What we're left with feels like a big blur--an entertaining and wacked-out trip to Wonderland, but not one that I feel particularly compelled to return to.

A Hundred Miles Off needs a single or a hook to balance its trebly extremes, and Leithauser's good-ol'-boy tenor has lost some of its edge, tripping too easily into the whiny nether regions.

But no matter, because the tracks that Universal has okayed are the kind of ballsy primal rock that conjures up images of a glorious multicolor three-way between Bikini Kill, the Ramones, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Young Hunger is a solidly crafted album that manages to give hints at what Chad Valley does best while musically supporting a bunch of his buddies.

Enough bending guitar licks to satisfy the yuppiest of thirtysomething businessmen and enough mellow ballads to satisfy your Dixie Chicks-loving mom.

Still, for all the sophisticated, melodic pleasure to be found on Here and Now, a comfy old shoe of an album, one could be forgiven for occasionally wondering whether things might achieve just a touch more frisson if Holsapple and Stamey surrendered just a little to the temptations of that sharp-edged sound of yore.

Finn's best songs are the ones when he's fully in the present, in tune with every emotion and every detail his protagonists might experience during a particular moment.

Although it's firmly in the commercial-R&B camp, it's got much more energy than those slickly produced records, and at times, the record's production verges on dirty.

The album is so cleanly produced that it sounds like they can't afford a flaw. And ironically, it's this seeming aversion to being perceived as imperfect that holds them back.

Mostly though, Pusha seems lost.

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

Brown is riding on the coattails of artists greater than he is, but he is clearly a talented performer who can deliver high-octane club hits.

Something to Tell You is so impossibly infectious that they can just about get away with more of the same this time around.

Music for Men is a relatively safe album for Gossip's first major release.

Even at its best, and it gets pretty damn good, such as on the stark "Black Sweat" and the rock single, "Fury," the record still sounds like it's stuck somewhere in the past.

Unfortunately the album as a whole, modulo a few bright sections, fails to come to life.

From the band we never expected to evolve, there is enough sweeping ambition to have knocked us on our heels - if only the members had learned the art of discretion.

On Intimacy his ambition often outpaces the execution.

Even as Joyner drifts out into that snow, he remembers to bring some warmth along with him, which is what makes Out Into the Snow the comforting mess that it is.

The songs are too determinedly distinctive to gainsay. But that mental sonic world that the music creates would be less intense, less encompassing, and listening would be less a transportive experience in the Tom Fec Dimension. Thankfully, this is Tobacco's world, and you can't trust your brain to determine mystery from madness.

On Neighborhoods, blink-182 took [Dude Ranch/Enema of the State/Take Off Your Pants And Jacket's] sonic template, updated it, and made an album where they tried to understand what it means to be a member of blink-182.

For all its questing, though, the album's--and the band's--heart and soul are the simple arrangements which, layered upon one another like a stack of firewood, often signify something greater than their sum.

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

On the whole Infinite Arms is an album buried under the weight of its own sound. It's hard to know how this album could have sounded with less ham-handed production, but as it stands the mix here feels like some sleight of hand.

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.

This buckshot spray of quick pop tunes is another wild success in his constantly twisting variations on a theme.

They choose to remain well within their comfort zone, rendering Slaughterhouse a largely unsatisfying experience.

Their change between 2007 and now may be incremental, but it's enough to qualify as a definite improvement on their debut.

Longtime Companion feels like the first cracked smile after the tears have stopped, somewhere between dusk and the gloom of night.

That their kitchen-sink approach yielded as many wins as it did on Strapped bodes very well for The Soft Pack, oddly enough presenting a band that has proven it's more than its record collection, and possesses a heretofore unseen amount of creative restlessness.

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 fact that this debut hews closer to the Noel we know certainly shouldn't be a disappointment.

It's quiet but it gets your attention, surrounds you, and makes you feel a part of it all the way through.

12 Desperate Straight Lines is Lerner's second LP under the Telekinesis moniker, and it finds his introspection all the more labyrinthine, but his chops as a genuine architect nothing if not totally satisfying.

Traces of other San Diego bands like Pinback and LaValle's own Tristeza and the Black Heart Procession are distinctly here, culminating in mellow harmonies, relaxed bass lines and subtle ambient effects.

So while High Places have neatly avoided getting stuck in a rut on Original Colors, daring to reinvent themselves into a more motion-friendly group, fans of their first couple of albums should still find the overall mood sufficiently low-key to provide easy access.

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.

CAMP is an imperfect album, to be sure, one that both succeeds on its incongruities and occasionally stumbles on them.

Mostly, Hysterical is lost in a hazy cloud that is more Dan Bejar than it is David Byrne.

Nothing new.

Mojave 3's new material isn't an abandonment of any strengths; it's an embrace of the simple pleasures of the classic '60s garage-pop style of songwriting.

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.

This is stadium schlock of the highest pedigree, the kind of thing that can make you feel desperately cynical about rock music.

This is a heavy-metal record in the classic style, stealing bones from the open graves of Black Sabbath.

The results are beautifully solemn.

While the slog through the mostly interchangeable mid-tempo, spoken-verse tracks on the first twenty two minutes of the album is a lot of saminess to deal with, a couple genuine pleasures await anyone patient enough to make it through to the album's final moments.

Some of the better songs on Dreams and Nightmares--"In God We Trust" and "Believe It" being prominent examples--are the ones that let Meek hit the track hard and tear it apart.... But ultimately songs like these are in the minority on Dreams and Nightmares. There are many notable stylistic missteps.

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.

Smokey Rolls down Thunder Canyon may be his best so far.

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.

They could have retread the same musical territory, but instead they deliver a record that’s remarkable in its maturity and--most of all--its ability to be replayed again and again.

They tend to stay in their most comfortable wheelhouse -- bluesy roots rock -- but, as before, their incredible vocal harmonies carry the day.

Though heavy-handed lyrics and ominous proclamations can be tiresome and often too taxing on the arms of music that bears them, the sheer artistry of SMZ makes the band’s messages endurable.

It’s tighter, and incredibly, more intimate and intense than the first, this is a band that functions as a whole, not merely a threadbare net of musicians straining to support the singer.

With Not Yet, Monotonix delivers a tight half hour of intensely likable scuzz rock that gives a solid kick to the lizard part of the brain.

It remains to be seen if the loose, congenial vibe of Sun Bronzed Greek Gods can be sustained for more than this EP's 19 minutes, but betting against Dom might be foolhardy.

The album's true stumbling block lies in the Friedbergers' inability to follow many of their ideas to any sort of logical conclusion.

Banhart clearly gets bogged down in that freedom, as the amount of sheer hokiness on some of his albums can attest to. But with What Will We Be, Banhart gets back to earning that right for total creative freedom.

It may play a little too closely to everyone's strengths, but in the moments here where those strengths are at full tilt, that's not a bad thing.

Dressy Bessy is a one-trick pony, and twelve songs of the same fuzzed-out retro-rock riffs are too much for one person to take at once.

It's almost as if Fantastic Playroom is trying to do too much. With so many agendas, it's a miracle that New Young Pony Club ended up all on the same page at all. Such ambition makes Fantastic Playroom a disjointed experience, but its triumphs are worth delighting in.

As of right now, the main emotional component of this music is the whiplash thrill of hearing rock music played on the edge of sanity, but if we can be nudged into feeling something in our hearts more affecting or cerebral, something more powerful than an echoing warstomp, then we've got a landmark album on our hands.

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.

Everything Last Winter may be the most accomplished debut of 2007, and it will invariably be one of the best.

Closing In consists of amateurish approximations of the music the duo wishes it were playing.

Aside from those two songs ["Florida" and "Pull The Curtains"], however, there aren't many highpoints.

They're an insipid, uninspired mess right now, but the Hives aren't done as much as they are confused.

Although Cold Roses can get messy in the way of a quickly made album, it marks a notable improvement on Adams's most recent LP.

Two Gallants, the band's second for Saddle Creek and third overall, shows significant artistic growth.

The tracks that don't work misfire spectacularly.

It's airy, synth-heavy and loud, and it moves like a glacier.

Her music-box arrangements have a child-like giddiness about them, but this collection of glittering songs has an emotional and sonic maturity that will keep you listening long past bedtime.

Hurricane Bar sees the group amp up the hand-clapping choruses and delivers a leaner collection that recalls everything from the Animals and the Small Faces to Hanoi Rocks and the Libertines.

Thistled Spring, more nuanced and poised than its much-lauded predecessor, signals the ongoing work of a band far from finished, far from plumbing the depths of which it is capable.

The high points of Break It Up scratch the itch the in a way only a Be Your Own Pet album could, which is more or less the best compliment you could pay Break It Up.

At its core, Mostly No prioritizes songcraft above bare texture, and Cohen's willingness to temper eruption with meditation sets Milk Maid apart from many of its buzzy peers.

Despite the three or four keepers, 29 suggests that Adams is still struggling to nail down his musical identity.

The remixes that constitute the second disc are less intriguing than the B-sides, but none of them are horrible.

With NY's Finest, Pete Rock, whose place in hip-hop is alread firmly cememted alongside masters like Premier, may not go beyond expectations, but he certainly meets them comfortably.

If you're over alt-rock, then Brazen Bull is going to do little to bring you around. But if you need a new guitar rock record, one that you can headbang to without irony, then the Cribs have delivered.

There is nothing to dislike about Classics, but I get the feeling they're holding back.

Sweet Christ, in no universe will Big Sean be greater than Notorious B.I.G. or Big Pun, and at the rate he's going he'll be lucky to end up a better rapper than Sean Combs, let alone Sean Carter.

As with Icky Mettle and then with Crooked Fingers, Bachmann once again has provided a taut and startling proper debut; his writing feels completely reenergized.

The lyrics meander, often failing to offer so much as a hooky line or even a coherent narrative.

Thorburn anchors every note, every contribution with a personal outpouring of emotion and heartbreak, the likes of which we've never seen from him before.

Like A$AP Mob and Odd Future before him, Purrp arrives fully formed, with his own unique, fully realized aesthetic vision.

Look, if you’re seeking out the latest flavor of the month or are looking to see where this chillwave shit is going, Love Comes Close is probably not high on your list. But spin this thing once and it’s hard not to become engulfed in the aesthetic gloominess and seedy milieus Cold Cave are delivering here.

Dylanesque is a mess. Nearly every album has a few bright spots, but this is a lazy collection of covers that offers no insight into the catalog of one of the twentieth century's foremost songwriters.

The album, sweet as it sounds, is so polite that to keep from offending listeners it stops short of saying anything to them.

Despite the impressive stylistic voices and rich production, there's ultimately something hollow around the project.

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.

Even though not everything Mould tries on Body of Song works, there are enough gems to make the album a worthwhile destination.

Yes, the Sounds' music starts to blur together, but what a blur.

Viewed in a vacuum, Out of Love is one of this year's strongest debuts, a complete album with easy hooks and easy charms.

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.

Pink Friday lives or dies on Minaj's ability to fully embody all of the various personas she toys with, the singer, the rapper, the lover, the fighter, the tomboy, the girly girl, the big sister, the bitch. But she isn't always engaging, and she doesn't always sound at home with this material.

A polite, undemanding excursion--frustratingly stuck to its own sonic landscape.

Unsatisfying.