Simply, Menomena are a band that sounds completely familiar but totally different.

For the most part this album is devoid of those special moments--no big choruses, no unexpected climaxes. Just 11 consistent tracks to perhaps one day rediscover, individually, while idly browsing your iPod's shuffle.

Archive acts as this brief glimpse into the evolution of a celebrated songwriter and a band, yet with the quality and the high level of music geekery required, it's obvious that this one's intended for the superfans.

The result is an album that's heavy on ideas instead of execution. It's pleasant but forgettable.

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

Mark Kozelek is surely a distinct voice, and a dynamic guitar player, but there's a difference between playing solo and playing to yourself. And he stumbles over that line just enough to hold this album back from greatness.

While some songs appear to have a cleaner polish (the pleasantly danceable "XXXO" and the epic "Tell Me Why") than others (the freewheeling "Born Free" and the ultra-compressed "Space"), every song is structured like a concise pop song with just a few rough edges.

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

Even if this EP is the byproduct of a band that's working out the kinks, it's still a promising glimpse into what to expect from How to Destroy Angels' 2011 full-length.

The band strips away any hard kicks and allows each song to quietly pulse at a more human pace. Ironically, the album feels best suited for traveling.

Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty isn't just an expertly produced and performed slab of brilliantly odd, futuristic dance music. It isn't just the best rap album of the year so far.

Expo 86 just straight up rocks. It never lets up on the monstrous riffs it delivers in its first 10 seconds.

Gone are the frantic raps, menacing synths, and general hardness of the band's past three albums. In their place is a mellow approximation of the jazzy, old-school charm of The Roots circa Things Fall Apart.

All in all, though, Total Life Forever is a slightly more assured record from Foals; this time out they sound like they've taken complete ownership of their music.

Robyn's transition to the boldest--and maybe loneliest--girl in the room allowed her to showcase her versatile range of emotions and musical influences, plenty of which are on display in Body Talk Pt. 1.

Because of his relatively privileged upbringing (he's from a wealthy part of Toronto), Thank Me Later is less about chronicling and rising up out of his environment (like basically every rap debut since Illmatic) and more about how Drake is uncomfortable being famous.

The group's bleak, sinister quality has always been one of its best assets, and in humanizing themselves, even in the record's shinier latter half, the musicians take on a slightly stronger shadow.

Champ might have its fair share of weak spots (basically the back third), yet it's another proficient album from one of the more (still) promising young bands around.

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.

While White Crosses has a few stellar songs, it lets down as a complete record. Anarchy will have to wait a little longer.

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.

Suckers fire off Wild Smile, an album that exceeds all possible expectations and lays down a challenge for all debuting bands this year.

Wake Up The Nation comes across as a lean, physical record with enough lucid zingers to make you hungry for more.

The best part of Treats is that it makes you rethink the possibilities of this kind of music. It is possible for a former girl-group member and a former hardcore guitarist to get together to make an album that is more daring and more fun than anything you'll likely hear on Top 40 radio this year.

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.

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.

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.

But for all the sonic changes and glimmers of hope, the best stuff here still sounds like boilerplate Jurado. Swift's production is at its best when it adds subtle atmospherics to the fragile melody of "Kansas City," or the dusty flourishes to the chorus of "Harborview."

At times Melted falls into the familiar lo-fi production trap: lack of variety in sound and tempo. However, at its best moments, Melted's songs employ playful riffs and weighty guitars to create textures as varied as the ones in Segall's sweet treat analogy.

This Is Happening is a record that knows -- made by a band that knows -- that disco is better when it's just not so satisfied with itself.

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.

Brothers, meanwhile, proves that the Keys can still put a few more miles on their well-driven blues machine, regardless of what direction their non-Keys work takes them.

While Compass, due partially to its longer track list, features a few duds that prevent it from surpassing the superior Jim, the album still shows Lidell as indie’s best answer to Robin Thicke and his compatriots, artists Lidell bests on a regular basis.

In spite of the album's potential obesity at 18 tracks of wildly different musical ideas, the three [Monae and her production partners, Charles "Chuck Lightning" Joseph II and Nathaniel "Nate 'Rocket' Wonder'" Irvin III.] keep the weight off by welcoming coherence and by evenly spreading out their interests.

While lack of tunefulness has rarely been an issue for noise-rock fans, A Small Turn of Human Kindness's abstractness makes it a little less satisfying than its predecessor. But it's still a fascinating product of one of the more fascinating bands working in the bowels of rock 'n' roll today.

Sometimes, the band forms something interesting and new from these starting points.

Unlike the Ranconteurs' sophomore slump, Sea of Cowards doesn't suffer from lack of inspiration. It's simply a matter of a lackluster songwriting effort as the product of deserved success, which in some respects is a worse misstep.

From its painstaking production to its dense lyrical constructs to its mammoth choruses, High Violet is likely to be one of the year's best.

Here's to Taking It Easy is a fine debut of sorts for Phosphorescent as a band. To Willie was the preamble to this, the band's new direction. And good as Houck was as a singer-songwriter, "band leader" is a role that suits him just as well.

No matter your feeling on CocoRosie, whether love them for their innovation or hate them for their grating pretension, when you hear Grey Oceans you might find yourself missing those more challenging (or more inventive) days.

It's OK to play with enthusiasm. Oh, and also, it helps to have an album with 12 fantastic songs, the way the do on Nothing Hurts.

The fact that Warm Slime doesn't quite measure up to the band's lofty previous releases is hardly the point. Thee Oh Sees are already careening down another road at 100 miles per hour, and you best keep up.

For a debut album oozing with influences, Stuck on Nothing is doubly impressive in the way that it not only makes a definitive mission statement for a truly exciting new band but also manages to keep such a strong sense of itself in spite of itself.

Make no mistake, there is still plenty of rock--it's just doled out selectively instead of consistently.

Essentially, Forgiveness Rock Record finds Broken Social Scene trading "big and loud" for "wide and warm" and as a result sounding like they've really just settled further into their identity as a band.

Yet, even though the steady presence of featured performances helps beautify Cosmogramma, this is essentially Ellison's crowning achievement. The album is sequenced with a sense of purpose, evidential from the promo being presented as a long continuous track.

On the whole, Together smartly meshes thick orchestration with their lean energy really well, picking up where Challengers left off and improving in a lot of ways.

The good thing is that for any misstep here, there's a success that overshadows it. But for those of us waiting for him to really knock another out of the park the way he did on The Animal Years, it might be a let down to realize So Runs the World Away isn't that.

While collaborator conductor Aldo Sisillo's orchestrations deserve a healthy dollop of credit for the overall sonic success of the album, Patton's voice is clearly the centerpiece.

Like all Gogol Bordello albums, Trans-Continental Hustle is instantly enjoyable, but even more lyrical and musical layers emerge on repeat listens that show you just how smart and (simple) Gogol Bordello can be.

The album sticks very much to the template of ambient keyboard pop and an atmosphere of disappointment that past Lali Puna and Notwist albums traded in. That said, it's effective in what it sets out to accomplish and has a silent ambition that is fairly admirable.

On La La Land, however, Plants and Animals abandon most of the qualities that made the band distinct in favor of conforming to more contemporary indie trends.

This is a great record, full with a daring, hard-earned hope, and a deep emotion. And that's something a lot of records could really use these days.

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.

Weathervanes is a darling, coherent, and certainly radio-friendly (if at times sugary) record. But on their next attempt, Freelance Whales should tone down the maudlin, veer away from Sufjan territory, subtract a few bells and whistles and grow up with the college crowd.

Congratulations shares nary a sonic smidgen with Oracular Spectacular, instead existing in a netherworld where mod-era psychedelia meets prog-rock and where the ecstatic heights of the band's debut don't exist.

While I See the Sign might not quite measure up to the staggering "All Is Well," this is still a hell of an album. One that, like the songs that populate it, could resonate for a good long while.

While this record may not be one that I listen to end to end, over and over, there is little doubt that it is the perfect soundtrack to a serendipitous, still-to-come, drive into the unknown.

What makes Marling engaging is that her music presents scenarios without deliberately sounding like poetry or art. Her songs do not emphasize the beauty of sounds or musicality of words so much as clip insightful observations from conversations.

Jones deserves special credit for treating her subject matter consistently and with an even hand throughout I Learned The Hard Way. She can express both hurt and her trademark, take-no-shit defiance.

The album has no song that truly feels like a single, and thus no particularly strong cuts ground the album.

The Dum Dum Girls’ debut, I Will Be, plays like a veritable best-of of current trends in lo-fi rock ‘n' pop. In fact, the disc’s (admittedly exhilarating) fidelity to the budding-but-already-overdone genre nearly weighs it down.

Volume Two feels better than it could be, but it's still missing that something that would make it great.

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.

It seems impossible that the same band that started out so ramshackle could deliver an album as splendid and tighly wound as this.

Let's Wrestle may, in all their zeal, cram a couple songs too many onto this record, but it's a minor setback for a pop record that carries as much melody as it does personality.

In the Dark is a big, loud, dumb record, filled with songs about not respecting women you bang on the bus ("Someone's Daughter"), feeling empty inside ("So Lonely" and "I Don't Even Care About The One I Love") and being for real ("I Am For Real").

Under Great White Northern Lights is a perfect explanation of the band's significance to doubters, now and in the future.

While this does fall in with a pretty crowded lo-fi movement going on, Happy Birthday is also an unabashed pop record unafraid to wear its grainy heart on its sleeve.

He never panders to them; instead, Plastic Beach's guest vocals are anchored by Albarn's own melodic flair. His falsettoed ennui shines through, and the songs are loaded with Albarn's pet sounds.

Sisterworld is their first album that fits in soundly with the work of other bands. Whether or not that’s a good thing for Liars is a matter of debate.

Although the album is listenable and even uplifting at times, no songs readily stand out as particularly important or poignant in the way that “Keep Yourself Warm” or “Old Old Fashioned” from The Midnight Organ Fight do.

The fundamental difference between The Monitor and the group's debut, The Airing of Grievances, and the reason why the former shines less bright than the latter, is in the attitude.

On the one hand, no 3 can sound frustrating unfinished. It seems as though something substantially more satisfying would have been attained had the band just stuck with it for a while longer. On the other, it's an enjoyable enough distraction not without its merits. Just don't think of it as the proper progression from no 2.

He's smart enough to know what's to be done, sincere enough to do it free of distraction, and nice enough not to impose his will on you. Ted Leo has literally seen his success as an artist become a life or death experience, and he's here to tell you how to treat it like a grown-up.

Quarantine The Past, a "best of" compilation designed for those who didn't experience the band at the right age (a group that is now well out of college), attempts to put the band's best musical face forward.

Aside from the occasional goofy detail (“I love sandwiches after sex”), their horndog bravado provides exceedingly little in the way of memorable lines, growing numbing and interchangeable over the course of 15 tracks.

The main thing preventing Big Echo from being a very good (or even a great) album is that the bulk of it is clearly and undeniably influenced by the quieter moments from Grizzly Bear’s oeuvre.

That such a glorious and previously unheralded collection of tunes could appear so far into what seems like a decade plus wave of reissue fever is a wider comment about how much great music still out there waiting to be unearthed. The Method Actors deserve to be placed alongside the very best acts of any scene or era.

Hidden won't change British indie, but it should obliterate all expectations as far as These New Puritans are concerned.

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

The album is pure Groove Armada pop at the end, but the decision to be slightly less saccharine means that it's not nearly as disposable as some previous outings.

With Fight Softly they seem so out of sync, so bland and so disappointing.

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.

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.

Without the threat of squalls of feedback (like on Palo Alto) or serious climaxes (like on Rook), most of Golden Archipelago ends up as beautiful as the cover of the album, but with as little context.

Pepper finds the band attacking a multitude of oddball genres--the disc spins from post-rock to electronica to rock to sheer noise--with a frightening focus for such sonic stream-of-consciousness exploits.

Dear God, I Hate Myself packs enough of a wallop that it is worth sitting through some dross to get at the choice bits, which, as is the case with any of the best work by Xiu Xiu, are uncomfortable, uncompromising, and easily hummable.

This Addiction is interesting and ultimately noteworthy because it finds a way to continue on with the band’s winning schematics while tweaking the blueprints in such a way that it's almost hard to notice that you’ve been duped by all the seeming predictability.

Have One on Me isn't at all a ploy for greater likability. It's an affecting, indulgent, and thoroughly fleshed-out monument to Newsom's considerable ambition.

Shout Out Louds have long been a case for the positives of going singles-only, and they probably keep that reputation here. But by a minor degree, Work is Shout Out Louds' finest album-length statement.

Quasi's reappearance with their most consistent album in a decade feels appropriate.

This ability to remain reverent to its influences without compromising its personal vision or sounding like a dull tribute act is White Hills' greatest strength, and it's on display throughout the album.

While not the definitive Tindersticks album, Falling Down A Mountain is a compassionate, delicately rendered collection of songs that warrants repeated listening.

The best tracks here still feature his distinct blend of surrealist poetry, but the music does not even meet it halfway.

They're onto something with the blistering, bluesy, punk direction, but the sound will never gel as long as the songs keep getting stretched beyond their logical breaking points. It's time to move on.

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

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.