For such a musically potent album, it sometimes lacks something interesting to say.... But make no mistake; this is the most daring, catchy, and dramatic dance music you're going to hear this summer.

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

CSS's music is almost immediately infectious and surprisingly poppy.

The Citizens have blended a poignant and fascinating, personal self-image of professional musicianship that elevates the band to unanticipated captivation.

From a group as self-satisfied as Oneida, there is a pervasive feeling that, having completed such a grand statement, they will feel consummated and move on in accordance with whatever insatiable rock 'n' roll muse they have been following all these years.

It’s at once simple, colorful, and cozy, but, if examined closely enough, can be appreciated on another level entirely--one that’s both casually sophisticated and quietly intelligent.

The laid-back feel of White Van Music ultimately hinders it from being a truly creative and distinct work.

The energy sustained here comes only from scientific curiosity at the permutations offered by a piece of hardware, and it doesn’t really connect beyond that.

You Can Have What You Want is an insular recording, but it invites us even as it turns a shoulder toward us. And that insecurity is what makes it compelling.

Orcas at first seems nondescript (and as such works well as background music, if your foreground is, let's say, a wintry gazebo), but it's an album one 'finds' after repeated close listens.

Talk Normal invoke the bare and abstract, not the fully rendered or figured, and it feels like they are making not only the kind of music we never thought we'd be missing out on, but also the kind that would be hard to live without.

An invigorating breath of fresh music.

A middle-of-the-road release that, because of the context of the band's end, is the most heartbreaking release of the year so far.

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.

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.

Surrounded by Silence is at once more scatterbrained and fast moving than any other Prefuse album (even more so than the blink-and-you-miss-the-hook Extinguished), but the difference here is the cohesion of the radically different cuts.

The album is still frequently guilty of some of the shortcomings that have plagued the band since "Picaresque."

CLPPNG is an excellent, beautifully-executed record.

Who knows if I’ll still be listening to Holy when the leaves turn, but it’ll certainly get some heavy rotation this summer.

In its more spacious moments, Look A Little Closer recalls the best Talk Talk in the way that their tight grooves serve to (almost) order and contain the ambient chaos and arrhythmic percussion in the gaps.

Dancer Equired is a fine and mature next entry in the growing catalog of three of Columbus' finest.

While Nookie Wood suggests lusty concupiscence, naughtiness, and vim, these conjurations are foundered by big production and mastering straight out of 90s alt-pop radio

Atmospheric, provocative, and uplifting.

Number 1 Angel is a maybe mixtape, sorta free, but released by a voice that’s constantly solving life’s real problems with the imagined solutions of pop music.

They try their best to make a staggering number of genres their own, but ultimately prove themselves to be jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none.

There are certainly moments of well-crafted, spaced-out music, but West is not as overwhelming as it could be. And to be honest, even after several listens, all the songs in West still sound pretty much the same.

As a debut full-length, City Center shows much promise and can rightly provide the soundtrack to a strange summer.

Rather than attempting to outdo themselves, Efterklang scale back, ending sweetly, without overplaying their hand or overstaying their welcome.

Pemberton’s lyrics can be long-winded, but on the whole, they display a postmodern reflexivity that is profoundly mind-boggling.

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

They accomplish what most rock bands only dream of: the subtle transcendence of genre, form, and the music itself.

It's just another above average release from another indie band.

Couples proves that Kate is no Jarvis, and, more importantly, The Long Blondes are no Pulp.

While the elders will rejoice this sober, satisfied, and craftily subdued effort, the younglings of the bunch, with their abbreviated attention spans, iPod shuffles, and demand for instant gratification, will declare the album a boring and lethargic affair.

Devotion has that same opiated warmth that left me lying in a bed of rose petals for long stretches last year, and though I would have preferred a bigger growth spurt from the Baltimore duo, they shot up at least enough to warrant a new pencil mark a half-inch/inch above where I placed them in ‘06.

Off to Business--released eponymously by Guided By Voices, Inc.--is the ultimate product of this trend: an album full of ebullient mid-tempo rockers, ebullient pretty guitar parts, and ebullient power drum fills.

It takes its time in becoming a thing of familiarity and character, far from rushing to win you over.

8 Diagrams is a paradox of track selection and pacing.

[A] wondrous debut record.

Alex G’s first major wax-plated step outside the bedroom is predictably secure. But it’s also exploratory of his changing landscape, one that’s situated like unauthorized speech-class notecards, articulating each situation and character but still allowing for cracks and incongruity.

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.)

[The songs] may be executed with prowess, but their bandied crassness isn't just a tried-and-true style, it's a tiresome cliché.

It certainly avoids the epic-lite quality we usually associate with bands in the post-rock mold. There’s no soundtrack material here: nothing to be exploited for the purposes of perfume advertisement erotica or inspiring nature documentaries.

This is probably the best album we've seen in the new millennium from a mid-'90s techno producer.

It’s one of those beguiling albums saved for times alone, times when nothing else would seem quite right.

Magik Markers seemingly forget their own warnings and regain their former wily intransigence, ending the album with a threesome of songs that return them to sonically murky territory, as if suddenly realizing that in fact they’d been trying to uncover something in this murk rather than striving to bury themselves in it.

The result is an album that feels more like a compilation than a true collaboration.

There are very few metaphors for the limitlessness of human creativity and ingenuity as powerful as that provided by space, and now by Public Service Broadcasting.

Essentially, Haines' piano playing and singing are lovely, but Knives' timidity, coupled with mundane and occasionally outright bad lyrics, keep this record in check.

Every song is serrated with pixel edges, and Alice Glass’ sometimes morose, sometimes lilting like a Valley girl vocals vibrate with such catchy and violent gloom that it’d send any human/marmoset/sentient being into an epileptic dance session.

If Watersports paced itself, if it weren’t afraid to be shorter, if it understood the power of precision, it could have been more awe-inspiring.

Do Whatever You Want All The Time is tepid and uneventful, and proof that the band's previous work didn't succeed solely on its raucousness.

While HEALTH and Get Color were cohesive collections of songs that created a snapshot in time of where the artists were when creating them, listening to Death Magic feels like we’re seeing not just the band they are currently, but all the bands they could be.

Mankind across as the next step in defining who High Places are, instead of the sort of developmental stopgap that makes us wonder why we ever believed internet hype in the first place.

In lieu of messing around in the dark fringes of slightly bizarre café music, Free The Bees is a straight up rock album more in line with Iron Butterfly and the Small Faces than Morcheeba or Quantic.

With twice as much content as usual and Numbers working out their heaviest dose of lo-fi drone rock, this is their best release to date.

The rich, roomy tonal fidelity on display is a big part of what makes Angel click.

On Tomorrow’s Hits, we place our hands against the walls, we feel the familiar texture of recording studio foam, we lift ourselves up gently only to drop back down to the ground, actions of a bored child.

In destroying himself, Chasny has unearthed deeper, simpler fundamentals in his craft and, in doing so, breathed new life into his musical voice. With Hexadic II, Six Organs of Admittance is born again.

Nothing have definitely learned a thing or two in between albums about using crushing dynamics to great effect. Unfortunately, there are times when the combination of a particular note and lyric rob the band of its power.

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.

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

Although LaMontagne fans will surely lap up this new offering, the album doesn’t have enough quality content to really sustain the interest of new listeners.

Instrumental Tourist is an attempt to cleanse the listener of "urban discontinuity" and experience the world as a passenger (something that's lost on a generation so used to being in control).

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.

Narrow Stairs is the sound of a band falling in love with the concept of sound; as such, Gibbard’s stately lyricism largely takes a backseat--although his voice has never sounded more different and varied.

A smart, garrulous collection of folk songs.

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.

Amidst the palpitated urgings of bass and the rapid skimmings of guitar, Fox’s drumkit emerges as the key figure here, the volatility of his technique underscoring the fact that, as soon as you efface the certainties and the contrived precision of the external world, the once incontrovertible dimensions of the self go with it.

Despite some shortcomings, 4 is an unqualified success in the Hawksian sense: There are at least three great songs and no bad ones.

AlunaGeorge have built a happy marriage out of the slick and the smart, and with Body Music, they just might manage the trick of making everyone else--from old fans to new ones; from critics to their record labels--happy too.

The lack of a reliance on the electronic merging with folk is the most interesting aspect to There Were Wolves; whereas it is essential to the appeal of Genders’ Tunng gang, The Accidental plays it straight, using those ever-present vocal sounds on top of primarily unadorned acoustic numbers.

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.

If you're willing to forgive a little lack of innovation and the subtle feeling that Spelled In Bones might be a little more mellow than it ought to be, there's one hell of a nice listen in this record.

Love is Dead is formally earnest and it succumbs as a product of its (unearnest) production, an art of sincerity lost underneath. Love is Dead, damnably, is sincerity in place of irony, which is to say sincerity outside irony. It has no world to tease of tense.

His rhythm work is crisp and earthen, not so much pushing forward as flowering outward, the picture of a mind focused on growing and filling out.

With Black Sands, he's proven himself to be a skilled multi-instrumentalist who knows how to construct beautiful, arresting music with enough layers of complexity to hold interest for multiple listens. Nevertheless, if he wishes to avoid being the listening choice for those who don't actually want to listen, he's not quite succeeded yet.

That mainstreaming of queerness and breaching of boundaries is the context, spirit, and thesis of Pictureplane's second album, Thee Physical.

There are solid structures to these pieces, the result of audio engineers who know how to combine materials. But there’s an elegance, too, in the manner in which lines pick up from each other, rhythms are doubled or halved, textures complement each other.

The Word As Power might only have one trick, but it’s one that resonates deeply.

Imps of Perversion is every bit as stark and nasty as the band’s previous outings. Only this time, the boogeymen and the futuristic hellscapes seem a little less remote, not quite as far-removed from reality as before.

New Material works as an excellent signpost of where the group has been and where it’s headed.

Even the sunniest of good-time albums needs a source of tension, but Gonzalez has provided nothing more than a stream of pleasantry. The resulting album is immediately gratifying, but there’s nothing to keep the listener coming back.

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.

Born In the Echoes maintains a pop-sensitive groove for all but two of its songs.... But the real winners on this record as usual are the curios.

By the time he hits the solo, which sounds like a cracked organ from a crazy kiddie fair, you might find yourself thinking that some riddles are just not interesting enough to solve.

It sounds like a cross between Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson without the soul, the Banana Splits, the Grease soundtrack and shitty disco records.

The band's aching for that contradictory limit can be felt quivering in every inch of Aesthetica. It is to their credit that one feels at peace through the record's most violent and cataclysmic moments.

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

Trans-Continental Hustle is an honest effort, but one that pales a little when compared to the Technicolor explosions of Gogol Bordello's back catalog.

Those pop songs, [not the ones on Herein Wild,] confess everything and never apologize. Herein Wild just disappears.

Berlinette seemed more pointed, pulled with precision and grace into the pop idiom. When you think you've got this one nailed down to a black and white electro-aesthetic, the splayed strands of its hair start pollocking acidic paint all over the place.

In the absence, though, of the gritty murk of TRST and the intimations of a world of malformed sonic objects outside the techno-primitive beat, there’s a quality of the streamlined on Joyland that calls out for irritation.

Essentially, Horses in the Sky adopts a host of varying song mechanics and a wider array of lyrical themes, a broadened pallet that either suggest a band in transition, or a newfound confidence in songwriting.

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.

It's obviously the most upbeat album they've released yet, and despite the more rigidly defined dynamic, it's a far cry from the bog standard "rock" sound the mainstream has accepted as the norm.

Things immediately slow down on the second song and stay subdued throughout most of the album. Once I realized that the rest of the songs weren't going to be as blazing as "Seventeen Years," I was able to enjoy it much more.

No Flashlight is the most sincere album I've heard in so long that it fills me with a joy that couldn't possibly only come through the music.