On their fourth album, this Scottish indie-pop band's fondness for woeful heartache and Phil Spector–esque production reaches a poignant peak.

If it sounds about as much fun as, say, watching CNBC, rest assured, dude's got a tighter flow than Larry Kudlow.

Cryptacize's latest squanders the band's natural resource: singer Nedelle Torrisi.

Ida Maria throws herself into every song as if it's all a big finale, which makes for an auspicious beginning.

Goofy if not guileless, Telepathe seem intentionally designed as a guilty pleasure.

Boasting enough sugary banjos, glockenspiels, and handclaps to give a Teletubby diabetes, The Boy Least Likely To animate their softly sung indie twang with nonstop hooks, bright production, and gently acknowledged adult anxieties. Beneath lyrics celebrating balloons and whiskers lie bittersweet longings.

Fantasies is a welcome return, but it's not without flaws.

The Pickups also pile on the sophomore-album enhancements here, deepening a sound that scarcely wanted for depth beforehand.

You Can Have What You Want floats dusty folk-rock melodies in thick echo, giving the vocals an otherworldly cast.

Add the pipes of Nancy Whang on most tracks--giving Future a boy-girl dynamic--and there's a distinct suggestion that the Juan MacLean might just become the Human League after all.

On their eighth album, spouses Brett and Rennie Sparks continue to put a brilliantly surreal twist on everyday subjects, using nature imagery to evoke the weird intensity of all-consuming passions.

Herren's stream of consciousness favors laptop techniques and restless exploration, and the results are Ampexian's modestly satisfying minute-long grooves, which seemingly end as soon as they get started.

With a squeaky Neil Young falsetto, backed by shambly wah-wah guitar and mop-bucket percussion, Earl chirps blithely inscrutable lyrics through a strand of airy, bedroom-psych pearls.

Two Suns is the rare concept album that's better for the bedroom than for bong hits.

Mica Levi leads her trio through this 28-minute cockeyed burst, each song a bizarre little post-punk contraption that sounds like it’s ready to fly apart and wreak havoc. Yet her debut is also insanely disorienting fun.

It's familiar, sure, but Kingdom of Rust has a welcome warmth.

The miserable bastard can still write melodies that make the medicine go down, and ultimately, that's his redemption.

Playing songs about cops on the take and dying in Penn Station with a hurtling forward motion that prevents the music from sounding (entirely) like a book report. Killer accordion solos, too.

There are no such standout cuts here.

It leaves us with a streamlined New Romantic sound, but one that at times feels like emotional Teflon.

After ranting against Christian extremism on their last outing, they're back to mindless fun, and with new drummer Westin Glass, they've resurrected the savage, speed-strummed fervor that once made Kill Rock Stars matter.

Black Dice are the perpetually esoteric older Crumb brother Charles: inscrutable, agoraphobic, undeniably brilliant but just as undeniably demented. All descriptions apply to their fifth album, with each track bursting at the seams with warped sounds.

Costas coos anachronistically whimsical and hallucinatory lyrics as if she were the ghost of an ill-fated fairy-tale heroine, and the haunted results suggest the greatest psych-folk obscurity you'll never afford on eBay.

On this debut, Lerner's gorgeous vocals, sunny melodies, and ultra-catchy choruses sound like a Fab Four fantasy trip as he logs extensive mileage in a rush of crisscrossing travelogue songs.

The sad sacks who populate such bitterly funny songs as 'Already Gone' and 'R.I.P.' linger in the mind long after the toe-tapping grooves have faded.

Their chops aren't superhuman, and groupie-trouble ballads drown Cormac Neeson's high wail. But when they up the tempos, they kick it.

The result is the alternative pop album of the decade--one that imbues the Killers' "Hot Fuss" and MGMT's "Oracular Spectacular" with a remarkable emotional depth and finesse.

For their second album as a duo, longtime collaborator John Parish gave Harvey finished songs to write lyrics for, and his sometimes brittle, sometimes thundering guitar work provides the skeleton for an array of fleshly narrators.