This may not have any of the hard-hitting jabs his best Smog records had, but I Wish We Were An Eagle is a subtler, more bittersweet heartbreak.

ike Animal Collective, Copeland's work is musician's music, geared toward the adventurous listener with a trained ear and a tendency to enjoy music as, well, an expansive, ever-shifting experiment.

An ambient record that doesn't bore or get bogged down in its insistence on fading into the background.

This is the kind of music we should be hearing all the time, instead of the deathly boring muzak we (and our ears) generally expect.

While lack of tunefulness has rarely been an issue for noise-rock fans, A Small Turn of Human Kindness's abstractness makes it a little less satisfying than its predecessor. But it's still a fascinating product of one of the more fascinating bands working in the bowels of rock 'n' roll today.

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.

The conviction in Stern's direct, bare voice is what turns the album into the kicking, clawing, emotional frenzy that we get.

Words And Music expertly explores the intoxicated love of music and the sheer joy of being a music fan: feelings so universal that they will never be confined to particular eras.

Nothing seems to rattle them, and hearing that Zen-like outlook on record is immensely refreshing and inspiring.

Though the narratives are harder to follow, and the refrains more verbose (or simply absent), this music is still full of youthful anger. The nature of it is simply more suitable for a recent-high-school-graduate-aged kid grappling with more knotty insecurities. It’s also probable that much of Earl’s younger audience has grown up with him, and will relate to this impressive record even more deeply than his first.

Vampire Weekend’s debut comes across as a confident, precise, and, for better and worse, mature collection.

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.

Parallax is easily Atlas Sound's best-sounding album to date.

With such a hooky, immediate, and yet complex record, let’s hope it’s not the final fade out.

The result is 10 songs of lyrical brilliance that will have music listeners giving Porterfield the credit that's long overdue.

Honeys is the band's ultimate thesis statement, grounding their past triumphs in cruel reality that, if not buffered by their expert sense of humor, would hit too close to home too many times to count.

In the end, Writer's Block isn't a life-changing musical statement, but it is a superb collection of finely crafted pop songs.

That restlessness and aggression make King of Jeans a visceral, honest mess of a record. This is all ragged glory.

Aloe Blacc's Good Things is a mature, well-crafted, and distinctive take on the basic blueprint of the neo-soul sound, the quasi-revival movement that embraced classic soul and funk tropes that had been abandoned by much of the R&B establishment.

Unstoppable.

Slave Ambient continues themes of wanderlust and searching that were all over the other records, but as Granduciel sings of friends gone, of calling loved ones home, of trying to find his place in the world changing around him, the music behind him seems to be searching too.

Instead of tossing off interstitial, between-album scraps, Ellison has done what most artists should do with the extended-play format: create a mini-album. Every song has its place and works together to form a tangible flow.

They sometimes drift back to that comfortable space, and those moments make the record feel a bit longer than it is, but overall this is another interesting twist in the band’s sound.

On one hand, the enormity of said soundtrack can be appreciated by those with a palate for the peculiar, while others might yearn for a more streamlined recording.

With his band's fourth studio album, frontman Will Sheff stakes a claim here for the right to be called the best songwriter working right now.

Each song here, when attention is paid, is gut wrenching, honest and unabashedly sad while maintaining a sense of resigned acceptance... The arrangements and production, however, tend to drown out Perfume Genius's ability to juggle his subject matter, leaving songs that just don't quite break your heart.

With electronic and live sounds, emotional production and excellent vocals from some of the underground scene’s best, Leave It All Behind is an open and experimental take on hip-hop and soul, highly successful, at that.

The Magic Position feel[s] more like a missed opportunity than a legitimate breakthrough album.