's albums should be forced to familiarize themselves. This just wouldn't be the first record I'd force on them.

In a sense, it seems more apropos to judge Double Up as a comedy record than as a pop record.

Like those on their last album, these songs reveal themselves gradually but surely, building to the inevitable moment when they hit you in the gut. It's the rare album that gives back whatever you put into it.

Mirrored is a breathtaking aesthetic left-turn that sounds less like rock circa 2007 than rock circa 2097, a world where Marshall stacks and micro-processing go hand in hand.

The majority of the record's new tracks need to either be more focused or show more dynamic range.

Toying with sound and rhythm, noise and melody, Square is less minimalist than Hope, more fractured than Second.

As annoying as Endicott's mascara-tainted bellyaching was on the Bravery's debut, his histrionics-for-the-masses commandeer the group's stylistic direction on The Sun and the Moon, cheapening already trite regurgitations of Robert Smith confessionals by bloating them to anthemic proportions.

Boeckner most excels when he works alongside someone who provides a stronger contrast. In Wolf Parade, Spencer Krug helps provide that balance; without Boeckner's typical foil, the results remain impressive, if not quite as compelling.

It's a great debut for a band with an impressive, distinctive sound.

Five Roses reveals Van Pelt as a talented producer who knows his way around summery pop songs.

Such frequent attempts to elevate the banal into the meaningful ultimately keep Release the Stars from achieving any significant momentum and only add weight to the notion that Wainwright's shaky aim-- rather than his lack of talent-- might be his biggest downfall.

An album of unapologetic straightforwardness, Sky Blue Sky nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise.

Its few missteps are well balanced by a handful of blissful, seismic bright pockets.

Gone are the gimmicky fragments and Mcluskyesque scene-jabs. The Beatific Visions is dominated by direly catchy and fully fleshed-out songs that pop like punk, lilt like country, mutter politics, and reek of the garage.

With their new album, Maxïmo Park avoid both utter disaster and absolute success by playing it safe. Nice and safe.

Where even her most divisive albums have managed to push her artistic boundaries, Volta feels limp and strangely empty-- almost unfinished.

God Save the Clientele sounds like the work of the same band, but it shows them in a new, brighter light, broadened in both sound and outlook. In terms of sonics and tunes, these changes are welcome and logical, expanding upon the sound with which they made their name without sacrificing intimacy or risking coming across overcooked.

On No Shouts, No Calls, the Krautrock-esque sonics of the band's last album have been fused with The Power Out's flair for continental pop, but it's the guitars that sing loudest.

That it still sounds mischievous and human through the band's studious chops and omnivorous listening habits is no small feat, as these qualities have eluded them for quite a while.

Mice Parade still finds Pierce working in a distinctive space, less jazzy than fellow post-rock vets the Sea & Cake but more atmospherically nuanced than typical acoustic singer/songwriters, but it's hardly the most appropriate release to bear the Mice Parade name.

Phrases like "rare talent" are thrown around all the time these days, but this compilation makes painfully clear just how unique and valuable this music is.

While the first half of the record is promising, however, the band loses steam toward the end.

The old Francis, the quirky, quipping storyteller, triumphantly returns on Human the Death Dance... to his unique blend of diaristic, down-to-earth meditations, eerie soundscapes, and loopy abstraction.

As big as the heart-swelling hooks get, though, Fields are more memorable when they let their early-1970s folk ghosts creep into the corners of their songs like dusty cobwebs.

These tracks... show an entirely new side of Wolf: one that finally puts impeccable pop songcraft ahead of lachrymose keening.

BRMC is a big, dumb band who writes big, dumb songs.