Cymbals Eat Guitars don’t get drowned in homage, however; from the first explosive note to the last, Why There Are Mountains is a routinely rewarding album, with each listen revealing great new scenery.

Part of the album's appeal is its lo-fi production values. These songs are clearly built on analog four-track recordings and then embellished with overdubs.

No longer firmly fixing their gaze upon past, The Brunettes have begun to turn their lights toward the future with Paper Dolls; moreover, these bouncy little bedroom discos should be more than enough to ensure that the band’s present (and future) remain bright as well.

Taken as a whole the album is great slab of rock and roll music.

Horehound doesn’t sound like the first album from a tossed-off side project; it crackles with the intensity of a band that has been together longer than a few months.

Clearly Robyn knows her pop history, but she manages to prevent the album from slipping into simple pastiche by always keeping the balance between old and new just right.

In Panic of Looking, he keeps speech in the realm of analog, not digital, and still makes it into music.

Bestival offers the opportunity to take a tour of the band's long, fruitful career, stopping at each stylistic turn in their journey to take in the sonic scenery, but it also adds the freshness that only a live performance can bring.

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.

Here, Mind Spiders achieve what every delirious party-goer wants: a celebration that stretches to infinity.

Viewed in a vacuum, Out of Love is one of this year's strongest debuts, a complete album with easy hooks and easy charms.

It's this combination of the simple and the intricate, the elegant and the forceful, that makes Luminous Night work so well.

There Is No Enemy does not offer new horizons for Built to Spill, but it does shine in a consistently good catalog.

This compilation of songs from films and tributes becomes nothing less than an inadvertent tribute to Kozelek himself, a finely woven tapestry of pop music as refracted through his heartfelt filter of pastoral, troubled beauty.

More important than any commentary about the listening habits of internet browsers I could possibly make is the fact that Dancer Equired stands as the perfect gateway for new Times New Viking listeners, and definitely deserves to be enjoyed and not brushed aside.

Upon hearing how masterfully Black Tambourine pull off these covers, it all makes sense. The sound these women helped codify with their music and their writing is inescapable today.

It’s this awareness that makes Living on the Other Side--on one level a pretty basic rock album that doesn’t surpass any of its predecessors--seem like something much, much more.

True to its title, it finds the pair plowing away dutifully and deftly at the furrow that's been their focus from the beginning.

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.

The Sister is Marissa Nadler looking down and realizing that she has recently written eight good songs.

For those readers familiar with Whitman, rest assured that this record only strengthens his hold on the contemporary experimental electronic scene.

It may be easy to namedrop a litany of '90s bands to describe Cymbals Eat Guitars, but Lenses Alien proves that doing so is a fool's errand. This sound doesn't fit such easy spaces, which is what makes it so damn good.

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.

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.

Without question, part of Shocking Pinks' charm is the intimacy of its unpolished production values, but, with a little more patience and rigorous revision, it's easy to see Harte's best songs being even better.

Like all score-dominated soundtracks, Slumdog Millionaire, at times, sounds like a mishmash of random pieces that don’t have much to do with each other. But that’s due to the fact that these pieces were created with specific visuals in mind -- so only listening to the album, you’re only getting half of the story. But this half is still pretty incredible.

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.