The band itself is top notch here.

Songs for Singles sees the Miami band continuing to experiment with upbeat, accessible metal songs, and while not fully pop yet, the addition of a more advanced rhythm section helps offset their perpetual need to drone their guitars out. The album inches the band further to reaching a goal of good pop metal that, while seemingly impossible in 2010, is a fight worth fighting.

Ascension doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it's a welcome addition to the Jesu canon.

Ultimately, however, The Minus 5 is the indie-rock equivalent of Ocean's Twelve. Everyone involved is clearly having a blast, and the result for the audience is often infectious. But just as often it is distancing, like watching footage of someone else's birthday party.

The project is structured much like a high-end runway show, so although most songs work on their own, they’re far more revelatory as a group.

The Blue Depths can be a mesmerizing album to listen to. Tapscott's voice creaks with emotion, haunting these songs with a vital humanity that keeps their cold feel from being mechanical.

"Majestic" is a word often used to describe Mono, and this record, the band's fifth, will not challenge us to avoid using it.

Rock music's era of overarching influence on culture has no doubt passed into the historical twilight, but artistry and ambition in the form is alive and well on records like Hp-1.

The album feels unfinished, but not totally incomplete--instead, a documentation of something altogether mystical.

In the end Hospitality is a solid pop album through and through.

The album conjures up equal measures of frustration and dejection, especially as it bears all the hallmarks of a band growing in stature, who may have just delivered on all that untapped potential on a finely honed fourth or fifth record.

The Black Kids may only have one trick, but as long as they only pull it at a house party, it’s the only one they’ll need.

Milk Famous is a full-on declaration, a confident pop record that shows us this band as a collection of unique performers.

The songwriting is bland and the production is overdone.

Only a few moments stand out.

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.

But even at its toe-tapping best, this quintet from Newcastle can’t convey a sense of passion.

There’s a cornucopia of sounds that definitely needs some time to be digested, but when it finally is--it’s an absolutely satisfying experience.

These are just the outcast songs with edges too elusive to polish. And while you're unlikely to fall completely in love with them, it's comforting to know that Lekman felt similarly.

Like many within Iceland's post-rock movement, these musicians have not quite mastered the ability to rein in some of their more excessive tendencies. But Kurr exceeds both the promise of Amiina's distinct instrumental premise and the musical and physical landscape from which the band originates.

What's missing, though, is the familiar sense of deft control over the album's arc, the lyrical intrigues, and the instrumental detail that make his other work so indispensible to the indie folk canon of last decade.

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

It's the kind of release that will keep longtime fans happy, and acts as a welcoming primer to new ears, inviting them to join El-P on his side of the line before exposing them to his harsher, more eye-opening material.

[His] vocals don't have the same strength or range they did just two years ago on You Are the Quarry.

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

Two albums later, on yet another ingeniously titled album, Art Brut vs. Satan, the band members have done something no one expected: They’ve turned into socially conscious critics of their woebegone generation without losing the charm that made fans love them in the first place.

All over Let's Build a Fire, +/- fails to capitalize on the moments of beauty and originality by either doing too much or doing too little.

Me and Armini merely falls short of being as fully conceived as the astonoshing "Fisherman’s Woman."