The overall effect is a more diluted sound, in keeping with the watering down of Skinner's diatribes.

Offend Maggie’s mellowness is not a lessening of Deerhoof’s strangeness. In fact, the emotional intensity of these songs may be even more pronounced than in songs from the past.

Consistency is not Yo Majesty’s strong suit, and Futuristically suffers from an uneven and unfocused approach. Despite this there is plenty to enjoy here.

Such Fun is the type of record Annuals were always going to make: a slick opus, epic both in sound and messiness, that just never comes together.

City of Refuge offers the refuge that comes with being aware of your surroundings and trying to make sense of both good and bad emotions without flinching. It is the refuge from ignorance that makes these songs timeless.

The conviction in Stern's direct, bare voice is what turns the album into the kicking, clawing, emotional frenzy that we get.

Molina has created a genre all her own, and Un Dia is its pièce de résistance.

The Chemistry of Common Life is not a technically proficient album despite its epic leanings. Like most albums primarily consisting of anthems, its impact tapers off slightly on repeated listens. But the sheer power of the album is key.

The wonder of Some Are Lakes is the fact that such arguably masculine instrumentation goes such a long way to buoy Powell's lady vocals. Neither takes a backseat, and the combination feels way natural.

He's here to entertain, and to interpret the memories of his childhood. As such, the music is a gentle stroll, like an idyll walk through the Rothaargebirge, the deep green mountain range adjacent to his hometown for which the Ferndorf is named.

Another World is under 20 minutes long, but it’s more than a placeholder. It’s the portrait of an artist as a changeling, moving above and beyond his former skill-set.

The choice tracks, the tracks that redeem an otherwise eternally frustrating album are 'Cannibals' and 'Modern Dislocation.'

The album is likely to find favor with clubbers looking for downtempo tunes to soundtrack their comedown. But Clayton’s knack for unearthing wildly disparate compositions, and seamlessly melding them together, will likely induce a few smiles in the blissed-out warmth of the post-club hours.

Public Strain improves on Women in every way, which is no small feat. It's 13 minutes long than its predecessor, but Women doesn't use the extra time to spread out. The band keeps the tension up by building the various lean sounds of that record into new, more muscular variations.

Although the album does lag a bit toward the end--not due to a lack of quality but to the inability to match the album's earlier dazzling heights--it's a very respectable addition to the Swedish canon.

By trying to define they’re own specific legacy, they’re actually ramming it down their listener's throats, and daring the music world to question them.

By paying just as much attention to sonic details as ever, Ejstes and his pals have put forth another refined effort, from the piano on back to the drums.

On what has been for the most part an impeccably executed commercial rap album, TI again reminds us what he’s really capable of.

They reproduce, even with simple materials and simple words, complex emotions and ideas. And at the same time, they just make you want to sing, freak-out, and play beach-blanket bingo in a basement.

Wigflip feels like the type of thing Madlib could churn out on any given lazy Sunday afternoon.

It's worth listening to with the hope of getting lost in some strange other world where children spew ether ghosts and spirits tap out love in Morse code.

Svennson was noted for his freethinking mixing of pop and jazz genres and styles, which is why the work on Leucocyte feels fresh and enticing for just about any audience.

The songs are classic Mogwai, only more sophisticated--and, as such, startling different.

Essentially a funhouse mirror of 2007's far superior "Because of the Times," Only by the Night stumbles under the weight of its ambitions by lacking the songs necessary to support them

Dear Science is another highlight from a band whose career has essentially been an extended one.

The members of Cold War Kids have deepened their sound rather than expanding it.

The album is boastful, vulnerable and witty, usually within the course of a single song. It may be a bad man’s world, but a bad girl’s record makes it that much more tolerable.

The songs never sound cluttered despite the cavalcade of divergent sounds that make up the album, and Pearson’s vocals are adeptly deployed as just another instrument.

Furr still finds Blitzen Trapper as a band that’s relentlessly restless, just one that’s purposefully that way.

The songs toward the latter half of the nine-song, 50-minute album begin to blur, but overall the album introduces a good, anachronistic headspace to enter into.

It’s noisy, it’s incoherent at times, but above all it’s a joyous record that's totally Neil Hagerty: inaccessibly accessible.

We can quibble about intent and expression, but in the end you will have to succumb to the heart, body and soul, and your brain might be left behind.

Ultimately, it comes down to the vagaries of taste, but measured against their previous output and current contenders, The Hungry Saw is a sleeper of a bar-chapped, morosely drunk record.

Noah and the Whale try their best to make weighty songs (look no further than the paint-by-numbers description of a funeral on the limp “Death by Numbers”), but they’re better as a pop group that digs ukuleles and acoustic guitars.

More than their previous efforts, this album exhibits the depth and experience that they have gained from such collaborations.

Despite Chunk of Change's flaws, Angelakos shows real promise as an innovative electronic-song weaver.

Death Magnetic is just about the best album Metallica could have made at this point.

While the return to straighter Old West soundscapes is welcome after Garden Ruin, Carried to Dust is really just another solid album from a band that’s made a career out of mining the genres of the Southwest.

Parenthetical Girls consists primarily of Zac Pennington's unmistakable vocals, and they are given a musical context that emphasizes their stark beauty on this album. It was well worth the three years of effort on his part.

Not only does it stand as a summation of their greatest (previous) strengths, its rhythmic and propulsive sway points to a new, more fervently alive direction for the group, making both the band and album’s name all the more appropriate.

It’s this awareness that makes Living on the Other Side--on one level a pretty basic rock album that doesn’t surpass any of its predecessors--seem like something much, much more.

Sam Champion’s sophomore album, Heavenly Bender, is a worthy rollick.

As a band whose biggest source of praise so far has been its unpretentiousness, The Shaky Hands may be better off with a little more bombast. If only they had the skill to put it together for more than a flash.

It’s a step forward chronologically but a step backward in overall album success.

All of this is still quite gut-wrenching, yes, but I find Caught in the Trees to be better when it explores other themes.

Me and Armini merely falls short of being as fully conceived as the astonoshing "Fisherman’s Woman."

Some of it works--'Southern California' 's honey-harmony’d and piano-led wistful look at the history of the Beach Boys in specific and SoCal in general is rather touching. But the rest of the album, especially the overwrought spoken-word interludes, remains a series of harmonized thuds and (however pretty) blank-eyed lobotomy-pop.

Putting out an album called The Recession right now, and draping the American flag over your head on its cover, comes with expectations of politically conscious ruminations. Instead, we get more of the same

The growth on display here outweighs the band’s now reliable--and easily addressable--shortcomings.

The tracks on Forth are long and often overproduced. It’s a tough blow to handle when a band you’ve loved for so long comes up so short.

The album, weighed down by a few awkward romance tracks and a well-meaning but ill-fitting MLK tribute, drags in the second half, and there’s no one moment to parallel the odd ache of 'Doctor’s Avocate.' But it’s once again more than the sum of its parts.

Despite Delta Spirit’s anarchic (i.e., creatively opportunistic) sampling of everything from cold war folk to the Cold War Kids, when the band members hit their stride--as on the rumbling, locomotive grooves of piano-stung epic Americana on 'Trashcan'--Sunshine becomes nothing less than an ode to musical joy.

The largely successful results characterize a risky proposition that in the hands of talent and artistic focus has yielded all sorts of adventurous delights.

You won’t hear anything on The Rhumb Line you haven’t heard before, but that doesn’t prevent it from being one of the year’s best debuts.

Though some of the oddball, art-house tendencies have been lost in this new translation of the band’s music, there has never been a better, brighter or more immediately satisfying pop soundtrack to Das Kapital.

Take Me to the Sea [is] a cross between sloppy prog-rock and emo that ends up being less than a sum of its parts.

The album is another solid (if somewhat too long) set by a band firmly in control of where it is at and what it’s doing.

Earth to the Dandy Warhols is as much of a joke album as "Metal Machine Music," except I don’t see any rock ‘n’ roll scholars finding anything particularly smart in this slop 20 years from now.

On their appropriately (and doomily) titled third album, Oceans Will Rise, Montreal band The Stills address the end of the world in the only way they know how--with marginally catchy, heart-on-sleeve ballads that never hook up with their aspirations.

The songs blur into one another, edited to form a metal-machine grind of music that, while certainly exhausting--there’s even a disclaimer on the album: “Do not attempt to listen to all at once” -- maintains a kind of lurid appeal in its dogged attempts to capture a three-year journey within the constraints of a double LP.

Where You Go I Go Too takes the meaning of the term "full-length" quite literally, stretching his already epic electronic disco into works of effortless symphonic grandeur.

Koster's ability to create charmingly imaginative song cycles out of instruments you might find in your grandparent's attic has granted him a fan base that has waited nearly a decade for his sophomore release. It was worth the wait.

Moody Motorcycle is a deft reappropriation and re-imagining of the harmonic pop of the Everly Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

Repentance can be taken as prime party music, but if you dig deeper, it's much more rewarding.

31Knots have produced a very good album--maybe even a great album--but one that simply does not reach the level it could have.

The problem is that making songs that are fit for beer commercials makes for an atrocious album full of half-baked ideas that are only good for 30 seconds of enjoyment.

The music may not always be easily accessible, but it is almost always interesting.

There is not much on Here With Me that surprises or overwhelms, but that is not Jennifer O’Connor’s brief.

The band plays its own game of seduction throughout the album, giving us danceable, practically glandular beats while singing lyrics of fear and loathing.

The result is a confident, tight batch of tracks that beautifully encompass a prosaic kind of ache.

Girls and Weather is a rousing debut effort from a band that isn’t out to try to pull birds by acting like the Stones (or the Clash or the Libertines).

The incredible ride finishes not with a bang but with a whimper. Preteen Weaponry isn't much more than a 39-minute sonic experiment for a band seeking a new direction, but it's such a mindfuck to listen to, who cares where it ends up?

The Airborne Toxic Event’s gift is two-fold -- they manage to take the little things, the day-to-day ellipses of modern romance and elevate them to a level of art.

Waiting for the Sunrise doesn’t signal the end of Vandervelde’s party, but one hopes he gets his second wind rather than becoming satisfied and heading off to bed.

When Oxford Collapse pull off the throttle, the results are remarkable, and the songs are perfect for soundtracking the nights the band can’t remember.

For those who maintain that vocals are the most superficial element of pop music however, Scars on Broadway will be a surprise treat.

This collection of rarities is a window into the mind of a restless but inspired talent. She isn't for everyone, but she is a break from safe.

A couple of moments are cool--the seamless transition to hard rock guitars in 'Gravity and Heat,' the intimacy of closer 'Spanish Triangles.' But there's not much else worth hearing on Life Processes.

The Black Kids may only have one trick, but as long as they only pull it at a house party, it’s the only one they’ll need.

With its shameless pop-punk anthems and wonderfully irreverent lyrics, Donkey finds the members of CSS at the top of their game.

Fate exposes the larger problem with Dr. Dog’s catalog -- namely, that the band have become so comfortable where they are that they are content to merely play to type.

In Flesh Tones is sensitive, unsure and guarded, yet it's comfortable and inviting despite this.

As all over the map as A Certain Feeling is, it’s much more concise than the band’s 13-track debut, "Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink." There’s not much extraneous fluff here.

Unsettling and unexpectedly ravishing in equal measure, Prurient’s latest is as accomplished an album as his followers have come to expect.

A Love Extreme giddily steals from and collides with a kaleidoscope of genres, all without a trace of modern guilt.

Considering most of the album is spent describing what life’s like for the rest of us, it’s surprising Stay Positive ends on a relatively self-focused note, courtesy of album highlight “Slapped Actress.”

Of all the bands in the rock canon, Wire may be the best embodiment of the term “forward-thinking” that is so vogue nowadays, and Object 47 keeps with the mantra with stunning results.

Modern Guilt doesn’t quite make it to that flashpoint, but it certainly points the way to a musical future brighter than the endless, mirrored hall of 'Devils Haircut' rewrites that songs like 'E-Pro' suggested was coming. And that is a sea change worth waiting for.

¿Cómo Te Llama? is composed almost entirely of the same kind of songs that made "Yours to Keep" such a lopsided affair.

It is the most realized of their albums to date, and it showcases the group fully exploring the possibilities of the niche that they created for themselves two records ago.

Some are sure to hate it, but unlike any Melvins album since "Houdini," Nude With Boots certainly demands your attention.

It seems Smith and Shields simply both did what they are best at, and in the process uncovered some common ground that few thought existed. Fortunately, the results are riveting.

Sure there’s a lot of questionable ethical implications with The Black Ghosts mixed in with a good ones, but a goth band with a rock conscious is successful even if their success in breaking through the mold of navel-gazing is Pyrrhic.

Like the return of Portishead and My Bloody Valentine, Leila’s reemergence is another welcome surprise in a year that’s been full of them.

Brevity is the buzzword throughout Skeleton. No track goes over four minutes, and five don’t even hit two minutes. But brilliance emerges within those constraints.

Make no mistake, though--the music of Hymn and Her is good, and the songs are almost always uniformly excellent examples of finely-honed pop songcraft. But when each excellent song sounds just like the slow, rainy Sunday pulse of a track that just preceded it, well, a few less hymns and a few more songs for rocking are in order.

Hercules & Love Affair is a testament to the great foresight and control is required in a disco producer to keep the track from lunging into an abyss of low-blow kitsch, and to be able to stimulate the ears and feet at the same time.