Steingarten is a nearly perfect album.

As exhilarating as Fourteen Autumns is at its most anthemic, the vividness of the lyrical themes ultimately carries the record over.

Klaxons' lyrical pretensions, alas, can be a reminder why the best house and trance music often emphasizes atmosphere over meaning.

There are moments of clarity when the band sounds fantastic, but they're not enough to save the record from landing in the band's forget pile.

The central flaw of Mob-- and it's a profound one-- is that its attempt to refine Employment's boundless levels of boyish vigor with introspection and intellect comes across as tired and bored.

The record grows soggy with Veirs' over-reliance on nautical themes.

There's virtually zero worth to this album, a combination of zealous experiments with Garage Band and would-be Music and Lyrics soundtrack cuts.

The problem with Buck the World is that it's largely inconsistent. There are 15 producers over 17 tracks. Sometimes it clicks, but other times it feels forced.

The album doesn't have any of the euphorically propulsive standout tracks that held Redman's older albums together.

What it is is the announcement of a stunning and unexpected late-career renaissance; Prodigy is tapping back into the fearsome frustration that once drove him.

On his lonesome Anderson is oppressively unimaginative.

While Pale Young Gentlemen is frontloaded and slightly naïve like a record of this sort should be, there's more than enough reason to anticipate what they're capable of when they decide to get darker, older, and less gentle.

As close to a perfect hybrid of dance and rock music's values as you're likely to ever hear.

Another solid (if not necessarily great) record.

I doubt Low fans who've held on this long will rebel against these new textures, more the way they're employed-- the band has added an almost disconcerting levity, and subtracted the gentleness.

So despite a pretty high hit/miss ratio, as a big-step-forward record, Living ain't exactly Armed Forces.

Armchair Apocrypha is ultimately another object of strange and unique beauty from this inventive songwriter and performer.

It's a little disappointing that none of the band's stylistic shifts have let them bloom into much more, but as furrows for ploughing go, this one's still pretty fascinating, and still all theirs.

It's a scary, difficult album, but one well suited for our times.

At this point in her career, Thorn shouldn't be courting the middle, and considering the best moments on Out of the Woods, she didn't have to, either.

It's plenty catchy and big, but it's also wildly uncreative and predictable.

The underlying problem here seems to be that Hebden still isn't comfortable in his own skin while improvising, with Reid or otherwise.

You can feel the warmth pouring out of the music.

Ruff Draft still feels like a limited-edition collectors-only curiosity.

The group's size makes the white-robed hordes of Polyphonic Spree an obvious comparison, but I'm From Barcelona's taut songwriting renders their numbers largely incidental-- these songs were meant to be shared by many voices.

The Ponys make good records, and Turn the Lights Out is no exception, but I'm still waiting on the great one I've always felt they'd had in them.

But if this introduction presents a retreat from the heavy metal parking lot, the rest of Western Xterminator returns to the usual spot and sets up a permanent trailer-home in it, with the 70s-Stones sleaze of Herrema's former band all but vanquished for a full-on 80s headbanger's ball pitched halfway between Sunset Strip flash and New Wave of British Heavy Metal thrash.

The brooding mid-mid-tempo pacing and smoky classic-rock guitar grandeur set a table for some serious moping.