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.