Allow me to offer some parting advice: just because a record expresses emotion doesn’t make it bad.

A veritable debutante ball of sad little songs.

After hearing the crap people have said about this album I’m bummed that people are so quick to reject what doesn’t fit their immediate logic. It’s ironic that folks would get off on shredding an album that’s about trying to be kind and honest at the same time.

More than anything else, Past, Present and Future is a record that is important because it denotes progress and the promise of far greater things.

Leo proves himself emotionally enervating throughout, so it’s really a shame that Shake the Sheets isn’t half so sonically invigorating.

Jacked up on myriad assembly-line noises, mechanical tinkerings, and golden acoustic guitar strumming, they manage their melodies with a deftness that keeps them loose and limber in the quiet assault of the underlying density.

A semi-bizarre and semi-wonderful example of twisted, melted country-blues-psyche-pop oddballness.

Thankfully, the music overpowers DeLaughter’s weak voice.

Might not be enough to convince disbelievers, but to fans, it’s a gratifying addition to an already impressive repertoire.

While not entirely successful throughout, it still contains enough majestic moments of sheer aural bliss to qualify as one of the most beautifully melodic down tempo-instrumental albums you are likely to hear this year.

Yes, it’s a concept album, but it’s not crap. Actually, Scarlet’s Walk is very suitable for an artist with Amos’ capacity for spewing drama from her intense and highly articulated words.

This album’s appeal is so superficial that those who don’t cotton to guys trying to look pretty while the bombs drop should avoid this entirely.

The group's consistent artistic statement with little flexibility for change or innovation upon an already distinctive sound is their own greatest strength and enemy, leaving them unable to win over new listeners with a directional change.

Nothing has really changed at all.

Hotel Morgen finds To Rococo Rot with a modestly updated sound, the sort of slight seismic shift that may take millions of years to have its say. They understand what classical composers knew: the next symphony won’t bring utter revolution, but as long as it carries the emotional impact of your intent, it’s a grand success.

It is music that sits at the crossroads of Neil Young and Captain Beefheart, a reverence for its rustic background balanced by a playful desire to fuck shit up.

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

The group’s move toward a math-metal-industrial fusion is a welcome one that should help to bring them fans that have never heard the group before.

Sadly, there’s no escaping the fact that Squire’s solo debut is a one-paced, uni-directional affair.

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’ve proved themselves to be capable of.

Seeing as this is only their third album, they can still get away with redundancy as long as it’s head-bobbing, genial and oh-so-cute. And it is.

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.

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.

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.

His last two efforts weren’t as focused, but this time he’s got about half an album’s worth of quality work.

Being Ridden is not a great album, because these kinds rarely are. Kidwell’s vision is born of confusion and disarray, so it’s only natural that his art would follow suit.

More than anything in his career, Escapology is literally riddled with confession and confusion.

Disappointing, but still a worthy purchase.

This is indie in the most traditional sense.

Howl is surprisingly solid.

It takes a couple of good close listens to appreciate Herren’s languid songwriting; a casual listener will likely enjoy listening to only a track or two before turning off.

It is a measure of Albion’s strengths that it can make itself heard above the crumpy distortion and shrill feedback generated by its author.

Suitcase 2 does exactly what it sets out to do, documenting the incredible breadth of Bob Pollard’s songwriting.

With no foil to Barat’s grumpiness and bitterness, it’s therefore difficult to see anyone getting nearly excited enough to love Dirty Pretty Things as much as many loved The Libertines.

Everything Ecstatic provides an enjoyable listen, but it also sounds as much like a groping as a declaration.

While the idea of delving into the cars of local wrecking yards and their contents is an interesting one, the music that emerges from it is noticeably weak, in comparison to other works in the genre.

As long as Wonder is producing and laying down basic arrangements himself, he’ll never be awful, which is a shame: like any lifelong charmer, he can stand to be more vulgar, or show some teeth, damn it.

Get Lonely doesn’t have the full force of any albums in the Mountain Goats catalog.

The Exchange Session’s second volume retreads the same path that Hebden and Reid took earlier, but they truly go places this time around.

So what if there are bits of Soft Bulletin and Dusk at Cubist Castle all over the record? At least they managed to choose the bits that fit together well.

When RJ sticks to the bounce aesthetic and Acey keeps his writing lucid and/or topical, the record becomes the most listenable of the emcee's recent output.

An interesting, good album: more inventive, heavy, meaningful, and memorable than the Veils’ first.

Like Trans Am’s late-90s material, this album is enjoyable without being astonishing.

A long, exhausting listen, Strawberry Jam will occasionally satiate fans hungry for the band’s strange brilliance.

This is probably the least fun of all his albums, but also among his most rewarding.

It certainly doesn’t stand up to Dig Your Own Hole or half of Exit Planet Dust, but Push the Button is much better than I’d hoped it would be a few months ago.

The Wedding has some slow tracks, but they’re greatly outnumbered by winners that leap over a baffling range of musical styles.

All Years Leaving collects plenty of derivative (but enjoyable) music with a few bright moments of originality.

Just about everything on Sky Blue Sky, even soft-shoe skiffles like the title track, will likely sound better live.

The difference... between For the Season and Gris Gris’s debut album is that the detours are less frequent and less distracting.

Easy Tiger sounds like the kind of album Adams could churn out every 18 months for the rest of his life.

The pared-down moments of The Con seem to long for the clusterfuckedness of the album’s meatier tracks, and for the most part, rightly so.

Nashville is chock full of weeping slide guitar work, soaring harmonies, keyboards, and Rouse’s lonely breath of a voice pushing out from the relatively lush production.

Carter’s an artist clearly capable of making a great album. The Story of My Life isn’t it, but it’s a start.

An album of many highlights but not much visceral or emotional impact.

Contemplative and comforting, this is inoffensive Americana for the brainy set.

As mechanised as their rhythmic focus can be, there is flesh, bone, and brain beneath the near industrial barrage of beats.

More than with either Mutations or Sea Change, you can hear Godrich’s rich instrumental layering beneath the rhythms.... Still, at fifteen tracks and over an hour, perhaps Beck needed a stiff editor more than the comfort of a familiar producer.

Where Chesnutt has long been thought of as the banjo-on-his-knee godfather of freak-folk, this record shows his skewed vision is beginning to radiate far from its nearly-naked, southern gothic roots.

Expecting two brilliant albums in a row is a lot, but when flashes of This Delicate Thing We’ve Made indicate he’s more than up to delivering, you get disappointed when there’s so much well-intentioned but patience-shredding filler between the gems.

While most of the tracks on The Shining lack the abstract ideas and flow of Donuts, it’s still an admirable record.

First Impressions of Earth is the first pretty good album of the year.

Voxtrot remains a compelling enough statement to justify the inordinate amounts of excitement thrown around the band, yet nowhere near a fulfillment of the enormous potential they’ve shown.

It is an energetic, powerful, and enjoyable album where occasionally pretty invention is marred by the suspicion that a hit-making producer is on deck.

The group synthesizes pretty much anything you could lump under a general Americana label--bluegrass, country, alt-country, folk rock--to create an idiosyncratic sound more West Coast than Nashville.

If he cut the middle out and made it an EP, Kenny Chesney’s Be As You Are would be a classic.

Like everything this band's made, it's long, sloppy, and uneven, but at this point that's the idea: here are a bunch of people who kind of know each other sitting down with some guitars.

The boys deliver the same sort of agreeable Britpop they've made their name on, wisely realizing that ambition's really not for everyone.

It's an album that has far more potential for emotional resonance than musical discovery. The arrangements contain few surprises, and the handful of simple acoustic performances quietly outshine the more elaborate productions.

On Collisions, Calla don't flee from their influences; instead, they turn inward on themselves, pushing out at their songs' edges.

With the impressive level of control, it’s understandable when it starts feeling like Adams is holding on a little too tightly.

Goodbye contains both the best and the worst of Schnauss’ output until now.

Outwardly, We Are the Pipettes is fun, sweet, and attractive. If you hang around, it starts to feel brittle, frigid, bitchy, and weird.

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

It doesn’t always work, and the record has a scattered second half that undercuts the sonic unity of the first, but the best moments here are as starkly affecting as any of Garnier’s past work.

As much as a lot of the tracks are just bluster + accent + guitars, there are some melodies hidden along the way and the bluster + accent + guitars here are better than those pimped by the likes of The Others and Kaiser Chiefs and so on and so forth.

A bit jumbled together and disorienting, but overall just about as rejuvenating as anything.

Lies for the Liars is a funny, befuddling, and altogether unexpectedly enjoyable record.

Hey Hey is an impressively cohesive collection of pop songs.

There’s a lingering sense that the product at the center of all the hubbub remains something less than its lofty reputation.

Blemish is not sadness or happiness; it is strange observation and relapse.

Certified may be a cinematic holding pattern but it’s a holding pattern in a place--both geographically and artistically--that we can’t hear enough of.

What Hey Venus! ultimately is, is a good record of classy pop/rock songs, arranged and produced well, shot through with a degree of personality and skill, and almost completely lacking in the inspired, eclectic madness which made "Radiator and Guerilla" so damn good.

Has only a slightly spottier ratio of hits to misses than their best albums.

It has some nice tracks, some experiments and more than a few keepers, and, yes, it’s almost exclusively a fan-only proposition.

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.

Approaching this album, I was skeptical. I was convinced it would be one of those albums with three good songs (the singles) and a load of filler. But it’s actually a solid, quality album with a smattering of great tunes and loads of shuffly beats that will make you lose control of your feet.

The Mix-Up doesn’t present anything innovative, nor is it any sort of triumphant career coda; it just sounds good.

13&God represents less a marriage of rock and rap than it does a meeting of weird with slightly-less-weird.

The pandering that characterizes the first half of the album leaves no hint of the hidden gems that follow.

It's a smooth, cohesive ride that never lapses into boredom.

News and Tributes is a solid album, and its high points are worth listening to over and over. Unfortunately, some of the weaker tracks were given primetime slots.

The album achieves a great deal of its success from the relaxed collaboration, but it does suffer from it, as well. Reid and Hebden interact so casually that they don't find the friction to really propel great improvisational music.

While the "darker follow-up to the breakthrough album" angle was an unavoidable cliché for Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday does their part by giving the more aggressive workouts a stronger sense of purpose.

It’s an intriguing and thoughtful and occasionally lively record, but it’s not the rollicking, randy good time some folks would lead you to believe.

Before The Dawn Heals Us is a very twilight album, a very urban record. It never quite achieves the variegated subtlety of Dead Cities..., but it doesn’t reach for the same frosty rural pastures as that record either.

A fairly enjoyable album as long as one doesn’t saddle it with expectations of being the next Sister Lovers.

Van Pelt teases enough sonic frontiers and has enough madcap charisma to mildly triumph where others would have failed.