Harbors feels mannered, genteel even; the aesthetic is humanness within mechanical complexity, as the jet wings, lungs, and eye on the album art suggest.

Certainly, Tomboy, recorded in a dark basement in sun-soaked Lisbon, delivers its fair share of primal pleasures and sacred ecstasies.

Share The Joy sees our own Vivians enter into a similar contretemps: locking horns with death and with demons (literally, on "Trying To Pretend"), they achieve a narrative victory that nonetheless remains, for the auditor, a work in progress.

Apocalypse is keenly observed, distinctly humane, and predictably idiosyncratic; it is yet another minor triumph from an artist who, despite his constant self-deprecation, seems incapable of offering up less than his best.

Cherish the Light Years is a breathless, versatile record from front to back, always oscillating between extreme shades of dark and light.

In cynical marketing terms, an 'indispensible' sticker has been slapped on this effort through these moves, so that no wallflower's music library would be complete without a shy Fading Parade.

While 936's perpetual schizophrenia is noteworthy, it's Peaking Lights' songwriting that elevates 936.

While the overall record is much more song-centered and even features honest-to-goodness vocals on many of the tracks, he's still basically stockpiling scraps from his childhood.

It's a complicated exercise in postmodernism, and one that is surprisingly rich.

These guys are working within a fully-formed aesthetic; they've got hooks to spare and production out the wazoo, but right now, I'm just not feeling the soul.

In the end, the album is a collection of songs, mostly good, some indifferent, and all a hundred times more honest than, say, Rihanna. But it's all really to no transcendent purpose.

Bibio aims to express an exquisitely blurry mind-state; instead, his lack of focus conjures only a musty shadow of the varied, sportive electro-pop album he strains to create.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have retained most of what we loved about them while also finding new ways to dazzle us, to make us swoon.

In many ways, All Eternals Deck, his greatest work since 2005's The Sunset Tree, is the perfect final album, fixated on death, legacy, survival, and an uncertain future.

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.

It's the sound of restless, searching energy channeled into a bare-bones context, surging against its boundaries by sheer compositional rigor.

The band's tight, and every song contains at least a few interesting musical ideas, but the album as a whole comes across less like a creative mess and more like a stoned-battle-of-the-bands gone wrong.

No Color isn't a bad album by any means - it's great at times, never less than good, and certainly better than could reasonably have been expected - but there's no sign here of return or retreat to their old strengths.

Other groups have approached the issue of originality by genre-blending; but in the case of Esben and the Witch, it is their very faith that ensures that the hollowness one feels while listening has a doubled quality, reflected not only in content but also in experience, leaving one with the ominous aftertaste of a doppelgänger encounter.

Where The Excitement of Maybe shines--like a harvest moon--is in production, composition, and musicianship, but these alone aren't enough to sustain the distinctive voice Cervenka has spoken in so boldly, particularly when they're employed in the service of pastiche.

EDD are probably too traditional a band to ever record a straight-up punk record. But it would have been nice to hear an entire album powering through with the intensity of the more rocking half of Riot Now!.

Barnes and Trost may be back home from their sojourn abroad, but their music is still out on the road somewhere.

12 Desperate Lines takes tried-and-true radio rock tropes and imbues them with enough life to make them feel fresh.

Ghostface may be the most spectacular survivor of the Wu, but Rae is its real heart; the voice of speed, he moves through these tracks like a field of threats, chronicling progress towards a goal that's never lost.

Land and Fixed suffers from a dearth of arresting moments, and the songs that do stand out typically only do so by directly aping well-worn standards.

Never mind the cultural appropriation bollocks, here's ethnotronic industrial pop.

Even as it limits the album's appeal as much as it does the band's chances of broader success, Wye Oak's stylistic purity is a virtue in itself.

Something Dirty has something of the reliability and surprise of rediscovering a trusty, well-trod paperback on the shelves of a particularly high-quality, secondhand but not-to-be-outdone bookstore.

For its circuitousness, there's always been a lean, mean backbone to the guy's writing; even his most bored-sounding toss-offs came wrapped in barbed wire. Here, he just kinda sounds bored.

100 Lovers baffles with the breadth of its misfires; from sequencing to packaging design to instrumentation, this is a band taking bold steps in the wrong direction.

Compared to her two previous releases, Barwick's songs on The Magic Place are much longer and more layered, with a greater diversity of textures and instrumentation.

Hendy now seems to be making a bid for the sort of omnivorous, stylistically noncommittal psych-hop that's been relatively popular - marking critically acclaimed hip-hop milestones - for more than a decade now.

Relying heavily on posturing and tired song structures, lacking the incisive commentary and pointed humor that it strives for, Music's Not For Everyone is a record that fails on many fronts.

The songs on Pyramid serve admirably as precise and severe mood pieces; they are great for rocking out to while one devotes half a mind to something else.

Port Entropy is Tokumaru's fourth widely-available full-length and sees him taking his songs to greater aspirational heights than much of his previous work, which has been characterized more by restraint than indulgence.

The Rural Alberta Advantage's capital-E Emotions are rarely comforting, but they serve as a reminder that life, stark - and wintry - as it is, is worth feeling hurt over, that our petty, mortal passions are justified.

It's as if Tyvek decided to reinvent themselves as a mutated punk group, and to no one's surprise, the aesthetic shift works.

This is soul music, sometimes in form, but always in content; mournful and inspirational in equal measure, Wounded Rhymes more than earns that categorization.

Within Radiohead's oeuvre, TKOL most closely resembles Kid A and Amnesiac, the double-headed phoenix that rose out the ashes of the band's turn-of-the-century identity crisis. The only thing missing this time around is, well, the identity crisis.

That Toro Y Moi's new record Underneath the Pine is distinctly a product of his songwriting, without sounding exactly like his 2010 debut, suggests that chillwave may still have some legs to it after all.

Such is the exquisite control he holds over his music, his vision evident even in the weakest moments of Space Is Only Noise.

The only way you can't approach Best of Gloucester County is neutrally. And it takes suspendin' some serious disbelief to buy into the Danielson vision, but I think it's worth it.

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 invites its listeners into that silent continuum that makes music whole.

Arbouretum succeed through absolute concentration and craftsmanship, eschewing the easy crescendoes of mid-aughts post-rock in favor of more organically evolving swells.

They know that a sound so anathema to many rock and soul fans as anti-human or soulless may have been created on machines, but it was the left-field creativity and forward-thinking imagination of a few of his city's citizens that helped to change the sound of popular music.

The Menham Street Band realizes the vision of No Time For Dreaming, with Brenneck at the helm. More Memphis than Detroit, they're always present but never pretentious.

With Dynamite Steps, Dulli has delivered the fully-realized statement of self-mythology that his fans knew he was capable of, strutting his stuff like agéd legends who've long since been internalized, making it look easier than it should be.

Hecker's freshest exploration of the life of rave death comes thoroughly recommended.

While Fluorescence may be an enjoyable record, it's certainly not a remarkable one. Hannah and Chikudate are adept at digesting diverse influences and turning them into an album that's pleasing to the ear, but few would consider it essential.

Its (mostly) gimmick-free, clear-eyed dreamer propulsion will buoy you. But if, like me, you're looking for something a little deeper in an instrumental rock record and you don't unrestrainedly sanctify this band, you may want to hold out till the next Do Make Say Think album.

Here, then, are 10 more steps on the path, 10 more keys in the song of life and death.

End It All doesn't reveal some new profundity to Beans' formula; it just happens to be the album that came out when I was finally smart enough to get exactly how weird he always was.

While albums like Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and To Bring You My Love found her looking inward--Let England Shake sees her peeking beyond her inner observations into the complicated web of English politics.

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.

Issuing such a thorough CD document of a vinyl trilogy winds up not so much a simple change in format or an exercise in excess, but rather a telescopic glimpse into the rapidly expanding Demdike Stare universe.

The lyrics mostly follow white-kid reminiscences, and it's best just to slot them in with all the rest of early-90s-mining that goes on on Old Friends, because they're forgettable.

Sic Alps are clearly both miles ahead of and miles away from their peers. Napa Asylum only further proves this.

Depending on how one looks at it, The People's Key might even be understood as the culmination of a long and troublesome trajectory Bright Eyes began as a teenager's bedroom project in the mid-90s.

Like the guileless ballers on the screen, Delicate Steve's got surprisingly smooth moves, and the album lets you see the wonder of each one. It goes for the layup every time, sinks it, and you'll have no problem cheering along.

Despite its lack of focus, the record's immediacy is also kind of charming, and there's something else about White Wilderness that makes me less inclined to toss it aside; only a few listens in, it's proven to be a grower.

None of these songs is an inferior version of other songs on the album; each dangles from its own distinct nostalgic thread.

No doubt there's an EP's-worth of gems buried here that are worth returning to, but for the most part, New Love resembles its thematic obsession: it's a strained affair.

It's rarely messy enough to be visceral, and rarely clean enough to be cerebral. Even the 30-minute running time is underwhelming. In fact, the album ends with a long electronic sigh, as if acknowledging that it hasn't accomplished anything.

While I'm certain that this mode will suit Moore in his future indie folk material that is sure to come, In the Cool of the Day naturally goes from inoffensive to mildly irritating fairly quickly through repeated spins.

Blood Red Shoes sound at their best when they manage to reign in their musical touch points and put them to work in their service.

On their latest effort, no track is longer than 5:45, and they kick the whole thing off with arena riffage and a song about bears.

The straightforward manner in which Disappears present themselves makes it easy to take the album at face value and enjoy its vibe and vigor without worrying about its place in the broader canon.

With this record, though, Black turns that style into a genuine language--a flexible idiom--one that can conjure up a whole weird world of new emotions and experiences.

The highlights here are subtle, but many.

This album does nothing to disrupt their two-decade streak of psychedelic, cosmic, post-rock transcendence.

Making no egregious concessions to potential new fans, nor to the musical trends of the past decade, Trail of Dead finally sound like a band emerging from a purgatorial state, out from underneath the shadows of their former selves.

Zonoscope is far from an outright failure, just more severe of a backslide than expected.

It all hits you at 78-rpm, and that these guys have the dexterity to recall the unadorned energy of 1977 punk is their greatest asset.

Once again, the limits of music and musicianship are foregrounded in Popp's relentless pursuit of the horizon afforded by a particular disposition of limits: the limits of imagination, of technology, of process, the organic and the inorganic.

The remarkable change here comes from courtesy of the record's sonic qualities.

Kweli still has an ear for beats, and despite some particular low points here, his lyrics were always overshadowed by his flow, which is as sharp as ever.

This album fits into the venerable history of The Ex and will make you want to dig out the old albums, too. History, as the band told us back in 1982, is what's happening now.

Deerhoof are spazzy, but not sloppy, and their execution is as serious as the atomic bomb on the album cover.

Destroyer's new album Kaputt may be one of the most indefensible albums of all time. But it's also a masterpiece.

Content (pronounced like the noun, not the adjective) is, in many ways, a return to form for the group.

The band isn't doing anything that hasn't been done before, but damn if that doesn't seem to matter a lick while listening to the record. It's just too youthful, effervescent, and charming.

While Arcade Dynamics is a major turn for Mondanile, it's aesthetically in line with the trajectory of many modern acts that also hide behind effects and atmosphere as they develop their songwriting chops.

If there's one thing to complain about, it's a lack of focus to each individual track, in deference to sheer joy at the combinations of sounds they're making.

That's what Cape Dory will be for many listeners--a toxic sugar rush full of empty calories.

No, at best, The King Is Dead is a patchwork of genre exercises, giving listeners little more than a chance to play "spot the influence." But even then it fails, for it taps only a very shallow stream of tradition, focusing on a series of folk facsimiles from the 70s and 80s that never quite add up to the real thing.

With this strangely juvenile rush of an album, Wire have simultaneously honored and eroded the legacy of Pink Flag.

For the consummate BSP fan, Valhalla Dancehall will likely be met as a sufficient new entry in the band's growing discography, but for a fella like me on the periphery, I'll need a lot more of the standout experimentation of Living Is So Easy to convince me.

Outside tastes like having returned to my favorite bar to find they've redone the menu. Only this time, all the improvements are positive ones.

In the end, the artificial pop of The Promise makes it, as a whole, a more realistic album.

Ghost has had his share of ups and downs, but Apollo Kids finds him back near the top.

How to Dress Well has most often been described as a distorted take on R&B, and I suppose that's most accurate, too. Love Remains substantiates the hearsay with slow, soulful requiems that begin to feel like lovingly sculpted effigies of some of the genre's more immortal catalysts.

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.

These songs, nearly half a century old, are as relevant as ever. They should have never been hawked to commercial singers, but delivered as broadsides to the public or as protest music to audiences (as many of them were). Active, agitated citizens should be the recipients of these songs.

So, it's formulaic, it's 'retro' in a really kitschy way, and Business Casual sounds pretty much the same as their 2004 debut, Fancy Footwork; and still, Chromeo are fucking great.

It turns out he's simply not the Nerd Messiah; he's creative and emotional and gifted, but at least right now, he'd do better making rap songs rather than ambient soundscapes.

The Moondoggies make: music for middle-class, middle-aged white liberals. Music for my parents, and the parents of pretty much everyone I know. Tidelands is almost just as good as the real thing, but the real thing is still out there, if I want to find it.

It's a solid reminder that it's tough to grow your rock up, but worth working toward, and Fantastic Explanations is a solid record demonstrating the results.

For those smitten with the notion of the dark, mysterious West and its expanding, crushing, absorbing, destructive, albeit beautiful tendencies, there's much to enjoy on Ancestral Star.