Kinsella and his crew finally seem to have found a way of expressing themselves that doesn't feel introverted and exclusive.

For sixty-two glorious minutes, Barry Adamson can add a little danger, a little glamor and a little seamy excess to your humdrum existence.

Walking emphasizes songwriting over gimmickry; even divorced from the studio fireworks, the tunes are engaging, hummable, memorable, and will only grow more so with repeat spins.

While the band's sound isn't exactly the most original noise out there, they deliver with such impassioned conviction that you'll be more than willing to forget a few "sound alike" misgivings.

Father Divine is that rare album that's conscious of its diversity without being pretentious about it

The Emotional Rescue LP asserts the fact that the band not only has exceptional songwriting talent, but has finally concocted a potent mixture of poppy melodies to complement their core of tranquil notes and minimalist orchestrations.

There's an intermittent psychedelia here that lifts even the most deadpan tracks into sunny pop territory, as sweeping, swooning So-Cal melodies erupt from its cavernous grooves.

Taken alone, each of these songs sounds exciting and raw. Taken together, Low Kick and Hard Bop is further proof, if any was necessary, that this is a woman posessed of a singular talent and an even more singular vision.

It highlights their talent for finding the core of invention within repetition, and suggests far greater peaks (and much greener valleys) in their future.

Damage is definitely more up-front about its hip-hop influences than past Blues Explosion records, but the core Blues Explosion identity remains intact.

Lacking the full-on roar of Motor City compatriots like the White Stripes and the Go, the 'Wings employ a more classic pop-oriented approach to their songcraft, resulting in songs that replace the aforementioned groups' immediacy and vigor with simple restraint and cultivated sophistication.

While Sha Sha is certainly ripe with hooks and strong in stylistic concept, the songs are woefully one-dimensional and marred by immaturity.

In the process of refining their sound, Dressy Bessy appear to have sacrificed a little too much of their uniqueness.

Gray is wise to continue experimenting and testing the boundaries of his art, but his changes don't need to be this bold. In this case, he comes up short: his minimalist mastery does not translate to resounding baroque success.

Divine Operating System has something for everyone (unless, of course, you have a rabid hatred of disco... then you might not dig it too much).

Inara George's voice is so gorgeous and soothing that you'll immediately believe that you can listen to it forever. Unfortunately, by the fifth or sixth song on All Rise, you'll wonder if you have been listening to her forever.

Mid-tempo rocker follows mid-tempo rocker without any change of pace to keep things interesting.

For all the divergent stylistic ground Wood/Water covers, nothing seems forced, signaling that the changes in the group's sound have come on their own terms and are not simply change for change's sake.

Like a comfortable old Pink Floyd album, this is the kind of thing to listen to while floating in space.

While everything here is generally good or great, Hello continues the trend of most other Half Japanese and solo Jad Fair releases, in that the slow, Jonathan Richman-like songs shine most strongly.

Body of Song is a record that plays like a book.

Nothing's Lost is slick and rich, packed with melody and rhythm.

Indolent, perturbed and volatile, Amazing Grace finds Pierce checking his wide-screen Spectorian visions at the studio door; he has opted, instead, for a coarse mix of electrified Southern gospel and somnabulent balladeering that has produced the most urgent Spiritualized album since Electric Mainline.

You'll either find it cloying and saccharine or heartfelt and precise, or maybe a little bit of both.

Origin Vol. I rocks pretty hard without asking much of listeners; it's difficult to be disappointed in a record that's so clearly joyful and energetic.

You can listen to the disc over and over and never get bored; there's always a new musical idea to discover in a place that you didn't expect to hear it.

In short, this may not be an album you'll want to listen to every day, but its disproportionate number of "Holy shit!" moments should earn it a spot close to your stereo.

It's another Merritt CD that's so good, it could radically alter the world if it was broadcast from the moon.

You might expect the resulting album to be disjointed and schizo, but it's actually a cohesive collection of potential hit singles held together by an incomparable performer.

As you've come to expect, a small amount of the material sounds utterly fantastic and there's a solid chunk that's barely audible, but whether it's delivered with a coating of fuzz or a liberal gloss of studio sheen, Pollard's gumdrop melodies and fantastical lyrical phrasing keep us coming back for more.

However, while Looks at the Bird's expanded arrangements are more conventionally "listenable" than much of Field Recordings, this comes at a small price.

It's probably a bolder, more daring record than it will ever be given credit for, as it's rare that an artist recognizes that she does some things very well, and then does them.

Tortoise have created another batch of distinct, inimitable songs that strike a perfect balance between the academic and the playful, the immediate and the eternal.

The disc is an absorbing listen, and a crucial weapon in any battle for subwoofer supremacy, but as far as generating an emotional response is concerned, it pretty much flatlines.

Picking up where Wasp’s Nest left off, Hyacinths and Thistles finds Merritt constructing a complex sonic playground in which a host of guest vocalists have come to frolic. While the songs might initially be Merritt’s, each vocalist manages to transform each piece into something uniquely personal.

Take a Casio keyboard or any other early '80s dance machine, wheel it out and blow the dust off and you would most likely be able to produce an album at least as enjoyable as this one.

For as good as the majority of the tunes here are, the grandiose scope of Highly Evolved turns out to be a bit more than the young quartet could chew.

It's hard to imagine a band coming along this year with a better or more enjoyable debut.

O'Connor's lack of subtlety eventually grows tiring.

Look, there's no question whatsoever that this is a well-put-together, carefully arranged and tastefully executed album created by a consummate craftsman. On the other hand, its palette (and, I fear, its audience) is limited to the placid and gently swaying.

It is, like all the best pop music, silly, pointless and thoroughly lacking in high-level intellectual discourse. Thank heaven.

It's a long, occasionally ponderous listen... but it's an impressive and rewarding journey that moves between prog, space-rock and subdural transmissions in ancient alien tongues.

There's nothing distinctive about it.

Despite the amount of rock and soul that Gahan tries to inject into the stew, Paper Monsters only occasionally breaks free of the Mode paradigms.

It's not a bad album -- it's just not particularly notable.

The fact that it hides among its excesses a handful of truly excellent rock anthems seems almost like an afterthought, as if, when the band ran out of crazy ideas, they found that there was nothing left to do but write actual songs.

It's the stuff that a thousand indie rock records are made of, basted, breaded and cooked to perfection.

I can't imagine a single Westerberg fan being displeased with Dead Man Shake.

Using inventive sounds and solid structures, he has created a damn fine album.

This is an album about technology, albeit not in the typical sense. While it wears the trappings of loungecore retro-futurism and new wave simplicity, The Geometrid has more to do with the "warmth" of technology and the increasingly essential comforts it provides.

By forsaking professionals for amateurs, the Plan has narrowed the scope of their artistic vision; for every stunning reworking, like Deadverse's "Automatic", there's a stinker like ASCDI's predictably bland mix of "Time Bomb" or Cynyc's blasé beat-slapping "Following Through".

At times strong, at other times vulnerable, and invariably honest, Donelly both affirms and fulfills the promise of her songwriting talent with Beauty Sleep.

Noah's Ark retrenches CocoRosie in their signature sound and gives us a glimpse of their indubitably eccentric future.

With an approach that seems so clinical, the album sounds cold and soulless -- and, well, boring.

Where Belle and Sebastian alienate their listeners with emotional detachment and indie superiority, Memphis's songs leave the posing and the cuteness at the door; they are accessible and honest.

The songs on Fallen Leaf Pages are all played at roughly the same glacial pace and share a very mellow, thoughtful and regret-filled vibe. Some listeners will find them repetitive, even tedious.

A solid set of shadowy songs with driving melodies.

Middling music that shoots for epic and edgy, but takes far too few chances and falls short of its fans' expectations.

Attention is a bubbly, pleasurable confection of an album, with beats enough to move your ass and plenty of hooks to keep your, um, attention.

Their rehashed rawk riffage is relentlessly enthralling, but their beat-you-over-the-head scream-tactics lend themselves to a sludgy sameness that, by album's end, has worn its welcome pencil-thin.

While Educated Guess may not be her best album to date (a near impossible-to-achieve expectation for an artist 21 albums in), it marks yet another transformation of her talents.

While the lack of further experimentation in the songwriting becomes tiresome after a while, overall the band seems comfortable and happy to be playing together again.

The band sounds richer, fuller and more confident. Sometimes they also sound a little too slick for their own good -- a nagging concern with "Disappear", among others -- but the studio glitz is matched by artistic maturity.

Those of you who choose to get in on the ground floor of this superlative venture they call Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By will not be disappointed.

Never, Never, Land not only escapes the expectations and pitfalls that dogged Psyence Fiction, but succeeds on a new set of strengths.

The 90 degree turns between tracks are endearing, like a cool mix-tape -- not cause for head scratching and folded arms.

Statistics... come off like an emo version of Coldplay.

If you've ever enjoyed an Arling & Cameron record, reveled in overtaxing your speakers with Big Beats or enjoyed the more anthemic, production-intensive side of hip-hop, Super Sound is for you. Not every record in your collection needs to be a ground-breaking, classification-defining, intellectual agenda-toting classic.

Whereas Walking With Thee was a wonderful relief in the indie/retro-rock world, pushing the band's internal parameters and the idea of what pop music should sound like, Winchester Cathedral feels more like a roadblock, or at least a pit stop, rather than a step forward in Clinic's previously innovative evolution.

Pole is the sound of a restless musical talent and intellect seeking out like-minded collaborators, expanding their horizons, and producing an otherwise impossible synthesis.

Fulfilled/Complete has a raw, compelling urgency.

IATWTC do '80s-influenced dance music the way '80s dance music artists wish they could have.

There are too many ambitious singer/songwriter albums out there to easily justify any water-treading.

Like Hot Hot Heat with a less annoying singer, The Fever offer a glimpse of everything that's good about dance-punk.

The technical skill and creativity at work here are enough reason to give DJ Me DJ You more than a passing listen, even if the songs don't make your head bob up and down and your feet tap.

It's certainly a lot more wide-ranging and engaging than its predecessor.

It's encouraging to see Murphy, twenty-odd years into his career, moving so confidently in new directions rather than rehashing old glories.

Not all Kinski fans will need, or even want, this disc, and the group seems to understand that.

It's a refinement of James' existing art form rather than an exploration of startlingly new concepts

A curious beast -- dark, confused, displaced and often hopeless.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that White People should never have happened... but Paul and Dan would do well to move on while they're still ahead.

The Sleepy Strange offers seven mid-tempo rock songs, most with the inevitable country leanings that a pedal steel creates. These pieces lack anything even remotely resembling a sense of direction or urgency; Japancakes' songs don't travel from Point A to Point B so much as wander up and down the street in front of Point A and dig odd little things out of the lawn. Some listeners will love it, while devotees of single-minded purpose will positively hate it.

Love and Hate sounds fantastic, alternately steeped in warm, old school funk and terse, bubbly electroclash.

While it has a few rough patches, the Hartnoll brothers' latest effort proves that they're still at the top of the electronic music heap.

A mostly "hit" but occasionally "miss" effort that showcases both the band's maturation and its residual shortcomings.

This is Lanois's most accomplished solo recording in a decade, and in its finest moments it even eclipses For the Beauty of Wynona in terms of sheer goosebump-inducing musical soliloquy.

They won't matter in a year, or even six-months...but for the time being, Ima Robot are an utterly entrancing and joyously frivolous antidote to those pre-winter blues.

A sensitive, fully mature contribution to the pop music lexicon, it proves that, like the rare child actor who actually works well into adulthood, The Cardigans have weathered a difficult transition.

More balls than brains, but it's that swaggering, careless spirit that gives Kasabian its razor-sharp edge.

Other than the last three songs, Everybody Wants to Know is an album you should know about.

The Posies' latest effort offers five power-pop gems that match the best efforts of this veteran Seattle band.

A welcome blast from the past.

It shakes the foundations of our music-consuming habits and plays with our genre expectations; it fucks with our minds a bit, just for kicks, and, more importantly, liberates us from the pernicious tyranny of monotony.

One of the best and most moving albums of the year.

As a political album, Liberation may only be half-successful, but I'd still take angry Trans Am over the schlocky Trans Am of TA any day.

Slick, well-constructed and mall-friendly.

Through smart songcraft, a powerful command of pop vocabulary, and skillful track sequencing, Dios Malos deliver an album that expands and grows more complicated with every listen.

While Politics of the Business follows in the conceptual footsteps of its forbears, its all-too-literal sense of moral responsibility does get a tad tiresome, occasionally sagging into diluted dogma.