Upon hearing how masterfully Black Tambourine pull off these covers, it all makes sense. The sound these women helped codify with their music and their writing is inescapable today.

Howling Bells fall into the same trap that kills most sorta-weird rock bands when they try to write a more popular sophomore album: Everything sounds bigger, but everything is easily more forgettable.

Stronger, more contemplative feelings are at work here; gone are the sugary la-la-la's and superficial lyrics inserted on cue.

Although its completed form has been framed as the most explicit tribute to Fuchs on the album, it is the furthest thing from somber, rocking an insistent downstroke bass part and a series of statement-making, sunsoaked guitar parts.

Inter-Be was good, but this record proves the band can make a sound uniquely theirs. In doing so, they've also made something far more lasting.

Excerpts takes it one step further and expects audiences to linger on the great tidal shifts of memory happening in our minds every day. If we manage to lodge ourselves within his cause, Alary has a whole world behind a world to open up to us.

Taylor doesn't get caught up in making his sounds too big, too large, or too much. He could, but he doesn't. He maintains control, doesn't get lost, and the result are nothing short of terrific.

Even if Sov doesn't live up to the hype, there is enough quality material on Public Warning to warrant more music from the self-proclaimed "biggest midget in the game."

Into the Blue Again is not essential, but its beauty is familiar and intimate.

At the age of 76, the Texas native proves that there is still plenty of stardust left under his cowboy hat.

It's hard to figure out what exactly the concept is behind this concept album.

Aphrodite is everything you expect it to be: inspiring, motivating and celebratory.

The Submarines are at their best when toying with charmed synth-pop.

Survival Skills is a call to arms, and a poetic, uncompromising one at that.

They manage to make the grandest songs imaginable seem like they were composed with only you in mind.

With this album, Lytle has established himself as a solo artist who does not so much distance himself from his previous band as successfully scratch an itch for sounds that have been missing from the music landscape for quite some time.

While the frequent use of echo and the isolation of each instrument lend the record a spare quality, Strange Weather, Isn't It? is hardly akin to Bowie and Eno's emotionally stark Berlin Trilogy. Instead, the album sounds like a band trying to regain its footing by returning to its fundamentals.

As with all covers records, the crucial issue is whether these renditions bring anything new to these songs. The answer is a resounding no.

Coming on Strong is one smooth record; even with all the glitch, all the bleeps and bloops, and all of the genre bending, it never leaves any residue behind.

Less than half of the eighteen tracks are worthwhile additions to Sean Paul's catalogue.

Like OMNI, this record seems a bit trite.

The album lacks the central focus that defined Yorn's earlier work, at times feeling like a grab-bag of style and sound.

Anything that was either subtle or complicated has been erased to provide ready-made heart-on-sleeve love songs.

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.

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

It's clear that Young Magic have all the tools and instincts down pat; even without meaning to, this album delves happily, though briefly, into pop excellence.

About seven tracks in, 119 settles into a series of mid-tempo jogs that fail to really go anywhere.

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.

The overall result is pleasant yet hardly exceptional.

Diamond Hoo Ha is by no means a return to the band’s glory days, but it at least offers a simple reminder of their talent for writing energetic, hook-laden pop songs.

For most of I Am Not a Human Being, it seems like Wayne has forgotten how to write a verse. He's all about couplets now.

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

This is a live recording that stays true to the night.

Her melodies sound tired and her deliveries sound rushed.

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.

Although Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy has the dizzy invigoration and winning enthusiasm of an excellent first album, it also suffers from a kind of first-disc immaturity, an urge to pack everything in at once and as early as possible, rendering it top-heavy and inconsistent.

To be certain, the push and pull is lost through most of The State vs. Radric Davis, replaced by a straddling of the line between commercial and street rap.

The album's midsection gets bogged down in songs that sound too similar: more lovely piano, more soft cooing, too many gimmicky studio effects.... To Espinoza's credit, he gets Mentor Tormentor back on track.

Everything Now doesn’t stretch out so much as it spreads itself thin, which is why it won’t ripple out like other Arcade Fire records. In the end, the band that made neighborhoods sound endless makes Everything into a cul-de-sac.

The guitar work is clean and atmospheric, the vocals light and poppy and the rhythms playful to reflective, but we've been here before.

The trouble here is what we know: That they're capable of more. So the question becomes how much we hold our expectations against them, and the way you answer that question will shape how you feel about their latest offering.

Those who were taken with the band before will likely believe this album lives up to last year’s blog-induced hype. However, everyone else will probably think that Everything Goes Wrong is, well, no fun.

Bleariness and monochrome sexual appeal are more popular than they were when The Raveonettes first broke, so you wonder how they'd be received had this been their first record, not their fifth.

Give Outside a listen, then maybe invite these guys in again.

Plays more like a gimmick than a remix album.

Given that it's reassuring that he is writing and recording solo material again, it's disappointing that his fully finished renderings don't hold the same fascination as the sketches.

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.

Unlike the surreality of their peers, distant and hiding behind static, múm is entirely here, wholly present and astoundingly beautiful.

In essence, under the mantle of her most pretentious album title yet (in a catalog of pretty brilliant titles), lies an earnest dance-pop album.

With help from seasoned pros, he’s delivering (to an extent) on the promise many saw in him after Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

Backed by Archer's stark soundtrack, Bohm remains as cool as the proverbial cucumber; her pretty-yet-monotone voice never betraying her stoic front.

Spring is using her EP to carry on the torch until they can reunite, and producer Jorge Elbrecht (of Violens) provides adequate reinforcements for Spring's filmy sound.

Swan Lake has the literariness of the Decemberist's Colin Meloy, but its members are the kids with the intentional nerd glasses in the poetry workshop -- not the fiction one.

There's a lot more discipline present on the band's second album, Leave No Trace, but it's not clear if that's an encouraging development.

After nearly seven years, to churn out an album with three highlights and eight overblown odes (among them, 'Here It Goes,' 'Carry You,' and the forced empowerment of the title track) is disappointing.

Music that's built more around the image earnest and honesty than musicality can definitely be a powerful thing, but that's just the problem: It's either powerful or it's not. On Year in the Kindgom, J. Tillman is either a soothsaying troubdaour, or he's not.

Only Place doesn't say or feel much, which would be fine if it didn't sound like it was trying so hard to say or feel a lot.

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

Ultimately, there's a sense of urgency that's missing throughout Honors. The Stampers can surround themselves with more instrumentation and a fuller band, but there's still not enough suspense on Honors to make it a consistently engaging listen.

Just as she was becoming irrelevant, Lil’ Kim returns with her hardest, bravest and most exciting album to date.

Up From Below is an album to be commended, even if it might lead to the scourge of other hippie hipsters appearing in buses across the nation.

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.

So while it can't really stand alone, it plays awfully well with its musical sibling.

Their tics are still here--just listen to how they build the payoff of “Nova Leigh” from a variety of angles--they just aren’t the exciting focal point anymore. That’s probably better in the long run for the band, who have all quit school to rep Born Ruffians full-time, but doesn’t lead Say It to the mountaintop it could have shared with Red, Yellow and Blue.

An abundance of hook-laden choruses, New Order analog-boogie and Stone Roses-cool could not be more frustratingly baked into this crumbly crust.

I’m not convinced that the second season, while musically not that adventurous (R&B and hip-hop tracks take up a lot of the disc) doesn’t measure up (and occasionally surpass) the heights of season one and the group’s self-titled debut.

This is rut music and The Mars Volta are still stuck in it; even if they’ve managed to avoiding digging themselves any deeper with Goliath’s frenetic lateral slides into pseudo bedlam, momentum is only momentum if you’re going somewhere.

Where they used to sound like the crackling of a subway car rounding a bend or the seediest alleys of New York in the pre-dawn hours, here they sound like alt-rock renderings of what moody post-punk is supposed to sound like.

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.'

Cokefloat! is a complicated punk album, all id and very little superego. It's not juvenile so much as it is childlike, and what makes it childlike makes it heartbreaking.

If the album sounds simple, it's because it is simple; it's the attitude, idiosyncrasies and Architecture in Helsinki's refusal to fall into the fey trappings of paint-by-numbers indie pop that make it such a distinguishing treat.

Idlewild has become predictable and boring.

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.

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).

On their third full-length album, Alive As You Are, the members of Darker My Love drop the whole neo-shoegaze, Jesus And Mary Chain worship of their first two albums and instead engage in a sampling of different '60s sounds.

Those who credit Benson with the poppier side of the sonic stew cooked up by the Raconteurs can probably make a pretty good case for that notion based on his solo outings, and What Kind of World is no exception.

Unfortunately, Made in Brooklyn doesn't have the same urgency as its predecessor and will likely fall into the middle of the solo-record pack.

Risky though it may have seen (in terms of both taste and talent), this is a great record.

This isn’t some lost early album that is as good as the new stuff; Campfire Songs might be the weakest entry in Animal Collective’s catalog. The album is the aural document of a young band blowing 45 minutes on a porch and hoping in vain for some kind of transcendent musical revelation.

For Screening Purposes Only is rock without a filter.

I Love You, It's Cool prove Bear in Heaven's 2009-10 success wasn't a fluke, and given two years, they can deliver another album of ebullient jams.

There may be moments of repetition that indicate a bit a creative bankruptcy, and even for an EP this is perhaps all too brief an outing. However, Behave Yourself easily topples most of Cold War Kids' previous endeavors.

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.

The blindingly sunny Endless Flowers is an album appropriate for the beginning of the summer, all popsicles, poppy beats and poolside parties coalescing into warm nights

Paint the Fence Invisible couples sparseness and creative vibrancy, with every untreated strum and vocal crack complimented by a subtle twist in the expected arrangement.

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

It represents the peak of their career to date, excising the self-indulgent tendencies of before and replacing it with raw, spontaneous, and unfettered power and release that simultaneously addresses the visceral and refined.

Although the band hasn’t really strayed from its cutesy indie-pop formula, the qualities that made Death Cab stand out aren’t present this time around.

Credit must be given to LP mastermind Jim Cicero, who at age 23 proves he's wiser than his years by crafting a set of compelling tunes that sound surprisingly distinct despite the past and present musical inspirations that could've just as easily overwhelmed it.

Unexceptional and devoid of charm, The Tourniquet is, on the whole, disposable.

While Lioness may not be the perfect Amy Winehouse album, it's all we have, which seems to be enough.

Social Climbers is a valuable document of its time, place, and a reminder of the greatness that might get away.

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.

A Weekend in the City borders on emo in its wordy self-obsession, so even though the record is actually more sonically adventurous than its predecessor, it seems like a massive step backward.

Polysics is not cute. It is rock and/or roll.

If there's an item of ironic animal print clothing hanging in your closet or you know the difference between a porkpie and a derby, then chances are you'll find something to like about Hanni El Khatib's debut effort.

The rest of the 15 tracks are of two types: sub-par production work DOOM did for other people (like Masta Killa) or two-minute tracks where DOOM drops a vintage sample, says a few winking pop-culture references and then moves on without consideration.

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.