Transference offers up several solid additions to the Spoon canon and setlist, but narrowly misses living up to its pedigree.

There is a currentless drift to these nine doggypaddlers, what with the sloppy rhythms, plain-as-dirt vocals, and obligatory wah solos - but it's all so satisfying in its way.

This is a good album, sure, but a better collection of songs.

Perhaps direction is lacking on moments in ESTOILE NAIANT, but for the most part, patten has harnessed the objects of previous releases and refined them.

Black Forest (tra la la) is a nice little record made by an ambitious group of musicians from whom I expect excellent things. Three or four songs here are downright wonderful, and the rest, at the very least, aren’t entirely unpleasant.

Their most concise yet dense and appealing album since their first non-album, Description Of The Harbor.

Admittedly, it may not furnish any musical diagrams of how to move from A to B, but in its own illogical way, it succeeds in submerging us deeper into A.

By the end of the album’s blissful, sparse, empty-Saharan-landscape closer 'The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance,' perfection doesn’t seem to matter much anymore--especially when your mind’s too preoccupied on starting Vampire Weekend again from the beginning.

Nothing can be a comfortable resting point, not only for Zomby, but also, symbolically, for the whole dubstep scene, a brief and peaceful pit stop for mental refueling and contemplation of the followed path in the vertiginous, intricate, never-ending electronic music circuit.

EP 4 is super cohesive, conscious of what unions and dialogues are and what it means to re-union yourself with something.

Trials and Errors could be looked at as vindication for Molina given his choice to move on from his Songs: Ohia days; but as an essential live album, [it] leaves much to be desired.

What makes a Wolf Eyes album worthwhile is less the raging skree than their keen application of dark, delectably uncouth fragment. Your head can still wade in this bracken, even if it may not be as tumultuously roiling as it once was.

Magnetite is not wholly arrhythmic, but its rhythms are sparse. They enter, and as soon as they develop to recognition (slow gong sounds, for instance, are common), Vainio destroys them with either unrecognizable noise or silence.

It’s a solid rock album whose dedication to artisanal noise in some ways negates its ancestry of majestic rock & roll that begs to be heard publicly.

In a way, on Platform too, there’s just too much control on the artist’s side and not enough room for engagement on the listener end. Still, Herndon is just setting to work as a musician, and she’s already pushing her sound well beyond the experiments of the 20th-century avant-garde.

The album’s second half becomes noticeably more lo-fi as it draws to a close, with the band laying down instrumental nebulas into which Vile allows his voice to languidly recline. It’s a hazy ending to a bear of an album, but one that rewards those who stuck with it through the 80 or so minutes.

Admittedly, Beautiful Rewind isn’t Kieran Hebden’s magnum opus, but it’s an album that succeeds at both moving the listener emotionally and, like much of the producer’s impressive body of work, inspiring him or her to literally and physically move.

For all its flaws, Old Ideas remains Cohen's strongest work for some time.

It's hard to see Medicine County winning her any new fans, but for existing ones it's a welcome release that shows her moving further into Americana (more in the old school sense, but, sure, in the No Depression sense, too.)

Glass Boys is the best album Fucked Up have released so far, by virtue of it being the “laziest” collection of their career.

While The Floodlight Collective offers a great set of songs, I’d still like to see Pundt deliver a more idiosyncratic album through which we can truly hear him expose himself.

Despite possessing a somewhat dour countenance, the main effect of this record is a sort of replenishment.

If you like the Super Furry Animals you will definitely enjoy this album.

Ay Ay Ay does veer closely to the edge of overextending itself by its completion and, by result, making a strong case for listener fatigue--but who said dancing was easy?

Perhaps they still haven’t quite gotten there with La Di Da Di, but they’ve come somewhere close.

By any other band's standards, Winchester Cathedral would qualify as a strong to very strong effort. However, the feel of sameness prevents the record from surpassing the sum of its parts.

The reinventions that fare best are the ones that come from the minds and hands of producers who dare to alter the attitude of the original compositions.

Brill Bruisers is an enthusiastic correction in course, as well as a reminder that age doesn’t always equal solemnity or, for that matter, slouching toward self-importance of any kind.

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.

The Helio Sequence have finally produced not just a collection of songs, but an album.

Blackjazz is an undoubtedly bold statement from an incredibly gifted compositional genius. Munkebey has been working toward this album for a while, and it is a real achievement in synthesis of the band's overriding influences.

As a follow-up to the massive, hypnotizing Overseas, Sorcerer is a concise distillation of Tonstartssbandht’s refreshing vision, a crystal ball portraying their intimate friendship, their cosmic noodling echoing deep into the nethersphere.

It’s actually quite an audacious album; it’s just that it’s so well articulated as to come across as serviceable. It is vain, self-serious, and predictable, but endearingly so.

For a record preoccupied with usefulness, it’s unsurprising that that’s the case. There’s no room for artifice; he’s got to tell it like it is, because the telling is the moving, and the moving is the riding, and the riding is the living.

With a sotto voce that at times leans too hard on the adenoids, Will knows better than to preen his voice for Top 40 radio. His home is with the glitch crowd. But pop star or no, Wiesenfeld, as Baths, taps into those universal feelings that makes pop music so accessible and so, well, popular.

Next Thing moves.

Are The Roaring Night brings the Montreal group’s potential down to earth, expanding what were sweeping, almost classical compositions into gut-wrenching, prog-y panoramas. A lot of the same cerebral, chamber-music-meets-guitar-wash elements are still there; they’re just a bit beefier this time.

As far as collaborations go, Thao & Mirah does a good job of showcasing its contributors' strong points while still allowing them to mesh together as an organic unit.

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."

It’s a dedicated focus on the materials that compel bodies and minds into motion that make RP Boo a continuously shining light in the ever-growing discourse he helped invent.

At its best, Burst Apart is a delicate, varied work that hints that we've only begun to see what this group is capable of.

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

The sheer ambition of it is staggering at times and you can't help feeling that Electrelane are on the right trajectory.

Much like his 2007 debut, "Ash Wednesday," Perkins speaks through characters and, more importantly, though his musical arrangements to present a nuanced approach to musing on mortality and loss and loneliness.

Although the limitations of Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009 will make parts of the collection appear inessential for casual listeners, this music will certainly be welcomed by Tindersticks fans and soundtrack buffs.

On The Echoing Green, Cantu-Ledesma has brought a newfound clarity to his work, carving distinct shapes of mellifluous guitar lines to impose against his towering sonic architecture.

There’s little doubt that, despite the odd slip into the saccharine and the set’s lack of anything notably outré or innovative, they do this with conviction and integrity, to the extent where Limits of Desire will receive plenty of service from the lovestruck and jaded alike over the span of this hopefully torrid summer.

Mysterious Phonk feels extremely private in ways that are powerful but not entirely sorted out yet. Purrp finds numerous occasions to talk about smiling in the face of a cold world, but even a facetious smirk never really cracks, and the world is cold in only the most brightly-lit, fantastical, and dystopic ways.

While the second half of the album is a miscue -- eschewing the sunny innocence that makes his music so likeable -- I know what'll be in my CD player all spring.

Faust continues to embrace the former and remain unperturbed by the latter, displaying the same youthful, brave spirit on C'est Com..Com..Complique 38 years after their self-titled debut.

There’s nothing wrong with Atomic. If you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably think it’s as good as Mogwai’s other work; if you’re aware of their career trajectory, it will mean something specific in that respect, too. The problems come down to communicating the weightlessness of the invisible imaginary figures that dance across your mind’s eye when you’re listening to it.

Introducing Brilliant Colors doesn’t go so far as to challenge this tradition, but it throws in enough wrenches to make it an exciting addition to the catalog.

It’s a hazy journey, encompassing loss, disconnection, and disappointment, buoyed up by hard-hitting production and Mykki’s unrelenting desire for pleasure and connection.

Rapor doesn’t push any boundaries or break the speed of light, but it constructs its fragile, fervid, and elegant confections with laserlike precision.

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.

Like an imagined conversation set before the waves, Still Trippin’ folds and unfolds. It is still unsettled, in me and out.

It squirms and shimmers for an all-too-brief 33 minutes, sounding like somebody melted a cassette with a mix of early-90s R&B jams on one side and Person Pitchon the other.

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

The absence of transportation and deliverance is ultimately what enables Recurring Dream to realize its pessimistic vision of the confused mechanisms we use to delude ourselves into thinking all is well, and despite its conceptually-necessitated limitations, the album is not short of moments of resonance and emotional impact.

Thankfully, Connected, despite the richness of its sounds, is spacious enough to leave room for the imagination (with the slight exception of "Trios," which teems with movement). That's not to say it's empty.

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 an accomplished one, and Fernow sometimes impressively commands the stylistic cues of the electronic musics he’s discovering. But the cold, calculating position of producer feels alien to Prurient as a project, where once Fernow torched his soul.

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.

Mos Def’s third album is worth a careful listen: it’s not a happy record, and there are few, if any, genius rhymes. But it speaks volumes about the frustration and resignation of the underprivileged.

Carried to Dust is a fine entry Calexico’s discography that both evokes a much-loved sound from the past and yet looks at the sun fading into the west, turns its horse towards the dying light, and carries on into the future.

It shouldn’t offend, but it might be slow to engage.

While Moore’s aesthetic interests are rangy and Chelsea Light Moving most certainly exist to make them a compelling reality, the disc’s final act seems to be the most keyed-in to his recognizably arty, bookish-punk iconoclasm.

It’s no "Donuts," but it’s definitely another solid entry in the Dilla canon and a reminder of how lucky fans are to have another beat tape this valuable in the absence of the man himself.

As ever, the project is a winner off the bat for producing material where no one track resembles the other. Olympic Mess raises the bar, however, in a fashion set off by the invitingly tactile, yet nevertheless challenging work of the past three years.

Secret House Against The World is a fun-filled affair that only reinforces Buck 65's stature as one of "hip-hop's" more versatile "emcees."

He’s been wood-shedding like a jazz player for years, riffing on ideas and loops and textures the way a pianist learns their scales, and he can now confidently test those skills out on just about any combination of sounds out there, if only to see what happens. In some ways, this succeeds, and in others, it fails entirely.

The experience is nothing less than fully immersive by the time we’ve made it through “Shelter Is Illusory,” the closest the album gets to true pop (aside from Armstrong’s co-written “Adamah”), replete with a gorgeous quasi-operatic upward-searching chorus from Armstrong and a keening processed-strings backing.

While the Actress tracks were, by most accounts, club tracks exposed to organic erosion and presented in sequence as an endurance test, KOCH is more bizarre and less aggressive.

It’s rare for musicians to age so gracefully (and regardless, no one in Joan of Arc is really old either), and yet here one finds the band mellowing a bit from the over-exuberance of their early output while still retaining the ability to engage and be inventive.

It's an enjoyable record (if somewhat slight, for a full-length), but its best moments are a lot like those faded mom-and-dad photos Huntai likes to use: iconic, intriguing, but not quite his own.

On Weird Sister, Joanna Gruesome exotic blooms--forget the Ys and wherefores, and cue some!

It’s just a solid album that, like the title implies, holds onto its historical surroundings as much as it moves beyond them.

As advertised, Strange Mercy lets us off more easily than it should, but without the promised strangeness.

More often than not, Chung’s tireless attention to his work is well-edited, and even the most chaotic and boisterous tracks are riveting.

There is a crisp richness to the sound, best appreciated on a decent system, which is redolent of the orchestral pop of the 60s, bringing out also the best of Gold Leaves' folk influences (as The Velvet Underground taught us so well, an aptly placed tambourine shake is a wondrous thing).

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.

For a few glorious moments, our beloved Mancs have that swagger back.

Any song on this album could function as a funny little short story well enough, but Barnett’s band, her guitar playing, her impeccable sense for melody and consistency give her stories life beyond their quirks, beyond her strength as a chronicler of the exhausting contemporary situation, expanding them into emotional worlds unto themselves.

What’s impressive about this broadening and deepening of their thematic coverage is that it’s been achieved with only a few subtle adjustments to their sound, making it seem like the product of a very organic and irresistible evolution from the days when they were playing with Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark.

Longtime fans will be enchanted by such quips and the naked introspection offered by Goodnight Unknown, and while not at all challenging, casual listeners will enjoy it simply for its strong collection of pop songs.

Expertly and diversely arranged, the songs of Heart of My Own build and hover, often in surprising ways.

Despite its sub-30 minute run-time, Remain Calm packs a punch.

The record’s second half is sedate by comparison, skewing away from the drone element and more toward conventional pastoral film score calling to mind Terrence Malick.

I'm all for musicians not taking themselves too seriously, but with such audacious, irreverent, and yet captivating material populating the bulk of the album, it is a supreme letdown to finish on such strangely muddled notes. Still, Dead Zone Boys is worth some serious attention.

It is somewhat disappointing that they would play it so safe at this stage in their creative life.

The referents on CUT 4 ME are as well-studied as they are obvious.

While enduring a few accidents, the group’s fresh folk approach shows promise.

It’s gimmicky on some level, and maybe formally confined, but the absurdity of these songs can’t mask their joy and evident catharsis.

There is very little experimentation on the album, at least in relation to previous albums, but there is also a wider spectrum of songs.

It may not be exciting, per se, but it speaks to the ultimate appeal of Work (work, work); even in its drugged-up, mournful state, it holds your gaze.

They certainly have a grasp on what they're creating, but it hurts a little bit to think that the mysterious band-that-could from ten years back cares less for innovation than simply having a fleeting good time.

True, Money Mark has a typical singer-songwriter vocal presence, but lighthearted lyrics sprinkled with clever one-liners here and there do a sufficient job.

It’s poppy and fun, but it doesn’t let you get too comfortable.