One of the better American rock albums of this year.

The album maintains a consistency that was sorely lacking on Amon Tobin’s previous records. However, in doing so, the album sacrifices the innovation and uncontrolled experimentalism one expects from Tobin.

There is no denying the power of this album.

[An] extraordinarily unassuming, gorgeous release.

It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here. But until then, Blue Eyed in the Red Room is one to skip.

Surprisingly reminiscent of that other white-boy hip-hop circus freak [Beck], circa 1996’s genre-mashing breakthrough Odelay.

The naysayers do not understand. Their expectations hamstring them.... Like the glass sculptures featured in the artwork it is precise, transparent, dangerously fragile, and ominously lit. 100th Window is a masterpiece of its kind.

A warm, accessible listen, it’s hard to say anything too bad about Obrigado Saudade, which may be its biggest fault: it’s too clean, too comfortable.

Because of its unexpected instrumentation and fine songwriting, “on mani” is the only track on the album that can be praised as anything more than above average.

For all of their rock leanings, they are a jazz combo in the best way possible—each player brings a potent set of chops to his respective instrument.

Although Punk summarizes Fatlip's traumatic post-Pharcyde life, the record is buoyant with character.

That’s not to say the album is a disappointment (it isn’t) or not great (it is, mostly), but after hitting their creative and commercial peak with Absolution and its subsequent breakthrough stateside, Black Holes and Revelations clearly reveals itself to be a transition record.

With Phantom Punch Sondre Lerche finally makes good on the promise of his talent; he’s mastered and polished his intuitive gift for melody and arrangement and rightly applied it to his most natural musical inclinations.

Their previous efforts have now paid off, culminating in a condensed treatise of confusion, longing, and maturation.

Era Vulgaris gets better with each listen, and that’s mostly due to the fact that the melodies take time to sink in.

Lif’s greatest strength remains his pissy paranoia.

At its best, Calexico does expand, opening the range of sounds to provide for new colors of expression; when it doesn't work, that open sound means a turn toward the basic, allowing prettiness to get in the way of sonic content.

It doesn’t try to scrape the lofty heights of the two or three masterpieces in Heasley’s catalogue, but by not making the effort, it doesn’t sink as low as his least impressive stuff.

Although the album is far from a failure, it rarely reaches the peak of its creator’s potential.

Wonderland is perhaps the biggest departure from their baggy roots they’ve taken thus far, but remains totally identifiable as their work.

There’s a really good EP waiting to be edited out of this.

His seemingly harmless overarching theme of matters extraterrestrial stitched through each of the album’s tracks somehow compromises their effectiveness.

It's not too hard to hear amid the swamp bass and prickly guitars, that this group seriously brings the funk.

Pales in comparison to its predecessor.

Ms. Yamagata has moved beyond the slightly jazzy overtones of her debut EP to grandiose, ready-for-radio singer/songwriter pop for the ages.

A tender, imaginative collection of disparate songs, How Animals Move is less an album than a steady stream of wonderful, unpretentious surprises.

[It's] not just emo, but the purest, most virulent strain of the stuff.

While their sound has become immensely creepier, it has also improbably become more beautiful.

Rather than winning over new converts, AWOO’s main achievement might be to delineate, skilfully but inescapably, the outer boundaries of its creators’ artistic reach.

A great study in songcraft, but not a consistently exciting listen.

The larger scope of the album bodes well for The Raveonettes... [but] it’s a shame that there are several clunkers mixed with such strong material.

I’m tired of being simply “satisfied” by the Sea and Cake.

Above all else, Shakira shows that highly individual, original pop songwriting can co-exist splendidly with commercial interests, and on both of those scales, this album is something of a triumph.

Zoo Psychology is a phenomenal 20-minute experience, if only for its sheer insanity. The songs aren’t consistently strong enough for it to be remembered too long down the road, but it does make for a thrilling listen.

One of the more unique pop albums of the year.

The energy the band packs into their songs is unbelievable.

Challengers certainly gets tastier after you’ve chewed on it for a bit.

Unfortunately, barring the opener, few of Lost In Space’s melodies do their lyrical conceits justice, and worse, many sound as if we’ve heard them before, albeit in a fresher, looser context.

It’s not that this album had to be catchy. But when an uninventive melody is rehashed ten times to the point that you wonder whether literal keys and strings are missing from the band’s instruments, what you get is a diffusion line of a product that wasn’t even selling well in the first place.

Song-for-song, they haven’t made an album this misstep-free since Vs.

So much here rests on formulaic indie tropes.

Just Like the Fambly Cat, even more than Grandaddy's past works, carries the weight of death.

The meandering songs coalesce into an uninspired mass, burying the few good moments within it.

His wheels may not leave the traction marks they once did, but the evidence here suggests the ride isn’t over yet.

When [Love is Hell] works, and it does so only sporadically, Adams creates songs of suffocating closeness and density.

As rap, this hardly registers. As political commentary, it’s too obtuse to make much impact. But as eclectic, genre-bending music with an ear for interesting sounds and a knack for making ambiguous lyrics memorable, cLOUDDEAD’s second effort is uniquely promising and satisfying.

Many tracks hint at the notion that Deerhoof decided to make an entirely different album this time around, but counterbalancing these advancements are decidedly flat resurrections of past glories.

There’s nothing wrong with collaborators -- and Faithfull has picked some good ones -- but the quality seems to be directly linked to who is behind each song.

You might not agree with him the entire way, but the gale force of Ali’s convictions and talent will leave you willing to believe most of his truth.

There’s no moderation on Cookies, no inner temperate telling the lads, "Enough’s enough," whether it’s following yet another crack about getting paralytic on drugs, another glammy, mascara-running-from-the-sweat-and-effort guitar solo, or that nth attempt to be cheeky.

The songwriting isn’t bad, by any means... But Heumann’s big-picture lyrics—faith, truth, etc.—are as ceaselessly heavy-handed as his guitar work, giving the whole of Rites an overwrought feel, one that can border on comical depending on your mood.

The weak point of the disc... is the songwriting.... But if you’re in it for pure sonic pleasure, you’re in the right place.

Anyone expecting direction changes and unpredictability may not find this band particularly exciting, but anyone who is a sucker for catchy, contagious pop tunes will revel in Life On Other Planets.

Thickfreakness is an unrelentingly dour record - perhaps this music was best left in the past.

Rarely does an album ingratiate itself so immediately and so quickly wear out its welcome.

A work far more potent and lasting than their debut.

Perhaps due to their prominence, Can Cladders works best when the strings are actually ditched.

I’d argue, though, that being an expert on the group’s verbose and ragged past wouldn’t help all that much. This is a different sounding band with pretty much the exact same lyrical concerns.

Planet of Ice's cerebrally structured songs pull in too many directions to pack a proper punch.

Her adventurous and, yes, massive, persona is allowed to wander wherever it wants on The Cookbook, be it avant or common.

The restless Broder can’t see the problem with shredding flavours as disparate as folk, rock, post-rock, the avant-garde, hip hop, electronica into a powerful, sometimes jarring, sometimes bewitching pulp, and neither should any music fan. Listen and free your mind from convention.

Ultravisitor appears to be the first album when jazz can completely mesh with Squarepusher’s canonized style.

Review 1: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1936&PHPSESSID=c34e5fbb0933de1389469828674b499e" TARGET="_blank">It&#146;s unfortunate that this band is so unsure of themselves, least of all lyrically.</A> [score=50]; Review 2: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1937" TARGET="_blank">Heroes To Zeros strikes a balance between enervation, subtlety and creativity.</A> [score=80]

Pieces of the People We Love is a great funky dance record with guitars, and not much more. Luckily, it doesn’t need to be.

Ben Kweller may not sum up Kweller, but it’s a worthy personal statement from a popster whose chops keep getting better.

But despite better production and the unbeatable chemistry of Coomes and Weiss, When the Going Gets Dark just doesn’t have as many memorable songs, nor does it spark the same kind of curious sympathy their best micro-miseries have.

A wonderful album stuffed full of sentiment, emotion and melody--and traverses the bridge between teenagerdom and adulthood with a moving and thrilling honesty.

Where Jerusalem was all reaction, humanely riddled with helplessness and incomprehension, The Revolution Starts...Now is the well-honed response, a focused act of civil disobedience.

None Shall Pass may or may not be the best album in Aesop Rock’s discography, but it might be the most fun to listen to. Call it his San Francisco Renaissance.

Less sparse than open, the songs resist the build-and-release structure that most other Montreal acts utilize, and they also refuse to ride a groove or play with distracting orchestration.

This increased humanism lends Fleischmann’s compositions an evolutionary sense of dynamism, thawing out his stern soundscapes.

For fans of indie-rock with a poppy slant, Stars of CCTV is an absolute necessity.

To completely dismiss Camera Obscura for their willingness to partake in this musical grand theft or K-Tel like attitude toward repackaging former eras of music would be unfair; free of the burden of meliorating an individual sound, they’ve been able to craft a consistently enjoyable collection of pop songs that inhabit the passion and style of the music they so clearly love.

While Ancient Melodies worked boring, repetitive structures into Martsch&#146;s typically simple song structures, Now You Know brings new life to them. Unfortunately, this album is nowhere near as good as Built to Spill&#146;s previous works.

Freeway is great on guest appearances, but it seems that he can&#146;t string together an entire song by himself.

It&#146;s solid, but it has no power over me.

Too many songs are caught between the band’s fading post-punk tension and their more professional desires.

A particularly dour, unsatisfying way to end such an intriguing career.

The lyrics here lack the self-indicting punch that made MEC so unflinchingly great.

Apart from Caleb Followill’s distinctive, growly vocals--half-man half-grizzly--this could be a completely different band. A much better band. It’s quite an incredible transformation--and I’ll say this upfront: it doesn’t matter what you thought of their debut, you should listen to this album.

In small doses it’ll absolutely cure what ails you. Unfortunately, taken in one album-sized chunk, the effect tends to wear thin—a doubly damning criticism since Dancing With Daggers is only ten seconds shy of being thirty minutes long.

There’s little to differentiate Mr. Beast from Happy Songs, and less to recommend it in the face of Mogwai’s potent catalog.

It’s obvious that Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler have not lost a bit of the touch that made them famous in the early 1990s.

Its airily liquid, peculiarly French dance-pop is crafted to be almost entirely unmemorable at first, but upon familiarity grow into a wonderfully subtle, hook-laden album of continent-hopping (sub)urban pop which makes an ideological virtue of its superficiality.

The downside of the Brakes development is the loss of the raw power that accompanied some of their more demented moments.

They’re a perfect opening band: professional and sufficiently appealing on a sonic level without risking upstaging the headliner with any distinct personality or emotional resonance.

On On My Way To Absence Jurado provides far more satisfying moments than dubious ones, and that’s no small feat when trafficking in the kind of bottom of the barrel human emotion that Jurado has made his trademark.

He’s a post-techno indie geek making clattering, dead-end grooves with clumsy-but-endearing melodies splattered over the top like oil stains pressed in symmetrical folds of paper to make a Rorschach pattern that just happens to be a song.

Love Is Simple is Akron’s most streamlined album, one that bridges their multitudes and, finally, puts forth a series of discreet songwriting ideas rather than merely splashing about in genres.

Perhaps the producers have toned themselves down a bit just so Aesop can rock harder. Maybe they don&#146;t want to steal his thunder. Whatever their motivation, the beats feel somewhat restrained, lethargic and lazy. But they are perfectly suited to Aesop&#146;s limpid down-tempo rhymes.

Again is an opportunity missed by such distance as to become pointless and even irritating.

Kesto is an overwhelming, unbelievable adventure, but it's not for everyone.

It&#146;s a good voice, but it&#146;s not a good album.

Pretty Girls Make Graves fall slightly short of their ambitions and capabilities, producing songs that are good, even very good, but less than what they&#146;ve proved themselves to be capable of.

Because of You mostly reminds us of the Ne-Yo Problem. He wants to be bad, but chickens out at the last minute.

For a high-minded piece of process, one that rests on the old trope that the good stuff is always bad for you--or in this case, for the majority of the world--Herbert packs a lot of snap, crackle, and, particularly, pop.

The last decade has bled the band dry of energy and verve meaning that where once these songs would have been pop classics, now they’re tastefully tuneful AOR.

Canned Heat mixed with Kiss and chopped into lines with Elvis and Queens Of The Stone Age.