A flawed, overlong, hypocritical, egotistical, and altogether terrific album.

Forget Yourself is no small resurrection, and though it owes a great deal to The Church's traditionalism, that's nothing to apologize for.

Ghost have emerged as one of the most formidable (and important) rock bands I know. And Hypnotic Underworld is their rollicking masterwork.

Equally inspired by The Raincoats and Jacques Brel, The Power Out veers from one inspired genre tribute to the next, if it never quite cements the band's identity.

We Shall All Be Healed is complacent, formulaic for a trailblazer, lapped by Destroyer, optimistic-but-joyless in that it is pessimistic-but-punchy, and gooped with the silly putty of vagueness and cliché.

Each of these songs displays a mastery of craft rarely heard.

Me First proves to be a remarkably consistent and memorable listen.

While The Grey Album is truly one of the more interesting pirate mashups ever done, it ultimately fails at the hands of perfectionism with several pieces sounding rushed to beat some other knucklehead to his clever idea.

This is music just about anyone can enjoy, either for close listening or simply ambient sound.

The Posterkids sound positively ageless through No More Songs about Sleep and Fire, not having missed a flailing beat through the intervening years of decreasing tempos.

This may be Herren's least accessible project to date.

The album's chilling resonance is due in part to Godrich's anagogical recording of minimal instrumentation and digitally etiolated detail.

So while Delìrivm Cordìa is filled with great blocks of sound, it too often loses sight of direction.

It's here, about halfway through this four-disc set, that most people will turn off Join the Dots.

Cast of Thousands rides the borders of sentimentality expertly-- Elbow's new-found hope in unity may seem like idealistic drivel on paper, but is carried off on record with refreshing determination.

Obviously, Twista's not breaking down any walls with his wordplay on Kamikaze, but along the way he kicks over a few garbage cans while letting Kanye West, Toxic and the rest of his production crew move some crowds and elevate their status, one slow jam at a time.

Defiantly sappy, Silence Is Easy survives mostly on Walsh's oddly graceful singing. Unfortunately, the music on the whole is prosaic, even boring at times.

Another in a line of accomplished, eternally pleasant and intermittently brilliant Stereolab records.

A flatulent, irrelevant, self-indulgent attempt at recapturing the hotwired spontaneity of their debut through a dirge of sub-par psychedelia and try-hard freakouts.

Secret Wars is the first step toward the combination of Oneida's monolithic psych-rock and the numbing riff iteration they've spent so long deriving.

Even as Punk Rock shows that The Mekons have far better musicians today than when they were first fumbling around with Gang of Four's instruments, it also proves they're better songwriters.

Dalley possesses neither heart nor soul as a lead vocalist, and his milk-warm emotional outpouring of tiresome, overwrought subject matter could get lost in a crowd of two.

With Califone's penchant for extemporaneous creation finally being properly indulged, Heron King Blues is an appropriately loose and sprawling record, requiring a bit more patience than some of the band's previous projects.

As a singer, he's remarkable and distinctive, and on Cellar Door, he explores the range and impact of his voice to great effect.

An epic, sweeping cycle of songs that's completely over the top-- usually in the best possible way.

Just as Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" was perfect for the suicide-attempt scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, any song on this album would complement a still-photo montage of a prolonged labor ending in a miscarriage.

Captures a portion of the wispy bedsit magic that used to mark some of The Field Mice's best work and boosts it with the lush, "Hazey Jane II"-like chamber-pop of Belle & Sebastian's first flourishes of glory.

Dizzee's despairing wail, focused anger, and cutting sonics places him on the front lines in the battle against a stultifying Britain, just as Pete Townshend, Johnny Rotten, and Morrissey have been in the past.