These new songs have lofty melodic ambitions but aren’t dedicated to the kind of journeying Ward’s lyrics imply.

With music this uniformly entertaining, it’s best just to quiet down and let the former Stephen Patrick Morrissey do the talking. That's what Years of Refusal confirms as his greatest strength, anyway.

As far as listening experiences go, you can certainly do a lot worse than sitting back in your chair, being consistently affected by Asobi Seksu's sunlit wandering. Unfortunately, it would probably be better for Hush if the band stepped into the shadows every once in a while.

The Spirit of Apollo is what happens when you pack 40 guest appearances onto a single album and expect their charisma alone to make something intriguing. It’s a huge gamble, and one The Spirit of Apollo lost.

A subtle, intricate album that simply gets better with every listen. A bittersweet pleasure from beginning to end.

The thickset blues-rock of Havilah, the fifth studio album from the Drones, makes for opaque and impenetrable listening.

The poetry on To Be Still is sometimes a bit too delicate for my taste, but the songs show off much more than words alone. They display a quirky vocal talent and songwriting skill.

Vidal’s newfound penchant for quiet introspection, providing a fantastic centerpiece to this EP, which contains more riveting ideas and modes of expression than most full-length albums.

There’s a certain history-capturing aspiration here, as if the album's purpose wasn’t just for charity, to move records, or for Dessner to get together with his pals to compile an album but to provide a musical time capsule that in 20 years could allow younger generations to get into indie rock from the early 21st century. If that was how compilation albums were solely judged, Dark Was the Night would be the gold standard.

The only major drawback with Come Back to the Five and Dime, Bobby Dee Bobby Dee is that Ferree throws so much of his energy into writing about Driscoll that the songs don’t work nearly as well outside of the collection.

For the Whole World to See is not the true revelation the label wants you to think it is but it has some catchy melodies and delivers them at breakneck speeds.

The Blue Depths can be a mesmerizing album to listen to. Tapscott's voice creaks with emotion, haunting these songs with a vital humanity that keeps their cold feel from being mechanical.

While the flowing, assembled vibe of Mother of Curses makes for a unique listen, it rarely reaches beyond the realm of sonic curiosity.

Mandell’s best, most varied album is hidden somewhere inside Artificial Fire. You have to dig through 20 minutes of brightly painted filler to find it, and unfortunately 12 of those minutes make up the album’s first three songs.

With The Camel's Back, Psapp grows up while successfully eluding categorization in the quest for catchiness.

Fol Chen's debut, Part I: John Shade, Your Fortune's Made, is end-to-end melodrama and that's fine; so far, they're doing it right. Instead of the kind of melodrama that produces sugar and hooks, Fol Chen appears to opt for storybook.

It’s admirable that Auerbach would want to start looking outside of the limitations he and fellow Key Patrick Carney put on themselves at the jump by bringing in a full band to augment his sound. But there’s not much on Keep It Hid to enjoy that couldn’t have come from the Black Keys.

Unfortunately, Richards doesn't play to her strengths often enough. Too much of Light of X slips out of straightforward and into simple.

Lonely Island are among the funniest musical comedians around. But without video, their songs are more "A Night at the Roxbury" than "Wayne’s World."

Matthew Houck, better known as the voice of Phosphorescent, has given Willie Nelson (and the rest of us) a gorgeous, shimmering gift in To Willie.

Decent Work for Decent Pay, a slipshod mélange of long-overdue remixes, is not what we're looking for. Unless you've been living in Kyrgyzstan without an Internet connection for the past few years, you likely wore out most of the tracks on Decent Work for Decent Pay long ago.

The album conjures up equal measures of frustration and dejection, especially as it bears all the hallmarks of a band growing in stature, who may have just delivered on all that untapped potential on a finely honed fourth or fifth record.

The Good Feeling Music Of...is good for a few plays and might raise a few smiles along the way.

The Heartless Bastards are much better on the alt side of the alt-country dynamic.

There is something distinctly perfect about the naivety that the Pains of Being Pure at Heart seem to effortlessly inject into every bouncy ballad of young love and young living that makes their self-titled debut not only a welcome throwback but a much needed vacation from over-calculation.

As its name implies, Snowflakes and Car Wrecks is meant for winter listening. But the open space on this EP is good for curled up meditations in any weather.

Bones' role as the accuser, sputtering anger at everyone around him, is wonderfully assumed here, and makes A Fool for Everyone an enjoyable glimpse at the life of an unloved rogue.

When the proudly worn tropes – the irascible low-life characters, the working-class heroes – show up to break up the life-affirming stuff on Dream, they're an afterthought (the jokey “Outlaw Pete”) or worse (heretofore never to be mentiond again "Queen of the Supermarket" is, well, really fucking terrible). That's why the finest moment of the album is "The Wrestler."

Yet it is the span of moods, paired with the elaborate arrangements, which reveal something new with every listen, that make Dear John an album worth persevering with.

His lyrics certainly won’t help, but if he wasn’t a Stroke, this album could only be sold out of Fraiture’s trunk at open-mic nights in upstate New York.

As good as some of the tracks are, it's just discouraging to think how solid the record could've been if it had been just ten tracks of more fleshed-out material.

They display a loose, gritty feel that ought to please metal fans as well as those who still think this is Crow’s version of Spinal Tap.

It’s disappointing that a duo this good on paper could be responsible for an album as uninspired as A.M. Even the album’s better songs (the piano-led 'And I Wonder' and the sauntering 'The Wrong Turning') are limp and tedious at best.

Has the album of 2009 been unleashed in January? I can’t see anything else coming near it.

The Crying Light is not exactly light and happy stuff, but for Antony, it’s a giant step forward down the path toward personal and artistic happiness.

Everything’s a little less condensed here than previous entries into the Newman catalogue, and the compositions even get to hang loose at times. That does lead to some delayed gratification, but it’s still exciting to see Newman let his hair down a bit--in an understated manner, of course.

Unfortunately, the bad tracks merely remind us that for all Cut Your Hands Off’s brazen energy, towering sound, and melodious verse-chorus one-two punch attack, it’s the subject of the songs that ultimately bores. Which is a shame, because most of the time, these guys get everything else so damn right.

Even while working inside a style that has changed very little throughout its multiple-century lifespan, with Drone Trailer MV & EE have learned that looking outside tradition and beyond the past is a precious means of progression.

Their discography may be sparse, but Mirror Eye, released on the always-intriguing Social Registry label, is the finest embodiment of their drone-adelic sound to date.

Listen carefully to Fantasy Black Channel, as the journey is slightly different with each listen. Every surreal note smacks with the infectious energy and vigor of youth, yet Late of the Pier’s musical proficiency and mélange of influences definitely belie their tender ages (early 20s).

Right now, I can’t think of a better album to listen to after having a shitty day. Glasvegas is a masterpiece of modern miscreant malaise.

Norman Cook’s concern for the state of his trade, while veiled in ironic drag, is hard to ignore. It’s what makes The BPA tick, but also what keeps the BPA’s debut album more in the theory-not-practice side of respectability.

Like all score-dominated soundtracks, Slumdog Millionaire, at times, sounds like a mishmash of random pieces that don’t have much to do with each other. But that’s due to the fact that these pieces were created with specific visuals in mind -- so only listening to the album, you’re only getting half of the story. But this half is still pretty incredible.

We're approaching the dead of winter and are in the middle of a recession, and Universal Mind Control isn't helping.

Call And Response is an interesting (and by “interesting” I mean “awful”) remix album due to the fact that no one seems to want to mess with the originals for fear of alienating anyone or veering off from the song’s original composition (likely for the sake of the commercial prospects of the album).

The songs on the Dark End of the Street EP are well-sung and nicely arranged, but they are missing that vital thing that turns a song into a necessary document of feeling and experience.

A mountain of shambolic, livewire B-sides and covers of heroes and influence ranging from the Fall to Echo and the Bunnymen, help add a sense of balance and ballast to Brighten the Corners. It makes for an expanded vision of the original while at the same time proving that the original’s vision wasn’t quite so narrow after all.

This compilation of songs from films and tributes becomes nothing less than an inadvertent tribute to Kozelek himself, a finely woven tapestry of pop music as refracted through his heartfelt filter of pastoral, troubled beauty.

"Blackout" seemed like it signaled a more club-orientated path for Spears, like Madonna or Kylie Minogue, but Circus is a hodgepodge of pop themes that never really finds a face.

This is a bit more than a simple holiday cash-in, but it falls short of anything all that necessary or memorable.

We Are Beautiful might not be the pinnacle for Los Campesinos!, but it does prove they’re rapidly on their way up.

The project is structured much like a high-end runway show, so although most songs work on their own, they’re far more revelatory as a group.

There’s no telling if Ludacris will ever be given the level of respect he desires, but this help proves that he deserves it.

Tapes goes through the motions of dance music without ever delivering anything remotely danceable.

The album has a consistent lack of meaning and genuine feeling.

Although The Cross Of My Calling ostensibly provides an outlet for the band’s Marxist ideologies, its impeccable musicianship, arrangement and production make any political sloganeering irrelevant.

Even if it came out in 1996, it would still be self-absorbed, turgid, over-produced and soulless.

By investing a now-classic catalog with immediacy, freshness and a delicate, humbling charm, Sugar Mountain not only stands as the best argument for the Archives series and illumination it could provide, but as a classic live record in its own right.

Compilations of this sort can rarely stand as both, and The BBC Sessions, through innovative and intelligent sequencing as well as a dedication to the band’s history, stands well above its peers.

Sunday at Devil Dirt, for all the dark imagery and surgically perfect string arrangements, works best when Lanegan and Campbell involve themselves with simpler sentiments.

Jacobs works in a peerless vacuum located in a hazy plot point on the pop timeline, located somewhere in-between outright sugary pop and nerdy bedroom electronica.

It’s great headphone music and would make a suitably dense soundtrack for a drunken stroll through the Lower East Side, where much of the inspiration for NYC was found.

It's a neat trick that Love Is All has pulled off on this record, making the mundane and common just as urgent and real as the enormous and intangible.

It proves that with the same attention, wit, grace and intellect that these musicians gave to their songwriting, they can indeed construct a retrospective that not only reflects the brilliance of their band but heightens and intensifies it as well.

This album is the sound of just scraping by with a shitty job but not letting it get you down because there’s more than enough beer and guitars to make life worthwhile. Maybe in the next life or maybe in another world, but for right now The Bronx are right now. Welcome back, boys. We missed you.

The live tracks, especially those on the second disc, are the songs that will win you over if you are still listening and still on the fence.

They owe nothing to a far-gone musical moment, nor can they be pigeonholed. Limbo, Panto may be one of 2008’s most startlingly great debuts.

The guitars come at you from all angles, drums bubble up and clatter like a perfect assembly line, the vocals soar or are flung in from behind. Melodies sneak up and poke you like stray branches. Grab your headphones and start wandering.

What got lost in the record’s cacophonic crash was, again, what mattered--the songs--and in Berlin: Live, stripped of Reed and Ezrin’s overproduction, the bleakly radiant song cycle about doomed junkie love is allowed to flourish.

Despite Rogove’s contribution and support from the likes of the Strokes’ Fabrizio Moretti among others, Surfing illuminates the problems that have dogged Banhart since the jump: He can make really great pieces of ‘60s folk and pop homage, but has terrible self-editing skills and has trouble avoiding lameness, sad attempts at humor and bad taste.

Ropechain is sometimes frustrating bordering on indulgent, but it also depicts, without censorship, Adamson’s unique process and point of view.

On Intimacy his ambition often outpaces the execution.

The third album of the formula, the lovely-titled Heart On, shows that the Eagles of Death Metal have reached their limits, but not without a noble effort to keep on rockin’.

In the end, 4:13 Dream is nothing but a solid to shaky late period album from a band that’s due can’t really be understated.

Continuing the convention-defying structure that Deerhunter pioneered with "Cryptograms," Microcastle starts slow and spirals into something much larger.

Gently blurring the lines between the warm golden haze of pedal-steel’d country rock with elements of tasteful, classicist new wave, the quietly intimate Cardinology jettisons the schizoid, freewheeling genre-hopping of previous records, giving the album--and, most important, the songs--an intensity of focus where there was once just intensity.

A few breakneck thrash-jazz tracks, occasionally bearing a resemblance to TNT-era Torotise, make way for a distinctly downbeat end to the record. It’s a shame, because Just a Souvenir really could have done without the insipidness of 'Duotone Moonbeam' or the languid 'Quadrature.'

Like the band members themselves, Alpinisms is full of promise and obvious talent but would benefit from a more clearly defined direction.

Easily the most exhilarating rock 'n' roll record to emerge in 2008.

With Remind Me in 3 Days, they throw down a worthy challenge to hip-hop’s status quo.

Tronic isn’t quite hip-hop’s "Smile," but Black Milk is certainly open to pushing similar boundaries of possibility.

"Epic” is the only way to describe the balance of Skeletal Lamping--Barnes isn’t afraid to throw everything on tape.

Sometimes there’s a comfort to be found in familiarity, and Car Alarm plays like an object lesson on why sticking to your guns isn’t always such a bad idea after all.

It's rare to find a band with such breadth of vision, and although indie kids might balk at Saint Dymphna's shameless embrace of the dance floor, the rest of us will be lost in its agitated reverie.

The Dears left Arts & Crafts and cut their least entertaining album yet, Missiles, deciding to release it through the more populist confines of Dangerbird.

This semi-collective sound-making only adds to the expansiveness of the band’s gestures.

There’s something deeply captivating about Wood’s songs, and they’re brought to an appropriate close with a tightly wound sequel (of sorts) to the album’s opener, 'Water II.'

Rossi's music doesn't offer some great payoff, but the nice thing is that it suggests that we should keep listening because there will be one down the line.

This is the kind of music we should be hearing all the time, instead of the deathly boring muzak we (and our ears) generally expect.

Liver! Lung! FR! is a solid album--it was just better six months ago.

Exposion challenges us to rethink the limitations of a song, and thusly rewards us with an album unlike any other this year.

Despite the band’s mechanical leanings, they’ve always been able to let emotion seep through the swell and walls of distortion and static; it’s a trait the band shares in common with few of their louder (current) contemporaries. But the opening half of the album is not powerful enough to convince the listener of much of anything.

Who Killed Harry Houdini? is beset by lukewarm, heart-on-sleeve ballads that spoil the album and sub-form slices of pop that never take off.

Nobody sounds quite like them, though, and few metal bands balance spiritual and metallic consciousness so well.

On The Door, there is a sense that the sounds happening are not the products of the people creating them but rather those of some inscrutable (and vaguely dangerous) pulsing energy below our feet. It’s an amazing effect. And it’s created through the sheer power of quantity and repetition.

Reefer works best as a moment that’s fleeting.

Though the album doesn’t develop a theme throughout listening, the all-star analogy holds up.

It's evidence of a powerful songwriter honing his artistry.