The purpose of Clues wasn’t to outshine Penner or Reed’s past successes, but to make great new music. And on Clues, they do just that.

In the case of Super Animal Brothers III, you can either sit down and dismiss Ear Pwr for daring to play a game with the music, or you can see the state of the board for what it is and roll the dice.

It’s a noise-rock album you can play without annoying your friends, but it won’t aggravate the Tortoise worshipers in your group, either.

Throughout the course of Quicken the Heart, Maximo Park prove they still haven’t rectified their quivering post-punk with the anthems they are concurrently and desperately trying to craft. But despite that conflict, they can still occasionally pull it together long enough to bang out some good ones.

After all is said and done, the Meat Puppets have succeeded in making an album that maintains their iconoclastic reputation, but mostly just rocks.

While not as hybrid as Abe Vigoda nor as melodic as Jay Reatard, these women kick out a place in the musical universe through sheer, happy, blasting audacity.

The album is at once sparse yet warm and layered, lush and thick lipped, engorged with beauty. The Church have proven yet again they are masters of dreamy and dark rock, prolific and inventive.

I Feel Cream is a force of positive motion that addresses criticism with the sonic equivalent of a bitch slap.

Spoils contains enough perverse and engaging lyrical quirks to make it worthy of investigation, and who can resist lines like: “And here’s the dowry of the leper/ A walnut shell and a peck of pepper” (from 'Hazel Forks').

On their fourth album, Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free, they've simultaneously intensified and refined that blend, even as they've shaved off one of their original four members.

With their third album, Entertainment, they succeed best whenever they are warming up their familiar electro sound with pop elements rather than aping worldly sophistication.

Like the rest of Primary Colours, this is the sound of a band finding themselves out of favor and having to really strive for greatness. The Horrors will still have a hard time winning over new converts, but they’ve done a magnificent job of confounding expectations with this release.

Outside Love is brilliant, disturbing and powerful.

This is perhaps the first Isis album since Oceanic that both demands and inspires repeat listens. It might very well be Isis’s best work to date. At the very least, Wavering Radiant affirms that we still have good reason to follow the band's every move.

Here, they sound polished and crisp, which is a remarkable change from other issues of these recordings. Presumably the band is happy sounding this way, but it often feels a little too clean.

Balf Quarry, their first album for Drag City, isn’t going to put a halt to those Sonic Youth comparisons. They’ve steadfastly stuck with the sound created on the Boss album for most of this venture.

That darker side of Persson gives Colonia many of its most beautiful moments and includes some of her best vocal work to date.

This crackling album stands to remind that the man can still rock like all hell.

This is an album that’s extremely clean--the spic-and-span sonics might be the work of producer Michael Patterson. Even if it might help Great Northern achieve some broader success, all that cleansing has buffed away much of the band’s character.

Therein lies the personality crisis of Jackson Hill: The sole connecting thread for all these tunes is a band whose love for its craft just barely surpasses what a hodgepodge mess it often is.

There is a tension inherent in the contrast between such well-known artists that makes for interesting possibilities. Moderat do well here by playing off of this tension while creating highly listenable songs.

In the end, though, this is an unnecessary album that only clutters Folds's discography.

Though the quality on theFREEhoudini is extremely variable, fans of underground rap will likely find little to complain about, and even casual observers of the movement will be able to find several undeniably impressive songs.

There are fewer moments of reckless genre experiments on Touchdown than there were on past Brakes efforts, and when there are, they feel purposeful, like the band had some alt-country (or quick punk song) quota to fill.

Two albums later, on yet another ingeniously titled album, Art Brut vs. Satan, the band members have done something no one expected: They’ve turned into socially conscious critics of their woebegone generation without losing the charm that made fans love them in the first place.

Though Manchester Orchestra’s dedication points to the possibility of good things in the future, Mean Everything to Nothing falls largely flat.

None of the band’s stylistic flourishes are pulled off well enough to convince you they could do one style effectively, nonetheless the 10 they try out here.

Over the course of one great LP (2004’s "Underachievers Please Try Harder"), one pretty great one (2006’s "Let’s Get Out of This Country"), and now My Maudlin Career, Camera Obscura have arrived at a sound centered on Campbell’s self-reflective loneliness and their lifting of all the best of ‘60s music--a sound they own by themselves.

It is totally listenable and, to relay a personal anecdote, sounded highly appropriate at a recent social gathering.

Though there are some uneven points, particularly when Thornton tries to project straight pathos or regret, The Boxmasters prove once again that they are much more than a celebrity vanity project.

The more conventional tracks prevent the album from reaching a true fever pitch, but even they are elevated by Maria's primal wail.

Dance Mother leaves many unanswered questions. But a safe bet is that Telepathe have more tricks up their sleeves.

This may not have any of the hard-hitting jabs his best Smog records had, but I Wish We Were An Eagle is a subtler, more bittersweet heartbreak.

By coloring within the lines of dream pop Quever has recorded a pleasant release but not necessarily one that goes beyond the normality of his band's moniker.

The frequent presence of full-time collaborator Nancy Whang's voice on many of the songs adds an extra element of melody that largely sees the record's intention true to the end.

Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian is supposed to sound like a DJ set from an extra-terrestrial, but it often comes off as a random smattering of thoughts from an over-stimulated producer.

Despite these head-scratching derailments, 200 Tons of Bad Luck brings the gloom in Biblical doses.

It’s the ultimate inner battle of good and evil, one that even the best of us wrestle with when making ourselves vulnerable to the entanglements and snares of love, and one that Khan has found her most confident and enthralling voice in yet.

Anyone who has found beauty in a chipped tooth or a grazed knee will find much to love here. Jewellery certainly doesn’t suffer from a paucity of ideas, and the lyrical subjects are more than a match for the band’s heterogeneous musical leanings.

Now We Can See might not be fist-clenching Thermals fans’ first choice, but it shows there’s way, way more to the band than fist pumping yellers. They’re built for the long haul.

At times, the band outdoes itself even by its own standards.

Repo isn’t a great progression from previous Black Dice records. But their willfully amateurish approach, and a continued fascination with the coarse and the crude, make this another welcome addition to their woozy, dog-eared oeuvre.

This album, with all its unmoored, frenetic energy, is a fantastic pop album, even if it doesn't posit anything new.

The elements that make the band's performances distinct are all there: Finn’s rapid-fire, sometimes nearly incoherent delivery; the chemistry between the band members; the between-song banter that is equal parts inviting and human and kind of crazy.

When It Hugs Back do get loud, like on album highlight 'Back Down,' they show flashes of talent and vitality that they never let show between the purposefully considered and quiet haze that dominates way too much of Inside Your Guitar.

The album's strength really, is evoking so strongly the excessive, lonely culture that the music comes from.

It’s Blitz is representative of Yeah Yeah Yeahs tightening as an unit and delivering their best album to date.

An album of sporadic delights much like Dance Hall at Louse Point , this is a footnote in Harvey’s career, but not one that’s entirely unworthy of investigation.

Living Thing isn’t easy listening, it functions best on headphones, and it doesn’t contain an obvious single. But music should be challenging.

It may be the weakest album in their catalog.

The ambition to put out a decent club album is a laudable effort, but Thunderheist falls into many of the same pitfalls that a lot of the genre's output does.

It's more like easy listening with a funk flare, and, like all easy-listening, there are times when it falls decidedly flat.

The second half of Good Evening picks up and runs right off, with the hooks hiding under all the reverb and fuzz starting to scratch at the surface with a fair amount of urgency.

When Dekkar slows things down, it feels like a choice and not a limitation. He and his band never missed with their first three albums, but they've made some necessary discoveries on this one.

Even amidst amazing production by her friends Christoffer Berg and Van Rivers & the Subliminal Kid, the minimally arranged Fever Ray is best swallowed when Andersson distorts her vocal effects.

It essentially exposes Doherty’s biggest weaknesses: his trite lyrics, his less than perfect voice, and his inability to sound interested in anything he’s doing not under the title "Libertines."

Bromst annihilates all the expectations that have come to be expected of Deacon, without abandoning what made him everyone’s favorite dance-party czar.

Where past Decemberists albums rewarded delving deeply into the milieu The Decemberists had created, Hazards of Love fails to provide much worth that probing.

Kicks is less of a cocky triumph, but it still cements 1990s’ position as the torchbearers for no-nonsense Brit-pop.

The Indigo Girls prove themselves, again, to be artists whose metaphoric turns of phrases evoke a hard-up world and invoke a more meaningful existence.

As a debut, In a Perfect World... does show promise amongst several solid songs and is a proper introduction, but a more distinct line between Hilson as a songwriter and Hilson as an artist will be needed to make the next album more engaging and fresh.

Fuckbook is the best joke fake lo-fi cover album since Pussy Galore’s Exile, except with the added irony of the roasters becoming the roastees.

That the group’s second effort, Enemy Mine, is able to accommodate all three distinct voices in only nine tracks is even more remarkable. But that Enemy Mine is a firm step sideways is less so.

Nothing sticks. The only times you’ll be tempted to rewind is when Jones says something stupid, which is often.

Listening to his simple melodies, uncomplicated structures and often disinterested vocals, the cool with which Jay approaches Slow Dance is unmistakable, and it is largely the single element that carries the album.

Part of what makes it so distinctive is also what ultimately frustrates. The songs bleed into one another until the reverb-drenched vocals and phantasmic spirals of sound become heavy-handed, almost overwhelming.

"Majestic" is a word often used to describe Mono, and this record, the band's fifth, will not challenge us to avoid using it.

In reality, Technicolor Health is a remarkably eclectic, dynamic album even in its use of rather obvious launching points.

This clash of the sincere and the facetious that makes Beware such a disconcerting album.

A few tracks here sound less like fully developed songs and more like a college-age kid tinkering with a four-track, but overall, Williams hits more than he misses.

This approach has certainly made Shaw’s music more palatable, but his tinkering in the studio (he’s an accomplished tech head; just check out this interview and try to stay awake) has mostly drained his music of any emotional resonance.

For the most part, Tomorrow Today is a pleasing addition to the ranks of retro-futurist pop records, it just lacks the rough edges that make the best Broadcast, Pram and Stereolab songs resonate so strongly.

There is something else weaving through all of this, that other mysterious thing that some great records have, that keeps you going back even while you know that whatever vocabulary you come up with, whatever modifier you hang on the album, will be inadequate.

Timbaland rose to the challenge of making Chris Cornell a solo star by producing arguably the worst album he’s ever had a hand in.

There’s an emotional heft here that wasn’t present before.

Except for the intense, melodramatic middle mentioned above, every other track on this album could be a successful single.

Yes, it feels like she's lost some of the youthful pop and punch that she had almost a decade ago, but the reason why Mirah's sincerity feels like such a big deal is because her songs are like friends.

while Thank You Very Quickly is not shy about facing the challenges and horrors of certain parts of the world, it is defiant in its love for life in spite of struggle. It proclaims the power of working together and leaning on one another, no matter the circumstances.

Perkins has proven himself to be a versatile, surprising and compelling songwriter. On Elvis Perkins In Dearland, he walks the thin line between charming entertainer and confessional songwriter beautifully.

Tim Hecker’s beautiful meditations are inviting but still retain the edge of a seeker that isn’t quite finished with the trip.

Rockwell is a promising debut, and she’ll be wise to stick to the road less traveled on future excursions.

Song of the Pearl marks a nice transition for these guys, but it ends up sounding like it could have been more.

Benjamin Verdoes and his bandmates have put together a debut of impressive songs that can be infectious and inviting, but also caustic and surprising.

Ali can do this, can take the familiar, the overly confrontational, even the trite and overdone, and make it riveting, because he has a voice that strains syllables so that the meanings of his words are made perfectly clear--you can't escape what he's saying--and a flow that loads and unleashes relentlessly.

The odd bits and bobs typical of the 7-inch and B-side world manage to make Advance Base Battery Life a little more interesting than Owen Ashworth's previous work.

With an ear pointed to the type of gritty urban centers depicted on the album cover, Dirty Bomb references dubstep, baile funk, breakcore, North African drum patterns, Arabic folk music and Bollywood strings. And it will devastate your subwoofer.

Mystery, a four-song warning shot of an EP, completes the cycle of hype. Duck and cover, y’all: Something wicked this way comes.

By this point, it's within their rights to utilize pieces of their past in building a new present for themselves, as long as they don't half-ass it and start turning out inferior remakes of their old tunes. That's not what's going on here, and if anything, No Line is ultimately a more visceral and memorable effort than either of the band's other two 21st century offerings.

When Machines Exceed Human Intelligence contains some of the most interesting bass-centered tracks to come out in some time, and represents a progression in the current bass scene as a whole, no matter what specific genre each track belongs to.

Take My Breath Away is a techno album, and it will probably be listened to either by people who know what they’re getting into or anonymously at a bar on the Lower East Side.

C'est Com..Com..Complique is superb, a monument that could only have been sculpted by the group's original hands.

Little Hells still works from start to finish, but if that's the case, then it's pretty good for process output.

At its weary, lovely close, it becomes clear that Live belongs not to the listener but to the artist who created it. And that makes this album one of the most vital and electric he's made in years.

200 Million Thousand has more hooks and is better top-to-bottom than any previous Black Lips effort.

Taken as a whole, the music on Hungry Bird is at times lovely, but also has the tendency to become unsettling.

When it works, Temple stuns. Unfortunately, it seems he's also chosen to pad this album with formless sound collages and white-noise excursions, diluting what would have been a stellar EP's worth of material.

The Joe Budden on Padded Room, however, is focused and hungry, spinning dense, psychological yarns that build for dozens and dozens of bars. Budden scratched and clawed for his second chance, and he hasn’t squandered it.

Unfortunately, it takes quite a bit of effort to sift through 30 such songs to find the more immediately arresting moments. The sugar-rush aesthetic grows tiresome over the course of the record and threatens to overshadow the more sublime moments.