With one foot rooted in the past, the band is yet pushing forward, with an album that promises longevity and, maybe, greatness.

On the whole, Forever is downcast, introspective, and melodic.

Of the Cathmawr Yards is Ambien-fueled folk that never rises above room temperature, well-crafted yet lacking in passion and vitality.

Here Mega Dave isn't even that annoying. Perhaps it's because the music is so strong, or maybe it's that he's giving exactly what you expect and doesn't try to be anything else.

In 'Your Big Hands,' she and her pals work up a rowdy roadhouse groove worthy of Car Wheels–era Lucinda Williams. And 'Mexico City' has ringing ’60s-pop guitar twinkles that give her melancholy travelogue a welcome splash of whimsy.

The songs all melt together after a while - they're charming but not memorable.

The contrived sheen marring much of the album dissolves, and things get industrial real quick. That dark and uncharted - for Cut Copy - territory might be the way to go heading forward.

This feast isn’t without a good deal of filler.

With Collapse into Now, there's enough reason to keep celebrating.

He may have found the perfect partner in the Shins' James Mercer, whose moody pop sensibilities complement Mouse's muted time-capsule colors.

Mixed Emotions is a shiny bear-hug of an album--sometimes short on fresh ideas, but never lacking in heart.

The results are surprisingly tame, if not un-rocking.

There aren't many punk stalwarts who can weave a tale of being down and out quite like Mike Ness, and for the most part he's in top form on this seventh studio release from Social D.

Still blessed with cleverness, tunes, sass, and youth, she generally pulls it off.

We'll never know what goes on behind the helmets, but who cares? The sheer audacity of this action-movie-reboot soundtrack is its own reward.

Keys and Codes, which inverts the title of Death Cab's last record, feels slapped together, which is disappointing when you consider the array of talent present.

VYP nonetheless shows, perhaps by design, a pretty convincing arc of maturation.

Throughout, a messy æsthetic attempts to cover up pop sympathies--or simply proves that dissonance and sweetness needn't be kept in their separate corners.

Despite the technological tweaks and inventive aptitude that this sometimes Afro-topped sound genius reveals in every crevice of his latest grab bag, Echo Party is true to its name and anything but tedious.

It makes for their strongest work yet.

Texas Rose is moody and layered, and Raposa is adept at creating a world that is deep, enveloping, and enticing.

Although his results can be flimsy, when his creations get legs under them, Terra is the bomb.

Galactic Melt is entertaining in a novelty sort of way, but the vintage (or vintage-sounding) equipment produces such over-the-top sonics that it sinks the record, unless you're super starved for some already-been-done nostalgia.

Beware and Be Grateful's main flaw: an occasional quirk overload.

No bad songs, but any other record they've made is better.

These 11 new songs represent some of the strongest material of their career.

It's never been easy sticking with Quasi through all their quality-control ups and downs, but American Gong lets bygones be bygones, fitting their sharp wits and bruised hearts into a sound powerful enough to contain them.

That patented caterwaul is in fine form.

One Second of Love is artfully crafted.

Less polished than its predecessor, 2009's Fantasies, Synthetica brings all the varied influences and styles together in perfect synchronization.

For some, this could be unlistenable; for others, it will simply come off like the natural product of glitch, shoegaze (to which Bundick certainly owes his chord palette), lo-fi, and psych.

The result is some kind of cosmic machine music, reflecting not just a stoner’s world of internalized minimalist headbanging but an entire universe of culture, texture, and possibility.

GaGa ups the ante in terms of catchy songwriting and sheer high-in-the-club-banging-to-the-beat abandon.

Recorded with his working band the Blokes, the album isn’t without its misfires (the obvious 'The Johnny Carcinogenic Show'), but it is Bragg’s most assured statement since hooking up with Wilco a decade ago to give life to lost Woody Guthrie lyrics.

Like the most artistically successful EPs (Magical Mystery Tour, the Who's surf-rockers, the Beta Band's glory-days output), these do the job without overstaying their welcomes.

As you might have guessed, nobody but TSOOL completists (and Mojo subscribers) needs all this stuff. Yet within Communion's overload lurk a handful of neo-Nuggets nuggets.

There’s something oddly accessible about the mess the duo make on Why Bother?

Zoo is a fine tribute to [often-compared band]Wire's heavier side, alternating between powerful, lumbering riffs and manic splatters of guitar noise.

Past Time was mostly content to present Grass Widow's aesthetic--cooing, ethereal gang vocals, sinewy guitars, a general state of breeziness--as opposed to Internal Logic, where those things are part of far more memorable songs.

It's nothing new, sure, but it's proof that mining from the past is a surefire way to keep things sounding familiar yet fresh.

Some bands make a third album; others make something more like a third refinement of "the album." This feels like the (charmed) latter.

The 11 songs here clock in at a tidy 37 minutes--plenty of time to flavor the straight-ahead rock jolts with spaced-out country-rock ballads and pop-flavored rave-up replete with a horn section.

True, Camu Tao hadn't mastered the art of songwriting: verses and choruses abound, whereas bridges are conspicuously absent. But even half-built tracks like "Bird Flu" and "Intervention" are proof that he could create engaging and catchy hooks alongside vocals that matched his new palette without diluting the hip-hop aesthetic. Such songs are tantalizing examples of unrealized potential--a sad indication of what could have been.

So if Thr33 Ringz fails to shock, consider also that it fails to disappoint.

CD2’s smoking live versions are where AC/DC defend their reputation as a well-oiled machine, as oiled up as the jugtastic fembots that permeate the music’s hyper-hetero fantasia. And the band’s testicle-laden metaphorical fodder is brought to life on the DVD’s music videos.

The Ohio trio took their time with Feel Anything, arriving at this more focused, albeit less celestial, effort.

Together, the group's fifth record, is explosive and infectious yet tight and glossy, a far cry from the proverbial seat-of-the-pants audacity of their 2000 debut, Mass Romantic.

Their ability to re-create shrewd discordant pairings in a second set of simple pop songs and still leave fans uncertain as to whether the duo are cleverly cloying or cloyingly clever is what will keep listeners in suspense until the curtains have parted.

They might have lost a little bit of character, but thankfully Big Troubles remain reliable writers of catchy pop songs.

The songwriting isn’t BRMC’s most memorable, but Baby 81’s noise-roots fumes are pretty thick.

The recent full-band reunion "Volume 4" was a small triumph, but Rain may be even more satisfying, since it’s the best work Jackson has done with a line-up that’s not strict-rock-band.

Yeasayer remain the new-millennium kings of studio manipulation, and it's downright jaw-dropping that they're able to experiment so wildly in the context of such catchiness. Fragrant World feels like a victory lap.

The only real sore spot is Wes Eisold's overdramatic Robert Smith singing style -- his pain sounds fashionable and forced instead of penetrating and raw.

There's no risk here, but there's plenty that's right.

Attention to the smallest instrumental details and the finest points of every composition have become Interpol trademarks; more complex than its pop song structures might suggest, Our Love To Admire is well worth exploring.

Endless Now is a record that will appeal equally to fans of the Buzzcocks or Blink- 182, and that rules.

Joe is one of the last remaining beasts from the East, and as he demonstrates on the DJ Premier ringer "I'm Gone" and "At Last Supremacy" with Busta, he sounds better in his back yard than he does in trying to appease pedestrians with unnecessary Wayne and Jeezy cameos.

Inasmuch as Stereolab have accomplished pretty much everything they could, Not Music feels like a passive retread.

Part of Caveman's appeal, other than having the coolest debut album title in recent memory (a respelling of the moniker of the '80s WWF superstar), is making the complicated simple.

Crash is easily A.F.I.'s best since 2003's "Sing the Sorrow," and the cheeky pop-punk chorus of 'Too Shy To Scream' is their first successful decree to boogie the night away.

New Zealand multi-instrumentalist Pip Brown a/k/a Ladyhawke presents us with a treasure trove of found blips, as if the 1980s had been nothing but a gigantic mirror ball to smash and paste back together.

Without a smidgen of a doubt, See Mystery Lights has egghead-party-album-of-the-year potential. But its value is greater than that.

Nary a tippy toe strays from the well-trodden path; it's as if Lemmy and the boys spent every couple of years locked in a studio with their own discography and no outside noises that might besmirch the purity of their brand. There are occasional hints of self-awareness.

On the whole, King Animal is a welcome return, and though it doesn't reinvent the wheel, it reminds us why these guys were considered the architects of the Seattle scene.

It could have easily gone any of several wrong ways, but Green Day's punk has long since been tempered with pop's most attractive attributes, and 21stCentury Breakdown, like its predecessor, is unapologetically accessible and relentlessly exhilarating.

Fortunately, getting the money isn’t all this follow-up to last year’s breakthrough Let’s Get It cares about, and the singles here are fire.

The results are hit-or-miss.

Free To Stay is all about hyper, exuberant tunes as accessible to Kidz Bop kids as they are to parents.

It’s this willingness to experiment with sounds and percussion that distinguishes Psapp from their electro-organic brethren.

Live instrumentation and organic jams keep it all from sounding très moderne, and though it touches upon some typical Air tropes (free-floating whispery shimmers, B-movie space sounds gone glitzy) the overall loosey-goosey methodology is refreshing.

With a clearer eye to the cultures whose stereotypes they’re furthering, the Bells could have made a provocative connection between the European forms they’re comfortable with and any number of traditional Middle Eastern and Indian instruments and forms they’re interested in but not serious about.

Erasure remain A-level, mid-tempo melody makers, crafters of classic romantic pop songs with electronica serving as the template.

Here the band, with producer Dan Carey (Hot Chip, CSS) at their side, dip their big toe into electro-pop, Afrobeat (sorta), new-wave seizures, and all manner of groove that bespeak body-rockin' pleasures.

It's like a late-aughts hipster cocktail.

The songs are what we've come to expect--approachable slacker jams mixed in with cursory love songs, and the occasional guitar solo that proves reverb and washed-out colors don't have the monopoly on nostalgia--but production is cleaner and energy levels are lower.

Cautiously, I submit that Join Us, their 15th album and first non-children's release in four years, has that old-school TMBG feel, as if the Unlikely Rock Band ditched the self-conscious weirdo-geek shtick for a more genuine weirdo-geek non-shtick shtick.

It’s their honest simplicity that offers a refreshing contrast to the irony of neo-new-wave disco retreads that are all the rage in the UK.

This is an album steeped in a generation’s worth of nostalgia, but unlike most rehashed coming-of-age exercises, Saturdays = Youth manages, in its own small way, to offer something entirely new.

There’s plenty in the way of ambition on Widow City, but little substance to back it up.

Rad Times is a towering paean to a time that never was, when too much was never enough, and a three-minute song could gloriously last forever.

Beyond a couple of guest-vocal spots from fellow Ronson client Lily Allen and an out-of-place rap from English MC Sway, Off with Their Heads covers pretty much the same territory as the Chiefs' first two discs.

Although titles like 'Suicide' and 'Drugs' may seem a touch overt, the songs are not overwrought cliches.

The constants are there; the group come off as authentic in their earnestness, even with lyrics ("I love your celebrity/the VPL in the SUV") that might look slipshod on paper. But no new ground is being broken.

Suuns' debut LP is pieced together from a few decent ideas and a lot of bad ones.

Knowle West Boy is a survey of Tricky’s sonic versatility--straightforward rock and oppressive, moody atmospherics all have a home here--and it is frequently gorgeous.

The Orchard cracks open a window to dreamy possibilities.

Within and Without is chillwave 2.0. It takes the same hazy late-night bedroom synthpop, but amps it up exponentially, with live instruments (cello, bass, violins, drums), guidance from superstar producer Ben Allen (who co-produced Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion and Deerhunter's Halcyon Digest), and more meticulously crafted songs.

Gibbard's carving out new musical territory on Former Lives, while amplifying the broken heart of what makes his sound so wonderful.

If the down-and-out, early-MCR-worshipping emo set need the equivalent of an "It Gets Better" video to remind them how awesome life can be, no document could be more spirited and persuasive than Danger Days.

With their debut full-length, Brooklyn pop quintet Friends have released the best pop album of the summer.

Even if the disc’s too long and there’s too much coasting here and there to qualify it as near-classic, there’s more than enough to convince doubters that Snoop can still deliver.

It’s still too lightweight to win any hip-hop race, but at least you’ll want to add K-OS’s name to your mental checklist as you peruse those small-rock-club listings.

Brian Wilson and his karaoke-smooth backing band the Wondermints have instead given us something on par with 1970s Beach Boys--kinda bloated, kinda silly, mostly out of date, but with enough earnestness and pop intuition to be so, so, so puerile that hating it would be like hating Raffi.

Dream Date does more than achieve its purpose, which is to get bottoms leaking.

Cut in Nashville with ace session players, what might have been a disastrous mess in other hands coheres into one of Costello's most satisfying releases in some time.

...The Ever Expanding Universe provides a nice excuse to put on the headphones and look up at the stars. There's nothing wrong with having one's head in the clouds, but this band could stand to make the occasional contact with earth.

In Light is an impressive step forward--it seriously contends for the title of this summer's go-to indie-pop record.

Martyn's early-'70s blend of romantic blues and eerie valentines remains potent, and on this double-disc tribute, 30 participants give him a smooch of respect, trying to update the hazy passion he brought to his best work.