Reefer works best as a moment that’s fleeting.

By all accounts, A Strange Arrangement is a potentially star-making turn from a completely unlikely source.

Furr still finds Blitzen Trapper as a band that’s relentlessly restless, just one that’s purposefully that way.

As far as listening experiences go, you can certainly do a lot worse than sitting back in your chair, being consistently affected by Asobi Seksu's sunlit wandering. Unfortunately, it would probably be better for Hush if the band stepped into the shadows every once in a while.

It's an album that purges the nastiness of its predecessor and switches things up enough without sacrificing its power, a template that hopefuly they remember to follow.

Logos, while just the second solo album from the frontman for a band of marginal fame, represents the latest and greatest chapter in Cox’s ride to indie stardom.

The stream-of-conscious raps that peppered her debut have been scaled back, replaced by relatively more traditional compositions, but the music is still deliciously unpredictable, and the words are a pack of SweeTart poetry.

The lightness, even with the same downtrodden lyrics, comes from the upbeat arrangements that find their way through the slosh of feedback--an appropriate sound for lyrics that evoke the same feeling--sloshing through the everyday. Perhaps Merritt realizes that to be comically self-loathing or misanthropic is, perhaps, all a person can ask for.

Over and over, we get the sense that Cadence makes records for that gaggle of kids on the album cover, for the look on their faces. If any of the rest of us likes it, all the better. It works: We’d like to know more about Mr. Weapon, and his buds.

Repo isn’t a great progression from previous Black Dice records. But their willfully amateurish approach, and a continued fascination with the coarse and the crude, make this another welcome addition to their woozy, dog-eared oeuvre.

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

That he was able to keep as much of himself in the transition from the underground to the mainstream is what is admirable.

Meat & Bone is proof positive that music needn't be so reverent to its past.

Longtime Companion feels like the first cracked smile after the tears have stopped, somewhere between dusk and the gloom of night.

While managing to side-step both preciousness and predictability, The Broken String pulls together the long-anticipated and full-fledged follow-up that fans deserve, at the same time aptly defining where Bishop Allen is now: all over the map.

Despite a sharp shift in direction, the spirit of Ascent floats--sometimes upwards, at times skittish and swooping underneath clouds--but nonetheless rising.

At times, the country air's so strong you can smell the hay/freedom. Far more often, though, Dekker and company find the sweet spot.

Muse is nothing if not distinctive, and Black Holes and Revelations is very much distinctively Muse: fantastic at points and ridiculous at others, without much in between.

The odd bits and bobs typical of the 7-inch and B-side world manage to make Advance Base Battery Life a little more interesting than Owen Ashworth's previous work.

The members of Cold War Kids have deepened their sound rather than expanding it.

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.

It's an album that marries the buzzsaw abrasion of past Swans' albums with the country-cum-death-blues feel of his work with Angels of Light. That's an easy way to explain it, anyway.

The songs toward the latter half of the nine-song, 50-minute album begin to blur, but overall the album introduces a good, anachronistic headspace to enter into.

This album will still take away the breath you aren't holding: It's at once bleak, aching, and insidiously beautiful.

War unfolds less like a cohesive concept album (though a rock-opera would be a likely future addition to the group's discography) as much as a series of telenovela vignettes.

It's hard to shake the feeling that the band's fourth album, Blood Pressures, is the one that will take The Kills to the next level.

Pluto should be appreciated for what it is, an album of impeccably crafted, energetic, original music that is striving above all else to be popular and universal, even if such goals look less likely of being achieved than ever before.

Taken as a whole, the music on Hungry Bird is at times lovely, but also has the tendency to become unsettling.