This ambiguity ends up being what separates this effort from the sort of average indie pop twinkies that were so abundant at the midpoint of the aughts.

Frustrated fanboy headscratching aside, the point is simple: All Day is a misstep of the worst kind, wherein Gillis' craft devolves from transformative to parasitic.

Autumn, Again is a rarely dynamic dream-pop album, an ideal caffeinated companion to birch skies and stubbly faces. It is a secret pleasure like the sound of a sleeping town and the feeling of control that comes with the first morning light.

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.

The songs that do hit the number, however, are unimaginably nimble in their enthusiastic originality, carrying on the busy-bee legacy Hill has been building and venturing into exciting territory. Considering how ground-floor some of his proper-solo recordings have been, this is an intriguing development.

The past few years have shown West first-hand what happens when the populace turns against its demagogues, and with Fantasy, he's letting us know that he's ready for our scorn and adulation.

This is a supergroup, and part of the fun lies in the interplay between musicians, especially Cartwright and Hames. In the classic tradition of the "answer song," the two singers take turns poking holes in each other's vows and proclamations, comically deflating their assigned roles in the pop tradition.

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.

For the Ghosts Within provides another oddly-shaped window into the labyrinthine mind of Robert Wyatt, nearly as vital in its own way as Shleep or Rock Bottom.

No one wants to see a zombie in the rear-view mirror, and nobody wants music that reeks of old trends, but both have their uses. Bands like Weekend have us looking nervously over our shoulder as we drive recklessly into the future.

This is not the best or most refined Jesu album and for the casual listener perhaps not the best place to start. For the Jesu fans who have not been able to track the debut EP down, however, it is well worth a listen.

With any luck, Stereolab's hiatus will prove to be temporary, but if Not Music is the epitaph of their career, it is a suitably dignified (if not emphatic) one.

Death Seat leaves nothing unsaid, and through this purge, Wooden Wand is absolved from past sins, ready to face a new life with a new resolve. The fiery mess of mangled metal and flesh looks much better from atop the cliff than from the wreckage.

They are making pretty, tightly structured pop songs cheaply, or at least pop songs that sound cheaply made, and pretty, and melancholy, and somehow detached and futuristic.

They go out not with a bang or a whimper, but with a wide-eyed and confident work tinged with sadness, knowing they were part of something truly unique and amazing that met an untimely end.

This is yet another album destined to become background music in a trendy clothing boutique. Sadly, I have a feeling it'll have more than one Concretes record there to keep it company.

Eno's true strength has always been in his ability to constantly create, to constantly make good noise. Small Craft on a Milk Sea finds him doing exactly that, and the results are at worst incredibly listenable, and at best utterly invigorating.

The only complaint about Knoxville is its length, although it's not so much a complaint as it is a curiosity about whether there is more of this live performance out there somewhere that didn't make the final edit. As with almost all Fennesz projects and releases, the listener is left wanting more.

Down There carries many of the hallmarks of c-wave in its purse like a pack of mints or set of keys, but it diverges in notable ways.

In spite of its shortcomings, this is a strong first record.

Hauschka has shown much promise in the past, but Foreign Landscapes buries its own experimental leanings under layers of charm and cliche: childish sentiments, cute sounds, and easy references.

By the time it comes to a close, The Books have taken us on a journey through space and time, and it's hard not to feel full, invigorated by a unique sort of listening experience that's perhaps best described by The Way Out's closing words: "And you're becoming the world and everyone in it."

If Belle and Sebastian appear to be repeating themselves here, maybe that just means there's another minor reinvention coming somewhere down the line.

With Funstyle, she has crafted above all else an experience, and one that is entertaining and rewarding in ways that few records can be. It's an arduous listen, and as music it is unquestionably terrible; but as a musical experience, it's something that shouldn't be missed.

The Age of Adz is an outrageously fun and messy masterpiece.

Lucky Shiner feels at once painfully intimate and intercontinentally expansive

Again and again, Antony gestures toward a light: a crying light, a swanlight, a luminous impossibility that beckons, ultimately serving only to illuminate the sadness of this world.

Mild as it might be, Mixed Race is a solid effort from someone who insists on sticking around.

Those time signature-obsessed math rockers will delight in her phrasings, while those with a taste for the intimate will no doubt grimace at the hyper energy. What both of those groups are missing, however, is that one hand feeds the other. More and more, Stern seems to be getting it, too.

It's clear there's a lot of, well, love on Infinite Love. And it's exciting to share in it.

Halcyon Digest might be an easy listen, but it takes effort to digest. Brief moments of transcendence break through the album's cracked, depressed facade, though even those are fleeting.

As much as Everything In Between transcends what the band has released to date, nothing feels like a true departure, and everything seems like an improvement.

Chalk it up to Lanois, near-death experiences, or the wisdom of youth. No matter the cause, this is the Neil Young to embrace.

Public Strain feels stripped-down, simpler, and lolloping. It's not so eerie.

As the Chicagoan trio defines it on their debut album King Night, witch-house is a curious blend of aesthetics.

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.

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To the Sky, from the title's evocation of righteous death on down to its suffusion with keening strings and other touches of sonic Americana, is an attempt to come to terms with the dark heart of history, with that ultimate question: if we are born into crime and monstrous darkness, how do we become more than that past?

With The Trip, she's split the difference, crafting a modestly arranged work that showcases a variety of strengths we already knew she had.

Although you'd be hard pressed, but very pleased, to find a shindig entirely amenable to FlyLo's relentlessly eccentric experiments, Pattern+Grid World is certainly more pillow fight than lounge party.

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

The Walkmen are that rare band that can stretch into all manner of different shapes and retain their oneness with the rock gods, and they've held onto the zeal that made them stand out like a diamond among the other jeweled NYC bands with impeccable resumes in the early aughts.

Black Mountain understand their chosen form better than any other contemporary stoner rock bands still running.

If there is a compliment to be paid to Hurley, it is that the band refrains from delving into the sort of WTF territory they've explored of late.

So while Penny Sparkle might constitute yet another step forward on the band's musical journey, it's not one that I feel compelled to follow them on.

Grinderman 2 goes a long way towards solidifying this four-man Bad Seeds mash-up as a distinctive musical act, even as it brings them closer to their parent band's wheelhouse.

Megafaun, with reverence to everything and without reference to anyone, are quickly carving their own path both through and away from their musical roots.

In the final analysis, of Montreal represents a rare and comprehensive attainment of vitality in modern music.

Sex with an X is a clear case of The Vaselines boldly going where they have gone before - most of the record more than stands up to many of the nuggets in their tiny back catalog - but maybe that's okay; maybe it's better to have them as they were than to not have them at all.

The familiar ingredients are there, from superb buildups to instrumental pyrotechnics to Esjstes' buttery voice and a general insistence that points toward some bright and shining future.

Expektoration offers a strong tracklist, heavy with fan favorites (opener "Hoe Cakes," "Accordion," "Rhymes Like Dimes") and peppered with rarities ("People Places & Things," "Change the Beat"), but it's not the type of strength you can't feel from going back to the originals.

Although technically their fourth album, Shadow Temple is Prince Rama's major bow in front of the increasingly intense glare of the online indie music press. But rather than withering from the mounting pressure, the band has forged an incredibly assured record that plays by its own rules and succeeds in creating its own unique world.

I sense a more natural sense of songcraft here. Banks is still trying too hard, seemingly attempting to write songs he thinks people will like rather than songs that, whether simple or arpeggio-filled, he and his mates like.

When they get it right - as they do on half of Personal Life - The Thermals are a joy to behold.

In a lesser person's hands, this particular analog stew would have turned out to be nothing more than an album of farting robot sounds, but in Prekop's it is a well-conceived piece of musical experimentation. Drastically more daring than previous releases, Old Punch Card shows a radical side to Prekop that is relentlessly inventive.

Sure, with Cloudland Canyon stringently adhering to their newfound formula and retaining a similar pace throughout, Fin Eaves doesn't lend itself to any startles or immediately striking moments. But their renewed approach allows for the full realization of the album's flavor: grandiose, ambitious, and almost painfully beautiful.

Familial is a worthwhile attempt at the contemporary folk that has been bastardized by many, coddled by some, and ignored by most. In this regard, perhaps Selway has forged an experiment more daring than you might think.

Strange Weather, Isn't It? is undoubtedly the band's most streamlined effort to date.

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

Though hardly a radical departure from the baroque-pop template set by that debut, The Orchard is more mannered, fussy, and prim than its predecessor, exact and instrumentally articulate in ways that evoke no one more than Ms. Bush.

It's a solid enough effort to merit hope for better things in the future is pretty good for us, too.

Early Grass Widow gems like the haunting "Lulu's Lips" suggested a band that was really going to deliver one day. Past Time confirms those suspicions with firm resolve.

He continues to chart new territory, using his latest album to highlight sonic textures and what they seem to suggest about a metaphorical city. Working within those constraints, he's captured the nuance of living in many real cities and, in so doing, has crafted one of the stronger releases you'll hear this year.

It's a joy to hear him in such audibly great spirits, even if his most cognizant album effort in decades isn't some kind of miraculous knockout

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.

Listeners looking for a long-term relationship are advised to look elsewhere or lower their expectations for love.

On The Suburbs, their third album, Arcade Fire sound more like a band than ever before.

Transit Transit works like a best-of compilation, assembling the group's better efforts over the last six years while forgoing the mismatched feeling of such collections, a feat only a group as talented as Autolux could handle.

Where The Messengers Meet subverts all the imagery suggested by the group's very name. It implies something incendiary, something rebellious, something explosive. And though there's evidence of a knowledge of all those things in the record's landscape, the path it takes proves a safer one, a trip to be had in good company.

Imagine my surprise to discover that Teflon Don is not only not atrocious, but it may also actually be one of the better rap albums of 2010.

I've rarely heard an album that wields so many weapons--not effortlessly, but with such painstaking mastery that it's almost arduous not to be won over.

The Long Shadow of the Paper Tiger cements their place at the forefront of contemporary dance music. The songs are funky and immediate, but display a global consciousness that puts them in a class of their own.

MAYA's many false starts and dead ends also place M.I.A. on shaky ground aesthetically, and with no coherent message to fall back on, the album feels alienated and disconnected, perhaps ironic for an album attempting to evoke the hyper-connectedness and sensory overload of culture in the wake of iPhone and Google.

Too much of Disconnect From Desire is an interchangeable muddle of middling drum programming and Teflon Liz Fraser vocals.

Sir Lucious is all but hiccup-free, exceptionally consistent in its mad musical mission. Each track on the record is an explosive standalone statement within a greater unifying framework; it's an album, but these songs are pipe bombs.

Expo 86 puts up a good showing. The best songs are catchy as hell but complex enough to stay sharp even after repeated listening.

I want to say “you’ve gotta hear it to believe it,” but there’s too much good music out there to waste your time on the bad--let alone the bad that knows it’s bad.

So let's put it simply: With Recovery, Eminem has misunderstood everything that once made him great as thoroughly as anyone else ever has.

It's fitting that Mason reserved his first official solo album for his best work since The Beta Band. The results prove well worth the wait.

At its core, Total Life Forever is a good dance record: something you could leave on at a party and not stop moving to until its full 50 minutes have finished. But as much as it tries to run away from that, it isn't a whole lot else.

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

Lacking the hooks and spirit of subversion that framed most of their previous efforts, the songs of Shadows require patience and understanding to reveal oft-hidden strength of voice within.

On an album that quite simply comes up lacking in spots, they provide a healthy dose of the same brilliant elegance found on "Furr."

There's nothing supremely bad about this record, but there are no surprises either. It's just--well, there.

Before Today is the best collection of pure pop songs released this year, and the experimental odds and bits only add to its considerable charm.

Temple and co. have obviously taken a big left turn that at the very least indicates a commitment to motion over stagnation; they're pushing themselves and their listeners somewhere.

What's frustrating is that beneath the surface of LP4 there appears to be the basis for a great record. But its execution is too rote, too much the result of being so entrenched in the band's Ratatat-ness that the material is suffocated.

The record can at times feel static and repetitious, revisiting the same structural devices numerous times and using a lot of the same timbres and ambient sounds on every track.

Splazsh evokes mood on a larger scale than Hazyville, increasing possibilities by stepping up production technique and stylistic variety, but it continues to focus on music's effect on the mind by allowing technique to undermine and contradict itself.

While Blood Like Lemonade offers nothing new, its depiction of a seasoned group reveling in their own nostalgia makes for good listening.

Sleigh Bells have latched onto an exciting undercurrent in contemporary pop music and put their own distinctive stamp on it. In the process, they've made a hard-hitting album that will positively kill on the dance floor.

Maniac Meat births a few new wrinkles, but it's the same old Linus blanket: comforting, yes, but worn and approaching threadbare status.

With its blend of classic Jurado themes and a new sonic palette, Saint Bartlett serves not just as an encapsulation of Jurado's career, but as a promising indicator of where he's headed.

These fine-detail improvements are what make This Is Happening LCD’s best work to date, though mumblings about how Murphy might be repeating himself a bit remain valid.

Infinite Arms is a confusing, schizophrenic work. Several of its earlier tracks find the band clicking like never before and exploring fresh ideas while sounding more aerodynamic than ever. But so much else seems to have been haphazardly thrown together, as if the band never even entered the same room during the recording process.

Brothers is the least stuffy record The Black Keys has put out, and it's by far their strongest.

It all adds up to something that is far less than a great record, but those who approach Distant Relatives can expect at least a handful of keepers for the summer months.

Harvey Milk never quite match the achievement of their canonical works, but, nevertheless, they've succeeded in stretching the running joke without dissolving into self-parody. Or perhaps more aptly, they've delivered on the promise of self-parody with a record of genuine insecurity, unsettling pessimism and inherent, indisguisable humanity.

By embracing immediacy and toning down the navel-gazing, The National have finally created an album deserving of all their earlier acclaim.