But forget about style and charisma: This band has no hooks and no energy.

Wind in the Wires is like Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn if Nick Cave had made it, a fertile nexus of tradition, technology, and Wolf's powerful pipes.

The Evens positively brims with revelations, not least of which is the consistent effectiveness of MacKaye's singing voice.

Sadly missing here is Ash's sense of vulnerability, a key element to their charm.

Kasabian is brash, loutish, and seems liable at times to cut you; the consistent kick drum beat throughout it is like a great party's heartbeat. But like the roustabout in the corner, drinking all the lager and scratching up your old records, it can be more loudmouthed than substantial.

A restful wash of clean, simple lines, unfractured beats, and neon-tinted melodies.

It's fantastic stuff-- at its best, the innate catchiness of Hersh's writing gets a shot in the arm from her cavalier vocals and musical caterwauling.

No Wow steps up to the promise of their EPs and debut LP, a boisterous reminder that kids can still hook up to songs that are little more than a guitar and attitude.

Set Yourself on Fire is about breaking up and breaking down, and as such the album feels wontedly cathartic, like the moments right after you hit your emotional nadir and start getting your shit together. Stars handle the mood delicately with few slip-ups; my only complaint is that they never handle much of anything else.

Forget the details: The sheer comfort of this stuff can charm just about anyone, from the rock bar to the office to your grandma's house.

[An] entertaining, varied rock record.

Hurricane Bar has diluted the two things that made Mando Diao's first album distinct: immediacy and a sense of fun.

Sounds a hell of a lot like Stereolab.

The Massacre's best tracks have 50 dropping club-clatter and gangster lean to show us the mind behind the six-pack, gat, and Teflon.

In the three years since Last Broadcast, Doves have cultivated a better understanding of their strengths and limitations, and Some Cities beams with a revivified looseness.

A homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity.

The album tries to conjure the anchorlessness of travel, but instead it sounds oddly weightless, floating by pleasantly but unobtrusively and rarely demanding your attention.

There's a wealth of great material here... all diminished, to various degrees, by genre affectations.

Back to Me is a bolder album [than Failer], with Edwards figuring more prominently and actively in the more personal songs.

There's nothing terribly new to the electro-psych sound he's worked up for himself-- it actually throws back quite a bit to the Roses-- but here he has a clutch of great melodies for him to hang his honey-dipped voice on, and he delivers those nicely.

The album's one redeeming element is the band itself, who-- over the course of one EP and two albums-- have improved tenfold.

The most satisfying and sheerly transfixing work of the twosome's career.

Regrettably, no other song here has a lyric nearly as compelling as "Andalucia"-- a major flaw for what is essentially a pedal steel-enhanced singer/songwriter album.

This one is just a little tiny bit less perfectly imperfect than [Transfiguration of Vincent], but it's still got all the warmth and gentle disorganization of its predecessor-- with a few more oomphy tracks standing in for Tranfiguration's most introspective meditations.

Green's self-consciously dweeby vocals hang his off-kilter lyrics like a doomed curveball.

End of Love isn't Barzalay's best collection of songs, and the production tends to gloss over the instruments so songs like "Collapse" and "When We Become" sound subdued and blandly unobtrusive.

Can't remember many bands whose B-sides/rarities comp things I liked as much as their full-lengths, but here's one.

What Garnier can lack in feeling, he makes up for with years of technical know-how, on The Cloud Making Machine as before.