Employment feels more like a patchwork collage of past Brit-rock stardom... than a fully-formed statement of their own. But maybe that's missing the point. When a band has this much fun and crackles with this much energy, you don't ask questions.

Overall, Venus in Leo deviates minimally, fearful of letting light shine in, but the moods it creates shimmer with a gorgeous, melancholic atmosphere.

One criticism of The Kills is that their stance can feel like a bit of a pose; sometimes it feels like there's a hole where the soul should be. The tracks can also sound a tad too similar.

The Oranges Band are good at what they do, but The World & Everything in It seems destined to function as background music rather than as a focus for rapt listening.

While the rest of the album flirts with the shivering, uncomfortable mood found on 'Since I Came,' it infrequently equals it.

In Love With Oblivion is generic in the best sense of the term, a record that blasts a bright light through its otherwise dead sources.

The Colour In Anything emphasizes the element of trust that collaboration implies and its role in articulating Blake’s feelings.

Serenity and temperance are peculiar words to use in praise of popular music, yet these are In Another Life’s most appealing features. Its greatest achievement entails the mindset it creates and invites the listener into, as the LP humbly ventures into well-tread musical territories.

The Stimulus Package, despite its remarkable consistency, remains a modest achievement.

Odd Blood is an album whose highs are higher than its lows are low; those valleys are, however, still very much present.

Although Ghost has an uncanny ability to pair their improvisational style with recognizable structures, there seems to be something missing in the overall design of this album.

It is blatantly experimental, though most indie fans should find it at least mildly accessible.

They have clearly mastered their craft, and have begun to push it beyond its boundaries without betraying its punk ethic.

A bit more polished, a little more cohesive, and a bunch more bizarre, but all still an attempt at reinventing rock ‘n’ roll from the inside out.

The music of 2000 sounds pretty tantric by comparison. And anyone old enough to have been swept up in the ornate neo-psych of the mid- to late-90s now has a right to feel a little ripped off by their nostalgia. All of which is to suppose how Glasser's debut LP, Ring, sounds beautiful, complex, intricate, and so on, and yet fails to actualize her.

Unlike the hyper-specific storytelling of some of Bottomless Pit's indie rock peers, the band unravels general truths slowly, through cloudy, opaque narratives of love and loss, of time and fear and happiness. And they do it so fluidly as to appeal to even the most discerning music fan (or critic). Rarely does something so interesting appear so effortless.

Intermezzo displays Bishop in top form, and if this is an interlude, the next act should be spectacular.

No matter her self-presentation, her grip, the music is relentlessly Sad--and exhausting in its sadness.

Music dignitaries and primordial fans will be contented. If they’re smart, they’ll rejoice.

Distrust is crucial not only as the resurrection of the passion and soul of hip-hop in the face of the overwhelming monetary success of pop-hop, but as a vital questioning of feudal policy, raising awareness, and sounding good doing it.

It changes the sounds of the band from the bombastic elastic to the crouched minor. It changes the hopes of the band from boundless to restrictive. It limps, self-conscious and careful.

Where once this cut deep, extended, it discloses itself merely as pleasant and pleasantly familiar.

The fact that Best Troubador manages to outright milk unqualified whimsy from the life and music of one of country’s most rugged, ambivalent heroes--well, it’s really something.

Playing it Strange isn't the most awe-inspiring Fresh & Onlys record, but it fits snug on the shelf next to their myriad other records and offers a few of their nicest melody slices yet. This is what lo-fi is meant to do.

Bat For Lashes has contributed an imaginative installment to our love affair with marriage, in all its charms and discontents.

Its intensity and aggressiveness reveal Truths about Raime’s process that “process music” can’t really tap into.

Ships is a brilliant collaboration of the finest indie minds backed by only the best intentions.

Although not perfect (and perhaps transitional), Time to Go Home is a defining moment not only for Chastity Belt, but also for a style currently seeing a serious revival.

Although Banhart might not be in the business of dancing around bonfires anymore, his music still feels like gazing into one, its nocturnal reverie calmly emanating a force both naturalistic and mystical.

Sonically, Rise Above is just another healthy dose of what Longstreth does best. Anomalous harmonies, quirky time signatures, and spontaneous rock-outs punctuate the album’s 11 tracks.

Admittedly, no track on Taking It Easy proves as woefully intimate as the ukulele and accordion lament of Pride's "Wolves," but "The Mermaid Parade" somehow rings just as true for all its simplicity.

With Creatures of an Hour, Still Corners prove that they can progress beyond this ubiquitous predilection for visual evocation.

Ibeyi is an uneven but sturdily promising debut.

While Menomena’s sound has matured and their musical prowess has grown considerably, similarities between songs of old and new are unmistakable.

I catch myself unknowingly enjoying Lights Out whenever I quit trying to overtly "listen" to it.

Albums of this caliber just don't come around that often.

Two Way Monologue is an evident progression forward, but not forward enough. It is extremely similar to Faces Down and ultimately leads to disappointment.

This is not an album bent on changing the way one listens to music, but the way one listens to their self.

Seabed is drained of an expressive self.

This very refusal to cohere, to make sense, to play the game of identity and otherness, of harmony and disharmony, makes Bish Bosch this year's only necessary work of art.

It creates an illusion of depth, and its intervention is interesting, rather than distracting. It thickens space and imagines worlds that once were.

While McEntire’s aimlessness feels honest and satisfying in its questing, it also makes for an album with plenty of movement but less, perhaps, in the way of progress.

Yes, Ambivalence Avenue is an album that defies expectations, and it is also Bibio’s most creative and penetrating release yet.

As each track unfurls, its glacial pace arrests the listener’s search for novelty, forcing attention to the profundities of the mix and the texture that the interlaced sounds create; and yet it also deepens the desire for what each step forward promises, the crisis that the procession patiently unveils.

There’s so much sweet in the bitter here that one might be inclined to think that this is music anyone could get into. But these are songs for Low fans.

Where other reborn acts seem to revel in the sheer formal reconstruction and forget songwriting entirely, Costello gets it backwards and winds up with a listenable record as a result.

Semblance’s rigorous and inventive improvisations attempt to bring synth music up to date, despite the unavoidable cultural allusions that threaten to render it an ironic pastiche.

It's as stunning a debut as I've heard in a long time.

Theirs is an 18-year experiment in empathy, in putting themselves in the place of Others, in trawling through the muck of human experience to find sparks of connection and compassion. English Oceans isn’t the Truckers’ best record, it’s their only record.

Pierce sinks his heart into his music, and while that may not manifest in impassioned yelping or big rock riffs, the exquisiteness of his playing and songcraft make it apparent.

Mediation succeeds not only as a stunning instrumental performance, but as an hour of personal storytelling.

Silver Mt. Zion (now a quintet) extract so much harried beauty and grace out of the world’s sorry predicament that it seems unbelievable that they wouldn’t be dispossessing themselves of something if all their/our problems were magically solved one day.

It’s a record that vibes on mixture of psychedelic forgery and improvisational wholesomeness.

It’s impossible to fully return all the way home again, but You & Me is the next best thing.

Next Thing moves.

Collaboratively, then, You, Whom I Have Always Hated makes for a solid metal album, but the attribute that gives it an edge works also as a reminder as to just how imaginative this collaboration could be the next time around.

It does justice to the musical traditions it invokes, integrating them into dynamic, scrupulously constructed rampages that escalate at just the right moments and explode at just the right moments.

Despite not being my personal favorite, the album may in fact be Gira’s most poignant statement to date, one that succinctly encapsulates Angels of Lights’ every driving thrust since "New Mother."

As usual, it’s best listened to when you’re in your feelings, and since good news is in short supply, that might be often enough for her gauzy vision of love to feel like a balm, the more wide-eyed the songs the better.

While many of the album’s stronger tracks are also its most spacey and elusive, the sequencing emphasizes just how important the clicking, EDM drums are to the project’s core.

Ultimately, Sold Out is not doing what its title cheekily alludes to. Although it traverses a variety of genres outside of footwork’s typical territory, DJ Paypal never relents on the actual practice of the juke: the core sound of the beat, getting danced on.

2008 requires more focus and more grace. Modern Guilt delivers both.

Obstinate, prickly, and elusive as ever, Crystal Castles seem poised for more of the reckless aggression they've become known for.

The Year of Magical Drinking strikes me as an album with something interesting to say, a quality only increased by knowing where Flournoy is coming from.

It’s impossible to predict which of today’s hit songs will become tomorrow’s classics, but at least Mandatory Fun, Weird Al’s 14th studio album, delivers on the laughs.

For all the admiration and absorption of realness, Take Her Up To Monto is wholly surreal, enjoyable nonetheless.

Though C'mon Miracle doesn't have the truly standout songs that made Advisory Committee so great, it is still a consistent piece of work that delivers on quality songwriting and musicianship throughout.

Beach House 3 is a strong, strong effort: universally pleasant in the same way as its antecedents, but given a thorough sonic update so as to keep pace with modernity.

Albarn doesn't give us a "Clint Eastwood" or a "Dare" this time around, but in spite of a messy and patently artificial conceptual framework, Plastic Beach feels clean, shiny, and new.

The Terror may be The Flaming Lips’ most concise statement to date.

Despite some questionable, off-putting decisions, there’s a wistful, melancholic temperature to this eponymous debut, one belied by the band’s sophomoric war metaphors and rubbery noodling, and it makes their self-titled debut one of the most essential records of the season for me.

This music took time, precision, intuition, will. But it is the same. It doesn’t demand reverence, but its immense power might go null if not for the voidless silence that could introduce it, carry it like a medium into your every day everyday.

At first listen, Tidings seemed more varied and adventurous than Steeple does. It had moments that hinted at pentatonic scales, exotic tastes of other worlds only compounded by the record's almost utter lack of focus.

Besides adhering to his familiar sonic longings and rather than dampening the message, Far Side Virtual succeeds in exciting the collective memory of that generation now so conjoined to its technological appendages.

When all these cuts add up, we wind up with an album’s worth of pleasantries.

Root For Ruin is hardly a great album, but it is an affirmative gesture toward commitment, to each other and to their craft.

As it stands, the album (along with the essential corresponding film, Icon Eye) stands as a rather moving document of the profundity of the cross-cultural and cross-generational conversation that goes on throughout all popular culture, and given the niche audiences for both Sun Araw and The Congos, this project offers a view on a very rarely explored conversation at that.

We find ourselves encountering songs that give themselves the time and space to breathe, build, incorporate shimmering choirs of backing singers and more layered overdubs than you can shake a stick at into the mix.

Discontinued Perfume has a net effect, despite its potpourri. Still, I wish they'd let some of their ideas out to roam a little more.

Cotonou Club backs up the feeling I got when I saw the group on their recent UK tour, namely that, while they're still very funky, they aren't currently laying the voodoo down like they did on those magic 70s discs.

To call Emotional Mugger a celebration of excess, as sweet as it is, would miss the mark. (Although it’s no veiled warning, either--it enjoys itself too much.) No, this is a bender with an undercurrent of anxiety.

Sadly, This is for the White in Your Eyes sees a band with great potential whose ambitions too frequently get the best of them.

Nine Suns, One Morning is unpredictable without being arbitrary.

This disconnect between Dirty Projectors’s pop tendencies with its “art” signaling is what ultimately stains the album with such a deep sense of confusion, making it difficult to parse who exactly this music is written for, if not people who are already fans of Dirty Projectors.

Full of craft and purpose, enchanting and creative, Rites is a promising tease of better things to come.

The pioneering hardiness Faun Fables capably venerates is now the domain of reenactors. The intrepid few who still seek frontiers have only the vaster dark of dreams to explore.

Equal parts 007-intrigue and spaghetti western-histrionics, this is music at its most cinematic.

As a palate-cleanser for those of us jaded on the overplay of St. Vincent or even the theatrico-folk-foray of Arcade Fire-esque energies, The Golden Record is sufficient and at its best sublime. At its worst, though, it's drifty, gossamer, and chilly.

All of the hallmarks of the band’s debut remain blissfully intact, and yet they’ve managed to engineer an LP with even more seemingly absurd outliers than minimalism and Radiophonic blips.

It brings out the best in Toth both as a musician and a songwriter.

A consistent, immediately catchy album that holds up after repeated listens.

By the force of their musicianship on Rivers, however, Wildbirds & Peacedrums manage to own that risk as one of their greatest assets.

The Phoenix is, ultimately, a collection of immersive and impressively well-produced analogue techno tracks, bound up in a package with overt cultural references that tend to distract rather than add to the experience.

His subtle turns of phrase and shifts in volume manage to achieve immersive depth even when the interplay of sax, strings, electronics, and drums otherwise lacks color.

Eden’s greatest asset is cupcakKe’s domineering voice; she wields hooks that effectively complement her verses and maintains a flow that not only justifies but also elevates her puerile sense of humor.

Born Like This is simply not as forward-thinking as his best works.

Trying Hartz works as either an excellent starting point for Danielson or the perfectly paced next step for someone getting acquainted with the work of Daniel Smith and his musical family.