Given Jónsi’s past solo releases and Sigur Rós’s discography, Shiver should have been much better than it turned out. While not a complete trainwreck, it disappointingly features a minimum of the signature greatness listeners have come to expect.

They are heavier, and denser, and overwhelmingly less instant than their predecessors, as cloaked and finely adorned in all manner of bright, shiny synths as they are, at times almost crushed under the weight of an ambitiously flamboyant band. But these are still Phoenix songs, and by the end of a dozen listens they are as urgent as ever.

On a very basic level Pre-Human Ideas may appear to be the work of an artist diving headfirst into insanity. But at its core the album is one of the most personal and engaging releases of Mount Eerie’s career.

While it sounds as though the band are still working on perfecting their recent power/thrash/prog formula that started being established with The Power Within, everything's beginning to be pieced together quite nicely.

With Shake, Shook, Shaken, we get an album that has never sounded truer to The Dø’s strengths as a band.

Skeletal Lamping lacks a satisfactory, uh, idea. None are progressed, thoroughly provoked, just simply thrown out the speakers in hopes that we are transfixed by its oh-so literal translation of Barnes’ Georgie Fruit act.

The group have harked back to the more memorable songs in their canon, but this can be interpreted as largely derivative in some quarters.

Broken Bells is the crown jewel of each musician's discography and is a necessity for fans of either one.

While it's hardly a pop renaissance, It's Not Me, It's You is an appropriate follow-up to a debut that peaked not only because of its musical merits but also because of it's cultural catalysts.

It’s hard not to enjoy it. With Muse, they have [un]intentionally touched on this form of art. For (mostly) all the wrong reasons, Will of the People is the best, most engaging record to come from the band in sixteen years, and it’s quite possibly the most fun I’ll have with an album all year as well.

Hobo Rocket is definitely an overall fan-pleaser, and one that compensates for Beard, Wives, Denim by mutating its 'flower power' whimsy into an erratic display of mood swings and horror-show theatrics.

ATGCLVLSSCAP will be different for everyone. But undeniably, it's an entrancing piece of music, collecting every bit of Ulver's legacy and throwing it to the wayside, making room for something transcending the band's 30 year existence.

Until Gibbard can harness this newfound happiness with the kind of lyrical flair his fans are used to, Death Cab remain in danger of being, well, just another indie band.

Far from a unified artistic statement, Other Truths refuses to pin itself down, and marks itself simply and modestly as a showcase of some of the best talent in genre. A minor miracle, if you will.

It's hard to find any real faults with Eisley's latest album, The Valley.

Is 4 Lovers isn’t a bad album, it just lacks that much-needed energy and purpose. A lot of the songs here feel like they’re going through the motions.

While Dark Is the Way, Light Is a Place isn't the album that will make long time fans of Anberlin still holding out for some sort of magnum opus from the band weak in the knees, it is the third straight near perfect album released by them.

Solid and relatively consistent, Hope is better than a "finding their feet" experiment, yet that is ultimately what it is.

Only in spurts does it ascend to the heights of the band's opening three acts, but it does manage to triumphantly assert itself as a leaps and bounds improvement over Coheed's most recent material.

This is a great album, perfect for a retro rave and I am happy to see the band reactivated. Hopefully, it won't take them another 7 years to release the next LP.

These aren't ferocious songs and they aren't always playing with everything on the forefront, and it's compelling to see that; the band has rounded up the edges of their songs and put them into the ground.

Past Lives isn't exactly full of surprises, but it doesn't need to be to succeed as a mission statement for a new band who seem to be around to stay, if rumours of new material brewing are any indication. Every member of L.S. Dunes is in their element even after respective years of being legends in the genre.

While it's sort of a fresh take on their musical canon, it could afford with more new songwriting techniques and maybe less vocal effects. Still, Year of the Black Rainbow is a consistently great album that may have required just a bit more panache, and certainly lives up to its predecessors.

Rooms Filled With Light is more than an interesting transitional release, it is a bold and moderately successful grower which will reward the patient.

Bouzilich however, does have some good ideas and there are some very good moments to be found on Hello, Voyager, it's just the convoluted mess of ideas that is the rest of the album overwhelms its strongest points.

There's a sense of detachment when I listen to this record that's weirdly hard to explain, and it's certainly hard to shake. As it is, anyways, Port Entropy's still vastly enjoyable on a surface-level; this certainly counts for something.

There is roughly an EP worth of songs here that bring something remotely interesting to the table, rather than simply rehashing past ideas and reproducing beats you’ve heard in 100 other tracks before.

Wrong Creatures is an often somber listen, better done at night. It isn’t Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at their peak, although it shows the three seasoned musicians doing a good job in their own field.