The group used to flirt more often with jazz and electronica, but when those elements show up here, such as with the groove on “Spy” or the digital glitchy noodling on “Roots and Shooting Stars,” the flirtation falls flat; the thrill is gone. The elements that feel most familiar to the group's past sound are the elements that matter the least.

It’s mostly enjoyable on a surface level or if you’re in the right mood (or under the right influence), but it doesn’t beg repeated listens.

RJD2 is still in a class of his own, and The Colossus is charming enough. Krohn might have temporarily given up on expanding his stylistic horizons, but he sounds comfortable again, certainly a small step taken toward a more fortunate future.

Maybe that's the key to the whole album, how it can seem to be a blog-fisher one moment and slap you upside the head another: it dissolves before you actually know what hit you. But for a lot of us, that's all the more reason to dive right back in.

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

Musically, End Times approaches Everett’s best work yet, but due to its narrow focus and exhausting reliance on theme, it falls just short of it.

One doesn’t listen to these songs waiting for these moments; one listens to the album knowing full well that it will consistently wrestle with one’s grip. That’s the contract listeners face, and I’m not surprised some people don’t buy into it, but for those sticking to earth, % is teeming with more rewards and audacious invention than virtually any other debut 2010’s seen so far.

With Graphic As A Star, she’s delivered an intimate reading of a revered American poet and made it entirely her own, creating her most beguiling work yet in the process.

Is Frauhaus! a groundbreaking musical statement? Absolutely not. Is it in the spirit of great, similarly-minded albums from contemporaries past and present? Resoundingly, yes.

Contra isn't really that bad, yet it's also not nearly sturdy enough to maintain the puppy-love, Obama-esque crush many of us have had on them.

The sound of Stigmata is grayed and stale--reaching, perhaps, for 18th-century Baroque, but instead winding up stuck in a rusty soundcard from 1998.

Fall Be Kind is yet another reason why Animal Collective TOTALLY TRANSCEND any notion of hipster hype-ism, another feather in a crowded cap. God bless these guys.

Rihanna has released a flawed album that may shrink under the weight of her biography, but it also succeeds when approached more directly, superficially.

Indeed, Annie’s given us a few winning singles but also a lot of glitz that can probably be ignored after one listen or two.

Real Estate might not be the best classicist-leaning pop record of the year (that dubious honor goes to the more stylistically varied "Album," by Girls), but it certainly is the most confident, the most assured, and the most unassuming.

For all of their wonderful contributions to modern pop music, McCulloch and Sergeant aspired for too much this time around.

For a solo artist obsessed album-in and album-out with delivering a product alien to the mothership, this move represents a regression, a willingness to tread ground he's covered, almost note-for-note.

Raditude is not a great album or even an interesting one.

Molina and Johnson manages to sound as good as the backstory: two friends crossing paths in winter, making an album that reflects the contemplative spirit of the season.

At the end of the day, Bleach is still the weakest of the band’s full-length albums, but there’s enough good stuff to merit a spin.

Eisold's delivery, as cliche as it might seem, is often hypnotically compelling, and the lyrics are slightly redeemed by the synthesizers.

Some of these beats are really interesting and unique, almost flawlessly incorporating subtle elements of jazz, folk, psychedelia, and the boogie-woogie rhythm of J Dilla, whose two appearances on the album are characteristically powerful. Too often, though, DOOM and his guests offer inconsistent, barely-there performances.

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.

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.

Like Bosch’s triptych, the album is vivid and dense, clear as a bell but hellacious, and undeniably worth your inscrutable attention.

What Will We Be is a better, more realized album, but it’s still a dud, filled with mediocre, half-composed songs and tediously unfocused songwriting.

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?

Rather than attempt to recruit other players and resume business as usual, Broadcast subsumes House’s spectral compositions within a framework that suits every one of the duo’s strengths. If there’s anything scary about this at all, it’s the ease with which they’ve made the corpse of pop songcraft climb from its grave and walk anew.

For about an hour, if you can allow Fuck Buttons to control your responses, to embrace the clusterfuck of noise and emotion, then Tarot Sport might be one of the strongest albums of this year.

Logos is an admirably worn, carefully composed record detailing a kaleidoscope of sound.

To be sure, The BQE score isn’t an utter failure on its own, but it’s clearly missing the dramatic effect found in the rest of Stevens’ eclectic seven-album catalogue.

The Real Feel is a solid step in the right direction, both sonically and lyrically.

The thick and poorly affected patois, the overproduction, and the sheer terribleness of the songs on Trapped Animal seem, at best, a huge dent in The Slits’ otherwise immaculate armor.

CrownsDown certainly achieves its obvious intent, its impeccable production, and untouchable vocal dexterity, firmly reestablishing the group as a definite talent.

This robot-induced hypnosis leads less to genuine enlightenment than it does to pointless New Age dehydration.

While Other Truths seems like Do Make Say Think’s attempt to re-articulate these active, forward-looking principles, they instead end up stagnating, reaching an unfortunate dead-end.

Although it does falter at times with a seeming complacency ("Meridian," "Colony"), it is mostly characterized by a quiet ambition. It’s gutsy and its gutsiness pays off.

Unfortunately, not all of the experimentation works.

What The Flaming Lips have accomplished with Embryonic is impossible to ignore: an ambitious double album in an age where the single is making a comeback, a collection of music that makes a 25-year-old band sound vital and new.

Some will rank it among other gimcrack releases, like Dylan & the Dead. Still others will categorize it as an oddity, like Self Portrait. It’s all and none of these.

While Nguyen continues to write upbeat songs about passion gone awry and her band continues to do its part in complementing them, Know Better Learn Faster just doesn’t quite reach the bar she set for herself last time out.

These are the giants' shoulders that Grooms have chosen to stand upon, and with Rejoicer they have done so excellently.

Indeed, when everything clicks, Darnielle can't be denied, and even when there's cause for concern, there's always something worth taking note of.

Taken as a whole, There Is No Enemy is a solid album on par with the band’s more recent output.

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.

Exploding Head is a solid album that spits in the face of any sophomore slump expectations.

While The Sound The Speed The Light might not push the band beyond the ground they’ve already covered, it goes a long way towards proving that “more of the same” isn’t so bad when it comes from the right outfit.

Bonfires is certainly a step up on its efficient, bloodless predecessor "God Save The Clientele" and stands up no matter what’s next for the band.

With Childish Prodigy, his debut for indie-juggernaut Matador, Kurt Vile stretches and pulls the increasingly annoying “lo-fi” tag into interesting new shapes, distancing himself from his Woodsist-kin.

Ask The Night is a dose of a kind of southern comfort that my doctor might actually approve of.

Wildlife is nothing more than an album that sounds fine in the background--even at a volume you couldn’t help but pay attention to--yet ultimately fails to make any kind of memorable impression.

The harsh truth makes itself clear: overdubs and studio pre-meditation trivialize Johnston’s music.

God is Good shows a clear effort to steer their boat past the Nile, past Yemen, and into new territory.

This project was D.O.A. from the moment Ghost announced it a year back, and hip-hop fans should consider themselves lucky that there’s at least a few salvageable moments in Wizard of Poetry.

Anti-Pop Consortium are still vital enough to keep the momentum they lost, in dreadfully untimely fashion, when they inexplicably broke up in 02.

Folk devotees may have a little more patience for the proceedings here, but I find it doubtful that Seconds will come as much of a revelation to anyone.

This is their best album in years, but there’s no real progression here. Ono’s mindfuck of a performance is proof: when a band needs to include such bizarreness as their record’s experimental centerpiece, perhaps they are working a little too hard to prove their expressive worth.

There’s no sense of cohesion or flow between any of these songs, partially due to a clear lack of thought devoted to these conceits, but mostly because every M. Ward- and Conor Oberst-penned song sounds the same lately.

Even if Album doesn’t turn out to be all it’s been made out to be by the reams of hype already bestowed upon it, it’s certainly working at the moment.

Truelove’s Gutter abandons the lush strings and complex production of previous work for a more straightforward style, and the results bring to mind the honest, plainspoken albums that Cash and Jones recorded in the mid-70s.

Sacrificing none of their self-effacement in their pursuit of a more emotionally direct style, WHY? have stumbled upon something uniquely personal yet utterly commercial.

A real carnival of a mess, completely inconsistent, sometimes really horrifying, and, more often than not, entertaining.

Plaintive, spare, and narrative in approach, these songs--which seem to bookend the album--are among Raposa’s most affecting.

Times New Viking neither regress nor abandon their origins, offering instead a compromise where the harsh timbres commingle with increasingly more adept proclivities for memorable pop songs.

The acoustic slide guitar that opened "Fourteen Autumns" could have broken up some of this monotony. But it’s powerful monotony. It begs you to listen to it.

Family is a work of purpose, from a band whose previously wandering attention-spans rendered any chance of artistic success accidental.

Every track on Sort of Revolution would feel at home in a warm, European coffeehouse.

The key to The Dodos isn’t their lyrics, but their melodies. And on Time to Die, they’re strong and sufficient.

The songs here represent more than just a band; they represent the myth, the sound of “beautiful losers,” as Buck describes them, making good on the promise their sound always presented.

The strongest tracks here make a case for Braxton’s compositional skills; the rest feel like recycled tales from his nights out with Stanier and Williams, an unfortunate byproduct of placing them within this context.

While no one could accuse Sylvian of playing it safe, the exercises that make up Manafon are neither experimental nor aesthetically pleasing enough for me to recommend this album.

Easily the blissful equal of jj or Memory Tapes, A Sunny Day In Glasgow are diffuse enough to avoid easy classification, and Ashes Grammar is easier to enjoy than it is to write about.

The group is at their strongest going off on long, meditative tangents of minimalist techno, but too often GusGus obscures their instrumental prowess with lyrical absurdity.

If we measure Q-Tip's success at "abstractionism" in terms of how his voice, message, and golden ear complement each other to bring out hip-hop's full musical potential, then Kamaal is a clear success on the artist's own terms.

Listening to Slaraffenland find their way, as they approach indie-rock from a rarified angle, is enjoyable enough in itself to cancel out any inhibitions.

When Joyner’s at his best, he can break hearts in the most hopeful way possible; in these moments, he is as reinvigorating as a much-needed cry. But most of the songs on this album lack this quality, instead coming off as contrived and, as a result, harder to relate to.

Here’s Yo La Tengo as embracing, alienating, and prolific as ever, with another strong new album, Popular Music.

The decaying aural ellipsis felt hanging in the aether marks the dusky road of the album’s fist half. This is dark stuff, darker than our main man Hart is known for.

On The Blueprint 3, Jay-Z, for arguably the first time in his career, sounds tired and old; too tired and too old to create a new blueprint, but not to create a third copy; too tired and too old to create new styles and ideas, but not to regurgitate them; too tired and too old to tell a new story, but not to tell an old story of a time when swagga belonged to the gods, one in particular.

With 13 songs to sit through, it all sounds like the same riffs, verses, choruses, and rhythms in slightly different contexts. It also sounds like a big disappointment from a band that roared out of the gate with several nice 7-inch cuts and a strong debut album.

Get Color is exactly what a sophomore release should be: a deepening of and expansion upon the promise laid out by the band’s first record.

Sure, Mister Pop might be of interest to fanboys and a few others, but it makes a less convincing case for why new listeners should care about these guys.

In Prism’s genius is to service the newbies and true believers in equal measure.

All hotly (strangely this descriptor seems almost an understatement) anticipated albums should deliver so profoundly.

While Eden’s Eastern flavor is certainly enjoyable, it walks a thin line between cultural exploration and exploitation.

The Visitor seems especially appropriate in this age of additive excess. It’s less a demonstration of O’Rourke’s ego than of his conceptual vision, which has always been relayed with an innate sense of purpose--a rarity these days.

Year in the Kingdom suggests whatever band he’s drumming for is ultimately inconsequential; this backwoods wanderer seems fully capable of detailing his wreckage on his own.

Bazan has built his career on the merit of his honesty, and Curse Your Branches finds him exerting that idea more forcefully than ever before, creating a record that beautifully, paradoxically, and soulfully explores the beauty and strife of admitting "I don't know."

Their insides have been swapped: the dirty, heavy, colossal, dark-nastiness has been replaced with arena-rock aspirations and fresh-white, paper-thin production.

While Ready is far from a perfect album, it seems Trey is learning how to inspirit his original works with the charm and inventiveness found in his freestyles and covers.

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.

There are a number of songs with enough stuff to listen to many times, but there isn’t anything grand enough to linger in the mind like an inamorata.

The Cave Singers, though hobbled by their overly-familiar nature, make sweet, sentimental music. Welcome Joy, despite its rockier bent, is no exception.

Hospice is a work of rare beauty and a watershed moment in The Antlers’ career.

Simply put and strongly stated, King of Jeans goes beyond charting Pissed Jeans’ position as the Deans of Denim--it places them front and center as one of the best and most ferocious guitar bands out there.

This time around, Chasny is clearly interested in writing structured songs with clear lines drawn throughout, with seemingly no concern for the reactions that might ensue from such high production and exacting precision.

As invigorating as the first half of Wind’s Poem is, its second half is where a filmic sensibility arises and the music becomes at one with the listener, the sounds yielding way to both chaotic and calming images as waves crash and subside.