A science fiction romance dedicated to the triumphs and disappointments of the modern world, the Geometrid has all the D.I.Y beats and endearing loops of Looper's first record, Up A Tree. This time around, though, Looper take the grade-school storytelling groove of that record and retool it space-age stylee.

The handclap stomp of "Miss You" explodes at just the right moment, while the house-music piano of "How Deep Is Your Love?" proves the boys' club credentials remain intact.

Like most of these top-shelf indie-pop tunes, ["101"] is cause for hoping Julian Casablancas loosens his songwriting grip on the next Strokes album. [Mar 2007, p.94]

The wonderful Street Songs of Love brightens slightly without losing intensity.

Emerald City may be his most unsettling work yet. [Aug 2007, p. 110]

Hot Thoughts sounds like Spoon and Dave Fridmann’s idea of a futuristic, guitarless record, which is to say it’s full immaculately constructed rock songs arranged on layers and layers of synthesizers and studio fireworks.

The album isn’t perfect. The pensive closer “Childhood” is too precious in its “where did the time go” wonderings. Lead single “Edging” is a mediocre punk number even Green Day might have left behind, and “When We Were Young” is undercooked and appears to battle its own time signature. But it’s still the band’s best work in 20 years, and rocket fuel for this new chapter and whatever follows.

It’s the band’s brightest, most animated album. The sound is crisp, every layer discernible, lacking the blurs and reverberations that constitute traditional rock production and instead drawing from the rhythmic separations that characterize ‘80s pop and freestyle.

For the first time in years, Pearl Jam are seizing the moment rather than wallowing in it.

It's all willfully abrasive, unflinchingly depressing, occasionally tedious, and intermittently triumphant.

Stones Throw rap fanboy morphs into credible crooner--now scans as natural evolution; his increasingly confident cries and grooves and songwriting aplomb are undeniably pro.

The best-sounding Decemberists record to date. [Nov 2006, p.103]

And yet, despite such growing pains, Clark's penchant for restless, exploratory tangents ensures that Blak and Blu hits like a ton of bricks.

Newly aching but still introspective, the Thermals remain a revelation.

"R.I.P music," wrote Cunningham in the introduction to the album. As corpses go, this one is exquisite.

Rough in all the right places but pleasurably smooth in others, Held in Splendor is less like the kitschy t-shirt quilt you made to remember your high school clubs and teams, and more like the perfect old blankets your grandmother used to sew: oversized, musty, and familiar even when you haven't worn them in years.

Carrie & Lowell is such a deeply, deeply personal statement from Stevens that its smallness sometimes shows. Though it’s easily his best and most powerful album since 2005’s Illinois, it never quite reaches the same sweeping highs of that epic concept album.

The resulting soil is almost tangibly immediate.

The Money Store fits into modern hip-hop like a square peg on fire, a 40-minute straitjacket tantrum of vein-popping, slow-flow barks closer to Helmet's Page Hamilton than Harlem's Charles Hamilton.

It's a warm, lightly psychedelic sound reminiscent of British strum god Bert Jansch and the quieter moments on Led Zeppelin III, less a soundtrack for Sunday brunch and more a place to get lost in, though our host herself isn't interested in hiding.

It should be noted that this all sounds fantastic.

Gathered from scraps of the You Want It Darker sessions and cobbled together with contributions from Beck, Feist, Bryce Dessner of the National, and more, it’s a worthy postscript to Cohen’s farewell, another clear-eyed look at the inevitability of death.

At times, that there’s as much “subversive” pop music as there is music that is supposedly being subverted, not all of it as deep as advertised. Poem, thankfully, is far more thoughtful about it than most.

Spirited and frenetic, Hold On adds up to more than just the sum of the band's five-star libraries. [Apr 2008, p.100]

Scuffed-up and brainy, Object 47 finds Wire still beguiling after all these years.

Recruiting Cursive’s Tim Kasher (on a single that outs the founding fathers as slave rapists) and Laura Jane Grace for 14 good songs in 40 minutes, Oberst’s made his best album since 2008’s addictive Conor Oberst, and ended up with the white male rage of the year.

Though not as brash as Goblin, nor as polished as IGOR, Call Me delivers consistent performances—and the artistic leaps Tyler’s made over the past four years are palpable in the album’s most boastful and somber moments.

All Hell throws up no barriers to access--if you have an abiding interest in great stories told by a great new storyteller, it'll welcome you in.