Ultimately, though, the bulk of Holy Fire is another sterling addition to Foals’ repertoire, and the band knows it too.

Apart from a precious few exceptions, none of the gathered musicians seem able nor willing to push each other into new musical territory that could yield fresh revelations about their union.

In Focus? is far and away his boldest record to date.

In all, Clash the Truth is a major step forward for Beach Fossils, and it’s certainly an album that I’m not going to forget about so easily, if ever at all.

Luckily, there’s enough good on this album to hide the negatives.

Widowspeak’s greatest accomplishment is maintaining that same sense of simmering, uncertain wonder over the course of one wonderfully blurry album.

While m b v is a record that is more than capable of standing on its own, at the same time it also sounds exactly like the sort of thing that we might have expected My Bloody Valentine to produce two decades ago, and this noticeable lack of allegiance to the present is perhaps the most potent thing about this entire revisionist affair.

These two seemingly disparate parts combine in an off-putting but refreshingly rough-and-tumble way.

All in all, not the death knell that it could have been but not the triumphant return it so could have been at the same time, Descension is another addition to the Coheed saga.

Ultimately, Conduit is a fair step down from the resurgence that was Welcome Home Armageddon. But having said that, it remains a solid addition to their discography.

As crushing as some of these songs are, Heartthrob never lets you feel the weight, but prefers to revel in emotions good or bad, most often while sweating everything out under a crystalline disco ball.

It just lacks in a hallmark of all prior Ducktails releases: imagination.

The result is an unfortunately hollow album, recycled in its sound and empty in its emotion.

It's not going to impress those that irrationally expect every release to be a mind-blowing exercise in progression and experimentation. On the other hand, it should impress long-time fans and satiate their desire for no-frills, in your face music.

Target Earth is the speed, technicality and thrashy weirdness of the band's earliest album enveloped in a modern package that is also able to retain its own vibe and personality.

As it stands for now though, Red is a mixed bag, and it's up to you to sort through the majority-holding bad in order to find the good.

Fade is not an exciting record on its face, but finds itself in the emotional peaks that surface hazily here and there, through colorful production and exquisite songwriting.

In short, Long.Live.A$AP takes what made his debut new or exciting and more finely hones it.

The album is just a bunch of incredibly inoffensive hard rock masquerading as metal, and while its not good by any stretch of the imagination, it isn't a travesty to music either.

Signed and Sealed in Blood is a pleasant addition to the Dropkick Murphys' discography, but the reliance on their trustworthy, time-tested conservatism is somewhat unfulfilling here.

Greenwood has pretty much stacked the chips up against himself by deciding to get involved in this album in the first place. There's no need for him to be seen as a competitor to any canonical composer at this point in his career, but by putting his works side-by-side with Penderecki's, he inadvertently puts himself in that light, and it leaves us with an album that tells us very little about his work that isn't obvious to anybody who knows how long he's been composing (young composer still learning his trade--gasp!), and nothing about Penderecki that we haven't already known for over forty years.

Bish Bosch is as much about challenging the people that absorbed and accepted Tilt and The Drift as it is challenging the rest of the world--and while that makes it consistent with all his work since Nite Flights, each subsequent album giving his fan base another hurdle to overcome, it also gives it a thrill that's unique to both his discography and the majority of the music you could compare it to. If, indeed, there is any.

Born to Die's highlights are both slightly more numerous and slightly more effective--but it's still a very strong, successful record, whether taken as an addition or a follow-up.

Centipede HZ is a reaffirmation. It reminds us that Animal Collective plays interactive, now and forever.

Fans will debate whether Failed States tops previous records, but certainly meets the standards the band has set for themselves.

It is both gorgeous and fearsome, and one couldn't ask for anything more.

In terms of overall quality though, it has to be said that things noticeably pick up in the album's second half, as any traditional indie rock sensibilities that Gibbard may have initially had start to recede and are replaced by a grittier, slightly more abstract edge.

Ultimately though, these are minor gripes for what is an otherwise solid debut from a band which looks poised to make waves in the independent music scene for years to come.