White is an accomplished storyteller – and stories and music both represent the best of what a ghost can be: incomplete presences, something that seems substantial in the moment but disappears in a matter of minutes, leaving only an impression in your mind.

Sleep Forever distinguishes The Big Sleep as a force in its own right, and it’s a testament to the band’s growth. That--as well as the tracks themselves--make Sleep Forever a pleasure to hear.

Her effort is continuously admirable, but what is frustrating about The Beekeeper is the music itself: it’s almost formulaic, including even the token song that displays a powerful sense of womanhood.

As a stand-alone collection though, it's vexingly stunted, and padded out with a few unnecessary additions to fill out its barely 30-minute run time.

The tunes don’t vary much from the originals, but the band renders them with vigor and style.

Producer Brian Eno has guided them towards more expansive instrumentation and bombastic atmosphere, but the center of the music often lacks real heaviness.

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

They are still too tied to their musical ancestors for any serious maturation to take place.

Dios (Malos)’s buoyant yet sophisticated glow incites a plethora of feelings, but the album stands out above most of the band’s dreamy indie-rock counterparts because, undoubtedly, the members of the band are enjoying themselves.

The Evolution delivers what Ciara is known for: hot beats, killer hooks and club bangers.

This is a solid listen regardless of whether or not it's breaking any new ground.

There's no doubt of Sproule's ability on I Love You, Go Easy, both as a songwriter and musician, and her reservoir of talent is far from dry.

Everything finally does come to a rewarding payoff with the ringing lone guitar work at the end of "Triangular Pyramid," but the long drive to get there is rather boring.

McKee's voice may sound exactly like it did 20 years ago (the fate of most twee-pop ladies, it seems), but The Vaselines' trademark noise has only grown deeper, richer. Listening to this record just feels good on a purely physical level.

Jeff Bridges is all quiet and sepia-toned, dripping like molasses in dollops of hammy pedal steel, placid acoustic guitars, and Bridges' cracked vocal chords.

Instrumental mastery can provide for some fireworks (particularly on the opening triptych), but spending six minutes in service of sprawling songs with no substance (like most of the album’s middle third) doesn’t do anyone any favors.

Although the album is undoubtedly a more polished production than is "Invitation Songs," the percussion is obfuscated by a watery and murky mix.

I Am Gemini is all jerky distortion, an endless sputtering, as if Cursive set out to intentionally make ugly music.

With only the faintest hint of retracing his past successes, Prince is still on top of his game.

X isn’t the comeback album some may have been hoping for, but it is a welcome return for Minogue.

Many of the songs end up sounding alike, and the somewhat dreamlike lyrics can lose you in a maze of psuedo-poetry, but You & Me is a solid debut. Barker’s strengths are, therefore, those of the record: simple guitar and an often golden voice.

The songs on Without Feathers are fine, really, and for the most part pretty well-crafted, but there just doesn't seem to be a good reason to listen to them.

The Blueprint 3 starts well enough. Its first half is good to great....But around the time we get to the Timbaland-produced, Limbaugh-dissing, Drake-featuring 'Off That,' a song about how far ahead of the curve Jay is, the album's quality falls off considerably.

There's nothing on Gauntlet Hair that rivals the pop-minded immediacy or the floor-stomping clamor of "I Was Thinking...," but it still manages to wade deeper into an abyss that few bands manage to come out of successfully.

His best work since 1999's Blackout.

Great musicianship does not a great album make, particularly when the singer is so out of his league.

The members of Dinowalrus deploy an eccentric series of sonic strategies on %, and this diversity is the album’s greatest strength.

The tracks span from 2003 to 2009 and encompass all of the band's fascinating, frustrating, illustrious stylistic progression. If it is truly Excepter's last release, it is an excellent send-off.

The flashes of the old Rapture are far too few, but when they're there, In The Grace of Your Love proves that the Rapture have lived long enough to outrun their hype.

Madonna and some of music’s edgiest producers have again brought an underground sound to the forefront of pop music.

Fire & Water contains too much artifice to swallow.

The Kooks come off like a Ringo to most of Britpop’s Paul.

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.

Though this record's pace does not change much during its 43 minutes of playtime, each track is a slow-burning confession from Summers and Weikel's subconscious, a genuine feat that has taken them 16 years to convey.

If you are able to ignore the lyrics, you'll be rewarded: the choruses on Meds are catchy.

Much of the record lacks the magnetism that the handful of highlights boasts.

Turns out Isaac Brock is just too damn weird to be imitable.

Peeping Tom's almost exclusively synth-oriented songs (save the occasional bass and guitar) are ostensibly intended to highlight Patton's voice. This only accentuates his overwrought yet indifferent performances, however.

The songs could have been chosen more wisely, especially because some significant fan favorites are absent.

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

On the whole, Anxiety lacks the addictive quality of its predecessor, and it's certainly less musically interesting.

The End of That feels like something built with the intentions of making a grand statement, but it comes up a few great songs short. Honestly it's pretty remarkable for what it attempts.

Naturally there some moments where having too producers and visions hurts them, but for the most part, the band sticks to the formula that's worked in the past.

If you enjoy church hymnals, tabernacle choirs, tunes from the Elizabethan era and all things Stratford-upon-Avon, you'll pleasantly enjoy Dr Dee's attempt at a modern interpretation of the ancient, packing a lost piece of history into 2012.

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

The majority of its ten tracks resemble either retreads of their former glories or listless attempts at Spotify-friendly R&B which rob them of any identity whatsoever.

What is here, a mixture of jagged dance-punk numbers with pretty sound sketches (of the type Underworld has employed for recent soundtrack work), all succeeds.

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

There are few compelling reasons to listen to The Exchange Session Vol. 2 more than once.

Penny Sparkle is a welcome addition to the group's carefully curated discography. Longtime fans should be challenged to hear the band's growth, while new listeners are implored to seek out past works for comparison.

Better Luck Next Life, their second full-length, does lapse out of recalcitrance, but its immersion makes for a worthy distraction.

It’s all pretty cohesive, yet the album relies too heavily on its slick production and lyrical arrangements.

Sure, this record doesn't quite match their best work, on 2002's ...and the Surrounding Mountains, but it is just as strong as anything else in their discography.

Esben and the Witch sure can make a racket, but parsing out the minimal substance is the real challenge. Better than Salem? Definitely. A perfect debut? Not quite.

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

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.

By the end of the album, most of the momentum is gone, and closer "My Forevers" is really just "The Return of When I Was Twenty Nine" but sampled with the melody from "Scissors," which means that there's really only eight (and a half?) songs with good, original content.

The duo has mastered the strange art of countering divides marvelously on Red Night.

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

The Cardigans probably still won't shake the one-hit-wonder reputation... but Super Extra Gravity proves that the group deserves more respect than that.

Where many electronica artists choose to mine vintage soul and hip-hop, very few have looked to 1960s folk-rock and guitar-driven anthems for inspiration. The results are quite astounding - if unexpected - and the change is definitely welcome.

The unhinged guitar liberation the group achieves on stage can’t be touched by the inspired but ultimately uninspiring sound of Return To Form.

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

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.

Squarepusher's wide range is bound to disappoint some listeners.

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.

Ultimately, Dross Glop cements the versatility of the second version of Battles, establishing them as both a powerful singular and collaborative force.

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 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.

Sticks to the mold of its hook-y predecessor.

What’s funny about the album is that despite all it hard-rocking aggression, it’s a collection of mostly love songs. And it works.

By merely keeping up, they don't do much to separate themselves from the flock of young bands crossing the Atlantic -- again and again.

Loose, sloppy playing and power hooks.

Keep trying N.E.R.D., you’re not even close to blowing us away here.

Oasis has given us another album chock-full of jangley Brit-pop numbers and stadium-rockers, and the result is a formulaic rock record.

The reality is that many of these songs could easily be outtakes from "One Word," and by sharing many of the same sounds, Preparations ends up sharing a similar voice, which doesn’t excite as it once did.

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

If Red Album’s songs were formulaic, shiny, and easily digestible like everything on Green or Maladroit, the vacuity of the new songs wouldn't be as big a problem. But 'Heart Songs,' 'Thought I Knew'--these are just plain bad.

The EP does have some great moments, and ironically it's when Blake drops the dubset and channels his classical piano roots.

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.

It's a perfect chill-out record, readymade for a sunny day or starry night, and it straddles the line between evolving style and signature sound brilliantly.

The fifteen-song album may have two or three cuts too many, but the core of The Big Bang... is some pretty damn good hip-hop

Mostly, the record displays a jump closer to American hip-hop in both production styles and rhyming, and the urgency that was so palpable on the first installment is gone.

Despite the jovial cover, this album comes off as almost entirely serious, which is all well and good until you hear some of the most misguided pontification ever laid down on a hip-hop track.

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.

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

The most powerful moments here reimagine their sound at its best without ever retreading. The rest of it, however, glitters far too much for its own good.

In Panic of Looking, he keeps speech in the realm of analog, not digital, and still makes it into music.

As a four-track EP, this would have made for an indelibly catchy collection; as an album, it plays like four lone meatballs awash in a pot of bland noodles.

It’s certainly punk, but it does not rock. At less than a 30-minute running time, it’s revealing that much of Frauhaus! is quite tedious. The future may hold great things for Wetdog, but for now their appeal doesn’t reach much further than diehard genre adherents.

There’s nothing wrong with a band being crass. But when that band tries to act like they’re doing it in order to make a vague, nonsensical statement on twenty-first century love and sex, the result is albums like Reality Check.

More often than not it just comes off as either needlessly melodramatic or watered down to a state of vanilla

A pleasant and inoffensive endeavor, it'll do well to keep any Foxes fan satisfied for the remainder of the season. But don't be surprised if boredom sets in by fall.

But for at least 10 tracks, Gucci is able to sustain a hell of a run, forming perhaps commercial rap's best dispatch this year. There have been, and probably will be, better rap albums this year. But none will be more fun.

California Wives' music is soft and pleasant and fully formed and vague. Their lyrics are ciphers.

Given the track record Clipse have maintained through this decade with their other two albums and three mixtapes (I’m not counting the official Re-Up Gang album, and neither should you), this is a fine album, but it's still a letdown, plain and simple.

Last Light contains fine songwriting and production and collaborations, but it offers little new.