"Cartoon Motion" was a nice moment for Mika, but this second album does not improve or advance what he did before. In fact, he seems to have regressed through his venture into childhood on The Boy Who Knew Too Much.

The players on Monsters of Folk complement each other extremely well. There is definitely something to be said for group chemistry. These songs don’t always shine the way they could, but the album is a great effort.

Girls are, at their most basic, a solid band of rock ‘n’ roll reappropriators.

Unmap is the definition of a vanity project, except there’s not much vanity in doing an electronic record that is inferior to the original music either group has made on their own.

The album is a crumbling beauty.

Why?’s ability to write so prolifically, that holds Eskimo Snow together. It keeps us looking forward to what the collective will present us with next, even if the quality of Yoni Wolf's vocals are up for debate.

Vapours gives Thorburn fans what they’ve wanted for a while: a great album of pop bliss from a guy who for too long has avoided delivering just that.

The Big Pink's A Brief History of Love is exactly the kind of album I wish had existed when I was 14. That's not a dig at the record; one of the more special things that a group can do musically is create a sound that appeals both to teenagers and adults.

Texas Rose, The Thaw and The Beasts is the closest Raposa has come to a straight country record. But he doesn't come that close, as all these players steer him further out on tangents rather than towards the middle. And the record is all the better for it.

Born Again Revisited is brimming with catchy choruses, expert song craft, and a few honest-to-goodness fist-pumping anthems. And this time around, your eardrums remain intact.

White Lunar showcases both what can and can't be accomplished by separating musical scores from the visuals that inspired them. Cave and Ellis seem more at home in smaller films. Music that is part of the historic and epic film needs that film in order to makes sense.

These four new songs are impeccably recorded, and frontman Kip Berman's voice sounds so intimate and close it's as if he's whispering a secret into your ear.

Together, which was recorded during a period of lengthy down time for all parties earlier this year, is the sound of five guys bro-ing down, drinking beers and recording an album. It’s not the deepest thing ever recorded, but it is a fun little record that bears no pretense of seriousness.

The songs are better, the guest performers more exciting and enthused, and the production varied enough to highlight the differences between each track (which wasn’t always the case on the previous album).

Time to Die by itself isn’t a bad album, necessarily, but it’s not even close to the same level as Visiter and what made Dodos different to begin with. I hope that on their fourth album, these guys return to their roots.

It is entirely listenable, but this sort of album suggests the power to either break or fortify hearts. To that extent, it does not follow through.

Wedren is game, and the hooks are there, but it’s been proven many times that a person can never truly go home again. It’s how far away Live From Home ends up that provides its greatest interest.

The 22 tracks on this album range freely in length from 11 seconds to six and a half minutes and a rare few would stand on their own, as the musical shifts between them can be so slight.

Survival Skills is a call to arms, and a poetic, uncompromising one at that.

Even as Joyner drifts out into that snow, he remembers to bring some warmth along with him, which is what makes Out Into the Snow the comforting mess that it is.

The problem is that the whole album ends up sounding like any other in the singing-songwriting surfer genre. The songs bleed into one another without much distinction musically.

Instead of spoon-feeding you how you’re supposed to react, they challenge you to understand them.

Popular Songs finds the band crafting solid indie rock that is more by-the-numbers than Yo La Tengo has been in the past.

It surpasses the previous Circulatory System effort, and stands to rival the best of Olivia Tremor Control's output.

The Blueprint 3 starts well enough. Its first half is good to great....But around the time we get to the Timbaland-produced, Limbaugh-dissing, Drake-featuring 'Off That,' a song about how far ahead of the curve Jay is, the album's quality falls off considerably.

Those who were taken with the band before will likely believe this album lives up to last year’s blog-induced hype. However, everyone else will probably think that Everything Goes Wrong is, well, no fun.

After Robots more than answers the call to hype; it breaks down the borders between countries and scenes, and it bears a message that it’s just as possible to create progged-out songs of unending complexity if you’re from Johannesburg as it is if you’re from Williamsburg.

On Get Color Health hit upon a noise that’s all their own. If they make the kind of leap between albums two and three that they did between one and two, Health’s third album should be nothing short of spectacular.