If you're a fan of the rock and the roll and the denim and the Rolling Rock, then snatch this record up tout de suite.

For all the technology they bring to the table, Ratatat are soulful and savvy, putting everything in its right place and locking the listener in.

Living Room Songs succeeds specifically because Arnalds does not try to build it into a masterwork.

The new attention to cleanly produced and perfectly played and arranged backdrops function as both a blessing and a curse. The songs that do work, work that much better; the ones that could’ve been saved by charming details, top-shelf vocals, or Adams’ lyrics end up sounding too safe, too easy.

There will be about 20 songs, and there will be about 30 minutes’ worth of myriad emotions that you’ll have to re-spin back four times or more to hear all that was sung-and-said.

The Appleseed Cast have finally managed to get things back on track, which will hopefully influence revisionists to give these guys their proper dues.

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.

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.

Even without the haunting, almost phantasmagoric washes of guitar that dominated the previous two albums and despite the newfound prominence of robust and well-rounded melodic work that was previously largely swept aside by it, Tamaryn’s new late-80s/early-90s sensitive pop still possesses something of the signature melancholia that inspired her earlier output with Shelverton.

Ripatti has extended himself beyond what reticence he may typically exhibit: his generosity and, yes, conviviality have birthed another notch in an already remarkable oeuvre.

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.

Although it is exploratory in terms of space and texture, Skullsplitter is anything but incidental; it unfolds like an epic poem, in all its boundary-dissolving creativity and intentional patterning.

They are unprepossessing in style, dainty and sweet in quality.

For all of its harshness and grit, Daniel Bachman is an elegant, personal work, a letter written cozily from the hearth of modern country music, its ink smudges and scrawl an affectionate indicator of the hands that wrought them.

The Voyager is a collection of catchy songs intended for those who have lost confidence in catchy songs.

Oftentimes, Gallarais is resistant to shape, with collages like “Grottovox” and “Beansidhe” balancing the reveberations of airplanes gliding above with earthy drum sounds and even echoes that seem to emerge from within the depths of the tunnel. These sections are balanced out by tracks like “Underlight” and “Mouthtoum” that demonstrate O’Dwyer’s effortlessly sorrowful approach to flute and harp, providing a musical grounding that still feels as improvised and as accidental as any of the less-controlled tones

Although these five tracks embody their own specific form, shape, and pattern, they work as appendages to the previous LP as opposed to a collection that builds upon new ideas, and if the debut album weren't such a marvelous success then that might be a problem.

Seasoned fans will be hard-pressed to dismiss I’m Up as a release chock-full of throwaways, but it’s truly a testament to Young Thug’s radical talents as a rapper for keeping an audience thoroughly engaged, even when the studio experiments aren’t always entirely convincing.

Musically, the album is a definite barnburner. If you find the messages too much to stomach, the melodies and riffage will comfort you.

Wasif is able to create a lot out of very little, making every sound count, and more importantly, making sure that the songwriting, singing, and melody are top-notch.

But even with Brooke’s uncharacteristically romantic epiphanies, The Grand Archives still occasionally tends toward predictable sentimentality.

The music here speaks for itself, whatever else Ward might be trying to say through it.

The tracks as a whole may come off a bit uniform, containing little in the way of surprise, but Family Crimes is nonetheless a sweet reward for those of us who’ve spent years following Jeweled Antler and everything after.

The tunes sometimes lack a punch or vigor — not to say they aren’t catchy; I’m just not shocked when they’re misinterpreted as stale.

These climactic moments of “High Castle,” and the others like it on the record, are a kind of triumph of Forsyth’s musical grammar, too: the efficiency of communication, the transmission of feeling via the blunt physicality of sound.

While it doesn't quite hit with the immediacy of 2008's Imperial Wax Solvent, Your Future Our Clutter has already proved to be quite the grower, with complex lyrics (Smith grappling with his recent medical issues and overall mortality) and penetrating aesthetics.

The new songs display a newfound sophistication in composition, arrangement, and production, with richly layered, textured guitars, and Pundt having come ever closer to finding his own voice.

Doris hits a couple more high points when Earl flirts with horrorcore.

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.

Polly has always done well to play outside her comfort zone, and in doing so on this album, she crafts a reminder more effective than her return-to-form attempt on "Uh Huh Her."

The Serpent is, in many ways, more reminiscent of 2002’s The Mantle than it is of Marrow, but with a refined and elegant brutality that Agalloch lacked in their earlier form.

For the first time, Dead Meadow have created something for everyone, not just fans of one aspect of their sound. While that might piss off those very same fans, it is for the greater good.

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.

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

On GEM, the power of Megan Remy's hooks is almost dangerous, to the point of threatening to overwhelm entire songs. It's where she attends to the muscle of her work that GEM invites deeper listening.

A classy affair all the way, Black Pompadour is sure to impress those who let it work its magic.

What Emblems lacks in youthful charm it makes up in its confident and solid delivery.

As ever, the Brooklyn four-piece triumph when they succumb to the dreamier elements of their work, of which Expect the Best carries just enough to sustain the listener across the finish line.

It's probably the worst Elbow album yet.

Not enough of Farmer or Poor Richard. Not enough sweat and gunpowder. They are intent on a tent shakeout, but no one’s pitching it.

Rather than going full-on honeymoon or dead-end breakup, New View treads a middle ground that would border on the mundane were it not for Friedberger’s own headstrong presence, a matter-of-fact reading that gives the potentially uncomfortable tension of the lyrics a healthy dollop of confidence.

Self-referential, unified, and insanely catchy, American Idiot's positives outweigh its clichéd delivery and ironic medium for corporate America critique.

What a Time to Be Alive, the yawp and the yeah and the yowl, is the perfect thesis and pinched nail. It’s the resolution to remain unhampered by despair while excising and atomizing all the moments we have to despair in.

These United States sidesteps what could have easily been part of a superfluous boy-and-his-guitar genre by folding classic standards and varying its instrumentation and pop arrangements enough to create a warm and subtle structure, making for an altogether fresh and uniform interpretation of railroad folk introspection.

The Singles shows the band has successfully solidified its brand of disordered dance-punk, and hopefully Free Blood will continue this promising trajectory with future full-length releases.

This new one is no less heady and singular, and even if it doesn’t do much to advance Jenkins’s captivating line in brain-hop, it solidifies his reputation as one of the most intriguing Wise Guy critics of the “thug life” still branding far too many rappers today.

Decimation Blues examines with more boldness some of the possibilities hinted at in his previous recordings and brings them shuddering to life.

While MU.ZZ.LE isn't thrilling, in the suspense film sense, it manages to strike a rewarding middle ground between comfort and pain, simplicity and difficulty.

The 10 selections are less a swirling cacophonous summation of Purgas and Ginzburg’s documents thus far than a series of muted, disorganized footnotes. They step out and freeze like models on a runway at a pace both deliberate and seemingly tentative. ... Most vitally, Blossoms is Emptyset continuing to do uncompromising, restless Emptyset, with no sign of stagnation (even if this very phenomenon continues to be a crucial aspect of their sound).

Even though Days To Bed is littered with the sort of tunes that indie pop fans obsessively search for, it suffers the same fate as the group’s previous releases. By the time you reach the final 25% of the album, you’re more than ready to go to bed — and not in a good way.

Another quixotic, cerebral, and indispensable album from one of Canada’s great talents.

Houck’s talents are prevalent in everything he plays, and his enthusiasm for Willie’s material comes through with each passing listen.

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.

With 16 thoroughly-developed tracks, clocking in at a little under an hour, Infiniheart is a tedious listen. Though its moments of faltering are few, it's a lot to digest.

Largely, Repave demonstrates that the collaboration between these Wisconsinites remains quite fruitful, yielding several songs that rival the finest moments in their respective catalogues.

All told, Western Teleport is an absolute victory lap for the punchiest axis of his 2005 sound

Koushik effortlessly summons the hazy feel of running around stoned at noon on a summer day in hot pursuit of a grape soda or some other ridiculous craving to be satiated.

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.

If sometimes the grandeur threatens to overwhelm, the album’s subtle gradations just as often leave me struggling to explain why exactly they make me shiver, pause, cry, or, at their most elusive, disappear.

It’s for the Pabst crowd, not the trendy crowd concerned about looking the part. It’s this honesty that permeates everything Escovedo does.

For Herren devotees (a group in which I would place myself), this album will appear as a necessary, blissed-out, and relaxing installment in an ever-evolving musical saga. For others less familiar or only interested in the Prefuse aesthetic, La Llama may leave them feeling adrift.

Gonzalez' voice is beautiful, but it doesn't have the emphatic uniqueness to carry the album on its own, while the songwriting, though producing gems like the EBTG-esque, understated "Mind & Eyes" is just uneven enough to fade occasionally into the background.

Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks is a dense album that seems at its best when it sticks to Badalamenti’s template, filling up nostalgia for the show with acoustic intimacy and emotional affect.

A Moon Shaped Pool is a “grower,” because all music is a grower. Here, there is perhaps a wider opportunity for the music to grow due to there being an audible release of sign and substance as a ghostly after-image of the band’s event-based trauma.

In short, Lux is exactly what one might expect from Eno in ambient mode, here manifesting with a blip of chaos in an opaque sea, like a drop of ink muddling a solution of milk.

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.

Ty Segall culls some some of his scene's most appealing aspects and affixes them to unusually-written, melodically appealing songs; in essence, he's an ideal ambassador for his Bay Area milieu.

What is perhaps this record's greatest strength: Baroness has crafted an epic collection of heavy music with two distinct spheres: the hard-hitting paranoia of Yellow, and the more organic, earthiness of Green.

Nothing is excitingly radical nor is anything unpolished or poorly composed.

The New Pornographers are straying away from the niche they’ve carved out for themselves, and they’re doing it with skill and calm. And perhaps that should be celebrated, because Challengers is everything this sort of smooth transition ought to be.

Moments of its 44 minutes are as hard to stomach as anything Xiu Xiu are ever likely to record.

The Men have simply absorbed another musical language and are trying to speak through it and the other languages they’ve spoken through on previous albums, trading Spacemen 3 or The Buzzcocks for Dusty Springfield (“Freaky”). Some don’t work (“Saw Her Face,” parts of “Half Angel Half Light”), some do really well (“The Brass,” “Electric”).

They may have traded in a certain sort of urgency and sprawl, but there's a certitude to the whole affair that makes the album go down easy.

8 Diagrams is a paradox of track selection and pacing.

Cripple Crow finds Banhart doing what many didn't want him to do or thought he couldn't do: make a pretty lackluster album.

They’ve become one of the most prolific staples of the American underground. And it’s there that Nude With Boots is a sound and welcome contribution.

Parquet Courts are confessing to their own messiness and, in doing so, have delivered their most fully realized project to date: a disillusioned work whose allure reaches far beyond the instruments being strummed on it.

It contains extraordinary moments of dissonance, rhythms coalescing and congealing then melting away, quietly shimmering choral vocoders. It’s (even) less pop-influenced than earlier works of Dalt’s (Commotus, for example). In its latter half, it sometimes errs into a backgroundish quality, disappearing into its own subtlety

Gradually revealing its strengths, Arctic Monkeys have pulled off a rare musical trick of their own; they’ve finally made an album that grows upon consideration, a record that feels accomplished and complete.

Deep meaning and well-crafted pop.

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

Armed with bolstered production and the band's strongest songcraft to date, Alamanac represents not only the next step for Widowspeak, but perhaps the next point in our never-ending discussion of what "real" folk is in the 21st century.

While Toxic City Music hints at alienation, it never succumbs to it.

This isn’t an album that I foresee myself returning to very often, but under the right set of circumstances--such as the live performance that I attended last December--these are songs that contain the potential to deliver an unforgettable, emotionally cathartic experience.

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.

Panic Blooms is a long overdue sound from a project that sees the absurdity in holding onto feelings while desperately trying to feel. It’s borderline pop.

Assume Form, at its center, feels like genre gloop spread over toast: good but too-easily digested. Sometimes it cloys. Sometimes it gets you through the day.

At last, HTRK are inhabiting their own spotlight instead of disappearing into negative space, and by shearing off the mystique, they’ve become much more riveting.

Less of an experiment in product-curation, Quazarz scans more as an effort in process-orientation, one that, whether consciously or not, divulges some of Shabazz Palaces’s obscure mysteries.

Tender New Signs does not manifest the insistent post-punk rhythms of the Led Astray Washed Ashore EP (2011), but it's not a huge departure from 2010 debut The Waves, though its sound is less chiming and more grinding (in a good way), the ethereality present only in vocals rather than in general suffusion, the darkness lingering at the edges palpable where before it was merely hinted at.

Over the three preceding records, the band has built up a loyal following by creating dark, gritty, but tuneful music. This album slots in nicely to the band's catalog as yet another release with undoubted new wave pop sensibilities fluttering amongst more damaged, foreboding vibes.

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.

Let it also be said that Jemima Pearl’s voice has improved in a myriad of ways; throughout Be Awkward, she wails, rally-cries, and (especially on 'Becky') croons with a range of emotions that were bereft in previous recordings. If there’s one thing Be Awkward has in common with BYOP’s first effort, it’s the fact that it runs a bit long.

Canary is less unified, but there are great songs here.

The Silent League sounds pretty, but their gooey emotional stuff doesn't run very deep.

He might not be making sounds for fighting the many injustices of our current place and time, but Unseen in Between is nonetheless a solid compatriot against the confounding effect of going forward among them.

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.