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).

The album rewards multiple listens with its sonic depth and subtle structural beauty. It has followed Lamchop tradition and evolved from its predecessor, but it lacks the unruly attitude that makes the band distinct.

Some of the material is brilliant, though much of it only hints at the gems that would eventually make up Dilla's collaboration with Madlib on Champion Sound.

Mono has upped the post-rock ante with You Are There.

Back to Black stands in testament to the fact that talent and originality still exist.

Logos, while just the second solo album from the frontman for a band of marginal fame, represents the latest and greatest chapter in Cox’s ride to indie stardom.

Unfriendly and alienating.

An Introduction to Elliott Smith [is] a compilation that maybe would have made some sense in 1998 but has no place in 2010.

Even with a few overdone songs, though, Shut Up I Am Dreaming is a solid effort.

Be Still Please occasionally falls victim to over-orchestration. But McCaughan proves too much of an indie-rock veteran and pro to let that sink the entire album.

It’s also worth pointing out that as good as White Denim is at riling up your inner animal, they can also charm its socks off with tracks like the jaunty, upbeat 'Paint Yourself,' which opens with a lively acoustic chord progression that soon erupts into lo-fi pop bliss.

It's an uneven record in some ways--that middle sequence weighs it down and Feist still feels undersold as a band leader in the studio too often--but while that may be what keeps it from the finding the same success its predecessor did, it's also what makes Metals the more exciting album to dig into.

Gold and Green holds some wonderful sounds -- and others that just seem strange for the sake of being strange.

While Dragonslayer might not be the best album in Krug’s robust oeuvre, there’s still enough here to convince us that Krug is still the ascendant king of indie rock, and that he might have a magnum opus yet to come.

At best, this would spark an awakening that provides the catharsis for yourself. At worst, WIXIW is an impressive statement by a band that regularly seems several steps ahead of their peers.

As much as the album may be a breath of fresh air, it still resembles what the Britney’s on our side of the Atlantic are putting out, closer than many would like to admit.

[It] turns out to be a proper Silver Jews rock album, which is to say it has the feel of a drunk snapping into his second wind long enough to belt out a few.

Wilderness is one of those albums where if you like one song, you like the whole lot, and vice versa.

Put Your Back N 2 It is a deeply affecting album, but also a plainspoken one.

That flash of a golden moment in between something sparking in the air and fading quickly away is all The Clientele are living for in this batch of heart-breakingly beautiful tunes, and its what Bonfires on the Heath seems to hold in the center of its heart.

A disappointing missed opportunity.

The sound is still layered and textured, and those gut-achingly gorgeous seamless harmonies between Sparhawk and wife Mimi Parker are still there.

Like every live album ever, this is pretty much for fans only. A newcomer isn't going to learn much from coming in this late, and casual observers won't find anything here they can't get on LCD Soundsystem's studio albums. But as Murphy seems content to head into retirement after this touring cycle, he's entitled to a victory or lap or two.

Hold on Now, Youngster... succeeds where the band does hold on: to genuine emotions, to vulnerability, to a cohesion that threatens to shatter under the pressure of self-deprecation and relentless skin-pounding.

It's an uneven and at times painfully intimate record, but one that confirms the talent of a songwriter obsessed with illuminating his interior truth.

Less Than Human lives up to the [DFA]’s reputation for making quality dance records, but it also explores enough outside territory so as not to feel like the next album out on the conveyor belt.

The songcraft on display here indicates that a similar crossover future is not outside the realm of possibility for these young Brits.

A certain amount of reassurance in the power of The Flaming Lips comes with each of the band's album releases, and this one is no different.

This is another hyper-energized, beautifully crafted album by the Mountain Goats.

What's lacking this time around is the cohesiveness of the Konono No. 1 record.

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

It is a record that tries to rise above the expectations created by the band’s past success. In doing so, it loses sight of where their past success came from.

A Deeper Understanding is an epic, panoramic record, but its effect is an intimate, personal one. The way these song stretch out make them grand, but they still leave space for you, the listener.

Rainbow is simply the record she needed to make. And at a time where most pop music is either designed by committee or drowning in beigeness, it’s also the kind of individual and achingly honest record we needed to hear.

Past albums might have romanticized drugs and booze as the way out, but here it's music, and the album feels more healing as a result, even if its ode to the sweet sounds that came before it presents its own complications and delusions.

A lack of self-editing is the only real flaw on an album which proves that two decades into their career QOTSA are sounding fresher than ever.

Barnes's most personal and emotional album to date.

Barring any idiomatic prejudices against the contemporary production techniques, there are no glaring missteps here.

Each pass cements that Stevens has done the impossible yet again: He's released another album that's both genre-defining and genre-defying.

While there may not be a ton of surprises from his solo work at this point, this is still an awfully strong set from a guy who's pretty tough to beat when he's on his game.

Break it Yourself dodges the feedback of erring too closely to its own sources--but not all of it soars.

It does two things that disparate types of electronic music do, and manages to bridge the gap between ambience and glitch so seemlessly they feel much closer than you might have first thought.

There's still an eerie distortion saturating Halo's vocals, as has become her trademark. But the prominence of her singing here is almost jarring, raw, practically emotive.

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.

If Donuts was Jay Dee's swan song, The Shining is a glimpse of what his work may have sounded like in the future.

Like the White Album, Exile on Mainstreet, or Wowee Zowee, this album's risky lack of sonic cohesion becomes the very through line that binds the work as a whole. Unlike those albums, however, not all of the experiments here are uniformly excellent or thrilling, nor do they all live up to the promise of the wonderful, muted Satan.

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.

The playing on the album is strong throughout, and unfortunately the lyrics don’t quite pass muster. Though Hood acquits himself nicely, none of the songs rank near the top of his considerable artistic output.

In a perfect combination of inspired production, innovative instrumentation and transcendent songwriting, Akron/Family is a richly layered and flowing album that is as emotional as it is challenging.

Real Life Is No Cool is essentially all pop structures. It's maybe an accident that Lindstrøm and Christabelle's project so successfully feels like something hip and modern, like a photograph hung in a museum or cut from an obscure magazine that's suddenly become part of the landscape.

Return to the Sea is filled with breezy, infectious melodies and quirky whip-smart lyrics; qualities that were sometimes lost underneath the Unicorns' shtick.

Stephen Malkmus is back with Mirror Traffic, in a way he wasn't with the Pavement reunion, which is to say in a way that reaches past nostalgia and easy money and is based in great music built to last.

For all the bravado of its title, Destroy Rock & Roll is in fact a neat, listenable trip.

By turns exuberant and hushed, intricate and occasionally frenzied, Gorilla Manor more than lives up to its title.

Fin creates a passionate kind of poetry not only in its music but also in its listeners.

In short, Thursday is a mixtape of subtleties.

Its power and poise never ceases for 90 wonderful minutes.

For all its delectable dance tracks, infused with Barnes’ latest influences of Afrobeat, disco and electronic music, The Sunlandic Twins still offers thoughtful lyrics and emotionally heady songs.

New Zealand pop lifer David Kilgour's Left by Soft, his seventh proper full-length (and third for Merge), is a lovely addition to the veteran songwriter's catalog.

It would be more of a worry if Dye It Blonde's high points weren't so revelatory or well-executed because while it's not a conceptually brilliant record, there are enough triumphs to score a summer romance and get cut up on mix CDs.

Things improve considerably when the pair abandons the preening street-cred game; Moffat and Middleton seem finally to realize that if they're going to make a love record they might as well not half-ass it.

As great as these songs are, how much you love them will rest on how long a leash you're willing to give Young and Lanois with the all ringing, sometimes overbearing, noise they wrap them in.

Veirs hasn’t given us anything strikingly original with Year Of Meteors, but there’s something to be said for working within the confines of a given genre and excelling at what that entails.

The older songs blend well with the more recent numbers; Helm and his menagerie of backing musicians use bluegrass instrumentation throughout the album and ably blur the lines between traditional pieces and modern songs by the likes of Steve Earle and Paul Kennerley.

The irony is Black Sun is better-suited for the club. The album's sounds and ideas are large enough to fill a dark, echoing room.

I think we should all be thanking our respective Higher Power right now that [Lekman's] hiatus was brief, because the album he would eventually make, the stunning Night Falls over Kortedala, is among the best of the year.

Believers is another step away from Bondy's noisy past, and he knows how to use his inside voice.

Mystery, a four-song warning shot of an EP, completes the cycle of hype. Duck and cover, y’all: Something wicked this way comes.

Unfortunately, despite White Wires' earnestness, likability, and knack for hooks, WWII is an album that is threatened to be overshadowed not just by albums from all over the musical spectrum, but also by other albums on Dirtnap itself.

It is a better album than its predecessor in almost every regard, but it hardly shows Condon taking risks.

That he was able to keep as much of himself in the transition from the underground to the mainstream is what is admirable.

As an album The Lady Killer achieves everything it purports to be. Its music is familiar enough to attract broad attention.

This is Spoon at its most Spoony.

Over the course of one great LP (2004’s "Underachievers Please Try Harder"), one pretty great one (2006’s "Let’s Get Out of This Country"), and now My Maudlin Career, Camera Obscura have arrived at a sound centered on Campbell’s self-reflective loneliness and their lifting of all the best of ‘60s music--a sound they own by themselves.

Wildbirds & Peacedrums make experimental music that really carves out its own sonic space, that intrigues and engages without ever really attempting to "challenge," because that's not what it cares about.

Not necessarily a mix for ages, but a mix that's pretty easy to come back to, be it road-trips, background music, or a personal headphones-odyssey.

There's a true songwriter's ear buried beneath all the fist-pumping, and it relies on a well-honed melodic sensibility that borrows on classic power-pop tropes but introduces impressive key and tempo shifts.

Nobody is putting out music like Pop Levi's right now.

The Wedding is certainly one of the best records this band has released and, more important, one of the better rock records released this year.

Begin to Hope has its highs and lows, but it is a journey worth taking.

Out in the Storm is a deeply impressive record, one that finds Crutchfield honing the strengths we knew she had, discovering new ones, and adding another strong record a rare sort of catalog--one that is consistent but unafraid to push for something new.

Just a hair less than 40 minutes of energetic music. Which is a welcome change by today's standards -- to simply appreciate some music by itself.

There is so, so much content, so beautifully and flawlessly presented that it can be baffling at times. The Suburbs, to many, was decade-defining music. Reflektor, I feel, through both content and design, will be artist-defining.

Here Low are, still going strong, still this consistent, still delivering vital albums like C'mon.

Many of these new forms shift her into the role of a band leader - a role that, maybe, could solidify her as the "voice of a generation" that overzealous press releases have claimed her to be.

This album will still take away the breath you aren't holding: It's at once bleak, aching, and insidiously beautiful.

It is in this tension--the struggle to find hope and comfort quickly and the realization that you can't--that Mr. M exists and shines.

In their desire to avoid repetition, however, they’ve indeed strayed somewhere they’ve never been before: the middle of the road.

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.

The album marks the return of that sharpness of perspective in Beam’s songwriting. However, there are moments where the music--though the band plays together well--threatens to tip from spare into stale. It never quite gets there.

At a focused 48-minutes, The Bones of What You Believe comes soaring through and makes its difficult for you not to press replay when it all fades out.

Beirut's mournful horn riffs, driving piano, sprightly ukulele, dense percussion and occasional synth loops proved haunting and entrancing at best, flat-out morose at worst, and benignly pretty the rest of the time.

Another stellar song collection.

What's missing is the meditative joy they achieved in their rockier moments.

The members of 13 & God have created a genuinely rewarding record that is better than the sum of its parts.

We, the Vehicles is ultimately too redundant to graduate Maritime into a more mature audience.

The Con is a mostly mature collection of solid songs.

The more you listen, the more you'll start to pick up on the elaborate instrumentation that exists in the background.