Real Emotional Trash, with its long, winding guitar solos, extended jams, and emphasis on shifting psychedelic guitar textures, is as retro an album as Malkmus has ever recorded.

Trees might be at its best when Moore gives into the freewheeling vibe that is the natural outgrowth of spending your adult life engaged in on-stage jam sessions.

It’s Dulli sounding like Dulli at his best. And Lanegan delivers some of his more devastating vocal performances.

Spirit If . . . takes plenty of time to revel in the beauty of its surfaces.

It’s a low, slow groove that might be coming out of the bodies of the musicians as much as their instruments--echoey, held back even at its most intense, every note sung or played with a determination not to force anything.

Working with producer Adam Kasper, Vedder played nearly everything on the album. And that gives Into the Wild a cozy, intimate feel.

Bloom is a sonic boomerang: resist if you must, but you'll inevitably end up right back where you started - sucked into their heavenly sonic utopia.

Although it doesn’t attain the career-defining cumulative power of 2005's "Gypsy Punks," it's a broader, more intricate disc.

The one-woman choir may seem eccentric, but by the last of these nine vignettes, Barwick has accomplished what few purveyors of such pristine beauty can. Through its oddities, The Magic Place shines.

It's a killer.

The lyrics resonate hard, though, felt most strongly when Rønnenfelt sings with broad expressive shouts.

Full of airy vocals and synths, the album sounds as if it could lift off at any moment if not for the drum thumps tethering it down. But the beats sound weighty only in contrast.

Several cuts on +/-’s third full-length... feature tunes sturdy (and dreamy) enough to satisfy a Death Cab for Cutie fan. But Let’s Build a Fire is also full of moments that suggest Baluyut has grown tired of the straightforward indie-rock approach.

Here, as on Red Album, they keep finding new ways to make old Black Sabbath tricks seem fresh.

Although some songs ("Taxi Cab" and "Holiday" especially) can make it seem like just another, nicer sweater to knot around our necks, the other word I never expected to use here is perhaps the most important for a young band of VW's talent: better.

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.

This is the longest the band has had the same lineup, which adds to the overall tightness from start to finish.

His philosophizing is rarely twee, and his fine-oaked voice gives new authority to his pastis-and-mushroom-fueled musings.

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

Indeed, although she's best known for those late-'70s Hotel Chelsea/CBGB-era fringe-punk albums, Outside Society illuminates some of Smith's underrated pop-minded phases.

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.

For the Ghosts Within descends into a strange netherworld bordered by art pop, jazz, and classical that few seek to visit.

Double-O and Nawledge were not yet capable of chopping up the sort of cuts that people sing in traffic. They are now--there's no boredom in Land of Make Believe.

They’ve gotten good at re-creating in the studio the sound of a dingy rock venue in full throb.

Produced by the late Jerry Finn, the album is a slice of American rock radio, polished, compressed, and routinely combustible.

Some things, like this album, are best left unanalyzed and simply enjoyed for their own bone-headed dedication to rockin’ out like a motherfucking banshee. Which Going Way Out does in spades and diamonds.

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.

It's a broad spectrum of styles, but sometimes that's just another way to describe the comfort of being your (multiple) selves.