Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star is a curious new entry for the group. It expands the space-age palate of Lese Majesty, but slips in the unique tunefulness of Black Up. And yet it doesn’t quite sound like either, and--maybe unsurprisingly, at this point--it doesn’t sound like any other record you’ll hear this year.

Instead of complaining about the soullessness of life under the major-label umbrella, naysayers ought to be examining the band's true aesthetic motivations for taking an earthier, more straightforward approach on The King Is Dead.

Darnielle's usual knack for detail and word play is surgical here, as usual, but All Eternals Deck is notable for its wide sonic palate.

Make no mistake, though--the music of Hymn and Her is good, and the songs are almost always uniformly excellent examples of finely-honed pop songcraft. But when each excellent song sounds just like the slow, rainy Sunday pulse of a track that just preceded it, well, a few less hymns and a few more songs for rocking are in order.

Plumb is one of the top-shelf albums of 2012 so far because of Field Music's openness to continually tinker with pop music's DNA.

Celebration is as theatrical as it is guttural, with Ford’s voice bellowing above cabaret-style organs, sharp guitars and loose, spiraling drum riffs.

The Lucky Ones shows him to be as reassuringly sarcastic and self-deprecating as ever.

A beautiful back-porch album.

This selection method lacks the cohesion of a proper album, but the uniformity of the raw emotion throughout offers some thrilling highpoints.

Slappers is a much more unified, low-key whole [than its predecessor], and it's both stronger and weaker for it.

At its weary, lovely close, it becomes clear that Live belongs not to the listener but to the artist who created it. And that makes this album one of the most vital and electric he's made in years.

Some of these songs do, of course, belong on the radio: They’re saturated with production effects catered to a generation that calls its designer drug “ecstasy,” all wrapped around indulgent hooks, sentimental lyrics, and a sweet voice airbrushed into flawlessness. But Annie flaunts too much.

When the proper songs throughout are so uniformly good in spite of their fractured approaches, complaining about scarcity seems despicably greedy.

A noticeable departure on Kiss Each Other Clean is that Beam seems to be having a genuinely good time on the album.

It's an album that sounds like it was difficult to make, as these two move from being the couple to being the players, and that difficulty yields some of their most beautiful moments on record yet, even if it also (and perhaps necessarily) gets in the way of the songs sometimes.

It lacks the mind-blowing qualities that made Rounds the essential album in his catalogue, but Everything Ecstatic is another must-own from Four Tet, the most reliable of producers.

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.

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

The elements that make the band's performances distinct are all there: Finn’s rapid-fire, sometimes nearly incoherent delivery; the chemistry between the band members; the between-song banter that is equal parts inviting and human and kind of crazy.

The album complements each situation differently, and new elements become apparent with each listen.

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.

She's ditched the medieval allusions to dragons and fairies and most of the courtly, classical sound that marked so much of the later Helium material and her early solo material. But what results in many ways sounds like a rehash of her previous work.

Overall, though, Days is a great sophomore album and solid evidence that Real Estate is growing and ready to settle in for the long haul.

The music is cutesy and fun, but the lyrics are subversive.

The album features Leo's most meaty and confidant singing to date.

Despite Delta Spirit’s anarchic (i.e., creatively opportunistic) sampling of everything from cold war folk to the Cold War Kids, when the band members hit their stride--as on the rumbling, locomotive grooves of piano-stung epic Americana on 'Trashcan'--Sunshine becomes nothing less than an ode to musical joy.

Not only does it stand as a summation of their greatest (previous) strengths, its rhythmic and propulsive sway points to a new, more fervently alive direction for the group, making both the band and album’s name all the more appropriate.

[Pfeffer] pruned this album to an essential thirty-two minutes, in which every note (and there are a lot of them) has its purpose and every bizarre genre switch leads somewhere important and ends before wearing out its welcome.