With your headphones strapped, the album's dirty optimism will brighten even the darkest, stalest airport-layover experience (true story).

Khan might be getting bolder, bigger, and more experimental, but pushing past what everyone expects or wants from you as an artist sometimes works - even the third time around.

In Ear Park improves on Grizzly Bear’s psychedelic folk æsthetic by both fleshing it out and making it more accessible.

This showcases Stewart's proclivity for macabre imagery and borderline perversion waging war with his pop-songwriting expertise.

It's the album's more subdued tail end, particularly "Ahead of Myself" and "Temptation," that shows a songwriter rising above his comfort zone to deliver a career-defining transition.

These on-record musings never reveal the off-record Marnie, which is a shame, but the sprawling, chimerical Marnia brings you close enough to be captivating anyhow.

The band bring the tang of that elsewhere pop back to Carried to Dust, however, planting big-hook sensibility and the willingness to evolve within its Southwestern mood pieces.

There's much beauty in the modest moments: the gentle, dreamy guitars in the ballad 'Detlef Schrempf,' the Uncle Tupelo–ish tumble of 'The General Specific,' and the instrumental interlude of 'Lamb on the Lam (In the City),' which sounds like the Cure lost in the Appalachia.

Saint Dymphna is the sound of a band of psychedelic dabblers finally getting their shit together.

In the end it’s the guitars, which alternate from restrained, melodic jangles to serrated feedback screams, and the general sense that Happy Hollow chronicles life during wartime that hold these 14 tune together, hymns or otherwise.

After a few listens, the entirely synthetic remainder that is Supreme Balloon is not merely a relief but a delight. If anything, the limitation of having no limitations has revealed Matmos as more skilled, stylish, and sculptural here than on any of their past releases--not to mention versatile.

As a post-Occupy album, it's less ripped-from-the-headlines and more cribbed-from-older-and-better-ideas.

Art-pop triumph "Tell Me" puts it all over the top as the zenith of Triple D's young career. That's something to be optimistic about.

Bland, quasi-political lyrics and zonked-out, dead-end textures.

Boy in da Corner may be the classic Dizzee will be forced to chase for the rest of his career, but Maths + English shows him still striving.

For all that Liars have striven to create an original album, the songs suggest not so much inspiration and composition as hours of laborious mixing and midnight consultations with Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies."

This ninth studio album finds long-timers Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley regaining their focus with their best set of narratives since 2006's A Blessing and a Curse.

Megafaun have promised a full-sized follow-up to last year's stellar Gather, Form and Fly by year's end, but this six-song appetizer will serve nicely for anyone pining for new material from these North Carolina avant bards.

The title Revival is no hype: Fogerty is again in full command of his talent for blending heartfelt writing with irony-free meat-and-potatoes rock.

This disc is both violent and romantic, offering warm singer-songwriter torch songs and jagged avant-noise frays with large-hearted choral flourishes.

Their sixth record reminds me quite a bit of that Metric album that came out last spring. You could put this reaction down to Sainthood’s understated, idiosyncratic electronic elements, or to the whole Canadian elevated-indie-pop thing.

Their third effort finds the four-piece twisting confessional post-punk into something startling, brash, and exhilarating.

At their best--during the disc’s torch-lit forays inward, the piano-ballad title track and the forlorn 'We’re Looking for a Lot of Love'--Hot Chip get serious, delving into the up-late tangles and riddles of the 21st-century heart.

To Willie could have a lost ballad and a roadhouse jam for variety's sake, but Houck's thoughtful curating makes it more than a fans-only stopgap.

The echo-saturated clang works as background music if you’re washing dishes in a haunted house or performing at-home knee surgery, but hunker down with the sound by itself and it evaporates like stale smoke.

Despite the injection of hope and a denser sound courtesy of Steve Albini, as well as good execution throughout, most of the songs tread familiar territory.

The disc’s best stuff — such as the hard-rocking opener, “Can You Feel It?” — makes it easy to get swept up in his limitless enthusiasm.

Patrick Stickles finally overworks his music to match his trying-too-hard fables.