The chemistry between them, first displayed on 2005's "Chemistry" and now on The Formula, is consistent from song to song.

Thunder, Lightning, Strike is for people who love music that hits them over the head with the sheer enjoyment of the human ability to rock.

On Get Color Health hit upon a noise that’s all their own. If they make the kind of leap between albums two and three that they did between one and two, Health’s third album should be nothing short of spectacular.

It jumps from light pop to disco funk to noise samples without ever sacrificing melody for the sake of overindulgence.

The Animal Years feels effortless.

I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass is the statement of a band insistent on showing the world it is not quite through being relevant.

There may only be two songs here, but Bejar does a lot with them. He gives us both the clever tricks we expect from him and a whole new sound in which for them to swirl around.

That restlessness and aggression make King of Jeans a visceral, honest mess of a record. This is all ragged glory.

[A] great debut.

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.

Luckily, Blackenedwhite, the first post-Odd Future hype machine album, is still as good as it was eight months ago, when it came out and was instantly the most fun album in the Odd Future oeuvre. It's a triumph of two kids putting all of their efforts into an album, and coming out with something great.

A wonderfully crafted album built on songwriting that is witty and potent.

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.

Take Care, Take Care, Take Care is another beautiful record from the band, and another fresh track laid on their sonic landscape, a slight tangent from their other records that never loses their overall direction.

The project finds strength in synergy, working off each member's best qualities; they balance a dry vocal tone here with a melodramatic keyboard sigh there.

Instead of tossing off interstitial, between-album scraps, Ellison has done what most artists should do with the extended-play format: create a mini-album. Every song has its place and works together to form a tangible flow.

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.

The sound isn’t youthful, nor does it try to be. To Del, the quintessential alternative hip-hop artist, and Tame, underground hip-hop mainstay, the panacea to the apparent predicament of age is craftsmanship.

At its best Gossamer is, like its namesake, delicate at first glance but possessed of incredible molecular strength.

But what this offering lacks in mirth, it more than makes up for in transcendence as well as dissonance.

While Eating Us and their various solo pursuits found them sticking their necks out into the world at large, Cobra Juicy proves that their self-imposed isolation once again yields the best results.

200 Million Thousand has more hooks and is better top-to-bottom than any previous Black Lips effort.

Romance Is Boring might sound, in description and on wax, very similar to the band’s work, but there’s a palpable confidence here that wasn’t present just an album ago, and it makes Romance Is Boring the key entry in an already ballooning discography.

Magnetic Man accomplishes its goal: make pretty for the spotlight.

What Darkel does offer is more of a good thing: songs that sound like the follow-up to Moon Safari, if Air weren't so progressive.

A barnstorming, kiwi-pop-delicate album that is Reatard’s best album-length statement to date.

Is Growing Faith feels more like an actual lost psychedelic-era gem than a revivalist record.

The slickly produced Twin Cinema tweaks the formula to include subdued moments, climactic codas and fully unified vocals, elevating the band’s ideas to complete cohesion and transcending its previous output.

Taken as a whole, Moms outreaches and outpaces any of Menomena's previous works.

The Horror's assault is quite capable of speaking for itself, and that's what makes it so memorable.

Jacobs works in a peerless vacuum located in a hazy plot point on the pop timeline, located somewhere in-between outright sugary pop and nerdy bedroom electronica.

Going Places is one of the heaviest, haziest, and densest records you're likely to hear in any genre. It also fulfills one of the promises of Yellow Swans career that was most apparent in their live shows -- namely, a marriage between the liberation of pure noise and the intellectual appeal of headier, more sophisticated experimental electronic practices.

Broken Ear Record... seems to embrace a certain sense of pop influence, albeit far beneath the manic din of sonic exploration for which the band is known.

He'll probably still be relegated to afternoon festival slots and in hard to find reaches of your local record store, but Pop Negro is another delightful record that pushes the boundaries between music and countries.

Edwards’s newly minted disco folktronica, as easily aligned with Sufjan Stevens as Aphex Twin, is a little bit very crazy.

Whether they’re taking names or taking their sweet time, the Constantines pull no punches here.

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

It's never anything less than gorgeous.

If the sound of being eaten alive is something you would like to hear, by all means, shake a leg to Burned Mind.

As Olivier's lyrical content matures along with the rest of the band's elements, Midnight Movies could be ready to move into primetime.

Where Now Here Is Nowhere was equally about force and restraint but always in separate parts, Ten Silver Drops does well to blend the two.

Micah P. Hinson and the Opera Circuit is a pure expression of turmoil, a cathartic release through art that skillfully avoids self-obsessed mawkishness.

A front-to-back play of Guns may not work for a dorm-room style throwdown, but it is a successful album of dancehall tracks that shows good teamwork within this collaboration.

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

To say that Oh Holy Molar has a bite is a vast understatement -- the record grabs ahold of your skin and refuses to let go.

Let it wash over you, let it slowly but surely catch your attention, and steadily let the music build its case for how engrossing it can be.

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.

They've got an amazing musical connection between them and its evident on this tight, pulsating, thumping record.

There’s a certain history-capturing aspiration here, as if the album's purpose wasn’t just for charity, to move records, or for Dessner to get together with his pals to compile an album but to provide a musical time capsule that in 20 years could allow younger generations to get into indie rock from the early 21st century. If that was how compilation albums were solely judged, Dark Was the Night would be the gold standard.

Whereas Helplessness lived up to its title through a narrator that found inspiration in leaving childish things behind, Misty treads the same notions of spirituality in a decidedly earthier manner.

Generals might sound like a spoonful of sugar, but it gives you a lot of medicine to get down.

Their sound doesn’t deconstruct or reconstruct anything; it just kicks some tail.

Anyone who has found beauty in a chipped tooth or a grazed knee will find much to love here. Jewellery certainly doesn’t suffer from a paucity of ideas, and the lyrical subjects are more than a match for the band’s heterogeneous musical leanings.

It's apparent they're looking to construct a big tent for everyone to fit in, and unsurprisingly they're succeeding wildly.

With such a hooky, immediate, and yet complex record, let’s hope it’s not the final fade out.

His self-producing the album allows for complete creative control and its pure sense of cohesion as one track flows seamlessly into the next.

It's evidence of a powerful songwriter honing his artistry.

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

"Epic” is the only way to describe the balance of Skeletal Lamping--Barnes isn’t afraid to throw everything on tape.

It is not at all clear where you are heading when you board, and it becomes less and less important as the journey progresses, beauty on all sides, comfortably lost in the violet noise (more appropriate than black) suffusing everything at hand.

With News & Tributes, the band has matured to where the songs are initially gratifying but also grant further rewards with subsequent scrutiny.

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

Even at its most elemental moments He Gets Me High sounds a lot more expansive than their debut. It might not be essential listening, but it certainly can be taking as foreshadowing of what a high-budgeted Dum Dum Girls might sound like.

The Ohio-based band led by singer/songwriter Jerry DeCicca bears its share of melancholy and then some on their fifth album, but so do a million and one other indie bands, and none of them come anywere close to evoking the same sort of sad-sack super session [like one with Lee Hazlewood, Townes Van Zandt, Stuart Staples from Tindersticks, and Mickey Newbury].

Cansei de Ser Sexy works not because of its ability to break new musical ground but because of its ability to borrow from other influences and use them in new ways to avoid sounding totally contrived.

There's a refreshingly human scale to everything on Pale Young Gentlemen--the songs are so strong that the crack of a snare drum and the bowing of a cello, simple gestures as they are, can achieve the band's grand theatrical ambitions.

This application of the synthesizer’s capabilities across styles and time periods allows Matmos to explore their music through a more purely compositional aesthetic -- and, with any luck, they’ll be remembered for this just as much as for their experimental leanings.

It shows a quick growth in confidence from the last record to this one, mostly leaving behind the moments that feel too quiet, too intimate to always connect to from the last record. Capacity is another strong record, and a brave step forward for Big Thief.

If Family Perfume Vol. 1 can be seen as a progression where Presley is settling into his skin, Family Perfume Vol. 2 is a cathartic catalogue of letters never sent, the consequences of past decisions poignant enough to keep Presley musing, wide-eyed, remorseful--but nonetheless hopeful.

Garbus might be more known right now as a magnetic performer, but w h o k i l l proves she's just as beguiling on record.

With Powder Burns he has surpassed all expectations brought on from his previous releases.

This is far from an album that will appeal to all, but it's a hell of a lot more fun than the Hold Steady's previous two efforts.

On Three's Co., Rademaker's songwriting has matured, which combined with the bigger production, makes for a thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying listen.

In Our Heads boasts at least eight festival crowd decimators, and finally strikes the right balance between Hot Chip's two sides.

A perfect summation of everything that was great about this band.

Behind these minor tones and detached themes, Third emits a knowing and quiet confidence that communicates the band’s strongly held ideas, especially that of existential ennui.

Even in a crowded field this summer, chockfull of musical juggernaunts releasing albums, Pigeons will likely catch people's attention. And those people will be glad it did.

Loud, brash, but never cocksure, Mantaray swaggers like a cat in heat.

Though at times difficult to listen to, the effect is a clear view of an artist's process. Herein lies the true value of Dennis Wilson's legacy: an open invitation to simply listen.

Listening to Bleach now, the main thing that comes across is how little it sounds moored to a specific time.

The Bears for Lunch surprises from quick song to quick song (even though we know this trick well now) and maintains an overall cohesion and distinct mood.

Big Business boys Coady Willis and Jared Warren, the drum/bass duo, returned for their third album as members of the Melvins in 2010, keeping the hot streak going with The Bride Screamed Murder.

This record is the sound of a young musician being given the right chance at the right time and knocking it out of the park.

My Guilty Pleasure is more cohesive, its production more varied, its songwriting more effective.

Okkervil River has never provided easy answers in their albums--unless you read the many interviews with Sheff, who always seems willing to explain what he can--and I Am Very Far is another fine album in an increasingly finer canon.

The Mouse and the Mask’s levity is the antithesis of the dense Madvilliany, and it continues Doom’s steady march toward achieving legendary status.

All the swirling riffs and overlapping repetitions might be tiresome if not for the sad, imperfect voices at their center.

Like the rest of Primary Colours, this is the sound of a band finding themselves out of favor and having to really strive for greatness. The Horrors will still have a hard time winning over new converts, but they’ve done a magnificent job of confounding expectations with this release.

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

With the explorations of additional instrumentation as well being more comfortable with silences and with echo, SunnO))) approach the freedom and abandon of the spirit-travelers alluded to in the titles and approaches on this, the band's best record yet.

ike Animal Collective, Copeland's work is musician's music, geared toward the adventurous listener with a trained ear and a tendency to enjoy music as, well, an expansive, ever-shifting experiment.

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.

It's the sound of a cooking band truly cooking it in the studio. Everything sounds like it's about to jump the rails at any given moment.

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's an often frustrating listen, but in the end the album is a triumph.

Christ Illusion is not a throwback; it's something new steeped in something old.

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.