Sequitur contains powerful resonances with the past, and it certainly reorganizes some beautiful moments that have been left behind, but some of these moments were left there for a reason.

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.

The fact that Hella are able to deliver the same thrills, same complexity, and same unopenable exploding package with two members that they do with five is both musically impressive and cognitively relevant to the experience of the music.

It’s a clarification--leveraging an assemblage of evocation, of presentation, perhaps of curation, but one that’s built from the fragments of the most beautifully uninteresting bits of what’s contemporary.

Tending toward minimalism as opposed to shock musical tactics, Cosmin TRG doesn’t thrill with throat-grabbing statements, but of course that is far from his intention.

Royal City don't have the arresting lyrics or delivery of the best Palace songs, nor is Little Heart's Ease the equal of genre-champ Magnolia Electric Company, but, as Riches might put it, there's some sparkles in the rough.

For the most part, Take Me Apart is sonically more akin to a soundtrack, one for neon-tinged late-night driving. Or for bedrooms with ceiling mirrors--those slippery reflections.

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

The Dropouts tend to the same dynamics and tones, and even at 30 minutes, it gets a bit tedious.

Reasons to Live sounds like old summer afternoons.

The morbid motivation behind it all looms like that skull, never far from the festivities, even if Gliss Riffer doesn’t always reproduce its glow.

Yeasayer soar with sublime choruses that are everything that pop has been trying to realize: high-art dionysian bliss contained in three- to four-minute bursts.

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

The Greatest Gift may not contain all the insight and manifest artistry of one of Stevens’s studio albums, at the very least, it reasserts his perspicacious understanding of his complex emotions and propensity for self-evaluation.

By no means is The North Borders sterile, but there isn’t a notably invigorating spark either--at least not of an obtuse or intense gesture.

As fresh as the Re-Up Gang keep their rhymes and beats, much of the album has a cheap feeling--a "We Got It 4 Cheap," cheap, that is, as nearly half of the album is comprised simply of freshly mixed tracks from "Volume 3."

A bit more laidback than its predecessors and encapsulated by exotic shades, Across the Meridian sits somewhere between Les Baxter’s lovable cheese, the playful ingenuity of Pierre Bastien, and the more twisted corners of a 1970s European TV station library music.

Hope in Dirt City presents some of Pemberton's most complex material to date. Most of the songs still bear the characteristically breakneck rhythms that garnered a nod from the Polaris Music Prize committee back in 2006, but unlike Breaking Kayfabe and Afterparty Babies, this album is swathed with layers of full-bodied instrumentation.

With Perfect Hair, Busdriver has once again crafted a fantastically immersive listening experience (arguably Busdriver’s finest work yet), only blunted by how profoundly it telegraphs its own ambitions and intentions, more than meeting my expectations as a piece of confrontational sound art, yet leaving its targeted structures a bit too comfortably in tact.

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.

Fans of Iggy Pop would do well to give Preliminaires a spin, since it showcases a side of the artist not readily visible in his other work.

Mediocre... I'm just so used to this indie dance sound that Le Tigre just sounds boring in the context of Fall 2004.

As much as Stephens desires for a naturalist/humanist authenticity found in the limits of the extremes of existence, The Bloom and the Blight achieves an equal subjectivity that Stephens searches for.

Although one of PE’s three focal points, Terminator X, is gone, Chuck D and Flavor-mother-fucking-Flav still have vitality pumping through their veins, enough to elevate a two-decades-old rap institution above the level most hip-hoppers reach once they hit middle-age.

As a straight-ahead listen though, it’s oddly paced.

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

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.

As with other Bats albums, Free All the Monsters' charming modesty is a hair's breadth away from monotonous.

As enjoyable as it can be, Telekinesis! is only good enough to make you wish it were better.

Despite Andrew Barr’s attempt to develop new rhythmic ideas in every song, the tracks tend to bleed together, impairing each song’s distinctiveness.

Keep things simple, reminded by older folks of a time when it was totally acceptable to admit being part of the KISS Army.

The duo has never abandoned the cool reserve of music nerds, but their sound on this tribute has a different sort of ease and confidence; they've learned something from studying their pop music history books.

If you are looking for light-as-air indie rock doused in melancholy, you won't do better than We, The Vehicles.

It's obvious after a few listens that the weight of the talent collected here hurts White People as often as it helps.

Although the album's been released in the United States a year after it was in their native Australia, the songs have held up quite nicely, memorable and unique as they are.

The timbres of the modular synth, in my opinion, are dull, but that doesn’t mean that Venetian Snares hasn’t created interesting music from his machines.

The other two tunes here, the instrumental 'Ponce of the Flaming Peace Queer' and a once-again-relevant cover of 'Fortunate Son,' work fine, but, coupled with the album’s brief tracklist and tossed-off nature, they make Peace Queer little more than a focused stop-gap between proper albums.

While Life of Pause appears to lack any songs with the lasting impact of tracks like “Chinatown,” “Only Heather,” “Paradise,” or even the sublimely beautiful “Golden Haze”--well-written works that exhibited a naïve clarity in purpose--it’s certainly a grower.

As it stands, the album sounds like Panda Bear at the height of his unchecked, uncompromised (and, therefore, at times uninventive) powers.

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.

The Like Young don't really veer from their predetermined path too often. They diddle around with loops and what-not occasionally like the rest of us, but their vision is singular, dedicated to the sort of buzz-heavy power-pop that's tough to resist.

As Moon Duo have become sunnier and rockier - a trend evident on 2011's Mazes and continuing on Circles - their vision seems less distinctively their own.

As a palate-cleanser for those of us jaded on the overplay of St. Vincent or even the theatrico-folk-foray of Arcade Fire-esque energies, The Golden Record is sufficient and at its best sublime. At its worst, though, it's drifty, gossamer, and chilly.

YOKOKIMTHURSTON displays an issue that affects several contemporary aesthetic forms when they become institutionalized: no matter how transgressive, shocking, or committed an artistic statement can be, it still remains enclosed within the safe, whitewashed, antiseptic confines of the art gallery under the sheltering halo of “high-culture” values, for the admiration of a see-but-do-not-touch enlightened elite.

On Talahomi Way, the Llamas are in fine, optimistic form, taking a holiday outside of time, to a place where Brian Wilson converses with Shuggie Otis over mai tais, major seventh chords are once again heard in pop songwriting, and distortion is something that happens in a funhouse mirror.

Co-opted as they may be, the best tracks tend to be the ones that aren’t attempting to mine old hooks for new hits.

Even as it limits the album's appeal as much as it does the band's chances of broader success, Wye Oak's stylistic purity is a virtue in itself.

The Crosswords-“Preakness” is a monster itself compared to the gentle rise and fall of the track’s 2011 studio appearance on the cross-promotional Keep cassette.... The rest of the EP, though, like most of Panda’s recent output, just washes over me lukewarm.

A generous musical vocabulary enables each song to speak with both a familiar voice and novel inflections.

St. Vincent dances with themes (family, success and the absence thereof, the isolation of the digital) but only ever seems to fringe against them in a way that doesn’t let the record add up to more than the sum of its parts.

many of these songs see Campos and Maker presenting compelling musical ideas that simply aren’t expanded upon in an equally compelling manner. Still, Mount Kimbie frequently succeed here in capturing inspired, stirring musical ideas.

Falls between Starsailor, Travis, Elbow, Alfie, etc, always raising the question: who are The Veils?

All these various elements are arranged like a sleek showroom with smooth glass surfaces, a few international flourishes, maybe a pair of funky modernist chairs in the corner; it all sounds like a seamless, impersonal, cosmopolitan package.

Undercard tastes like diluted Darnielle. Nonetheless, there's enough gold buried here to recommend it, even if it's not strictly canonical by my personal reckoning.

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.

Kila Kila Kila contains numerous pristine sounds and rich textures that show subtle moments of ingenuity and progression.

A collection of overzealous pop songs consisting largely of recycled ideas.

There’s a Riot Going On’s theory doesn’t quite match up to its execution, and its parts are greater than the whole. So, is it more beautiful, or is it more boring? The problem is that it’s often too difficult to tell the difference.

The album is a carefully crafted rollercoaster of emotional and auditory highs and lows, exhibiting the group's subtle growth since its major breakout, "We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed."

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.

The overriding element of Natural is the band’s sense of experimentation, merging punk with semi-transcendentalist folk.

Ultimately, Realism neither impresses nor disappoints.

Although everything here is at drum-and-bass tempo, White approaches each track from wildly different directions.

The prettier recording wraps up songwriting that seems perfunctory and performances that sound tired by comparison to the psychedelic dervishes Woods first appeared as.

Pick your adjective[:] Over-the-top, anthemic, epic.

What saves the album from musically becoming a boring, going-through-the-motions exercise is Imperial Teen’s ability to write good hooks.

This isn't to say that Girls Names don't display any originality, and for those who have a special place in their heart for this kind of sound, no matter its repetitive trajectory, Dead To Me will be an unalloyed pleasure.

Atmospheric, provocative, and uplifting.

These Days is full of potentially enlightening ideas, and its beats and hooks are often mesmerizing, yet Ab-Soul spreads himself too thin here, his abstraction resulting from a kind of undertaken emaciation, a renunciation of tangible substance in favor of nebulous spiritual impressionism rather than from a perspective-driven distortion of this album’s strong central themes.

The stakes are low for Super Furry Animals, with their dedicated fanbase and slim commercial prospects, and the music reflects this. They’re a legitimately great band, but sometimes one can’t help but escape the feeling that all of their dedication is in service of a joke.

Despite any missteps, Bermuda Drain is laudable simply for its willingness to branch out and discover new ways of expression.

Jessica Rabbit does not feel challenging, nor does it feel inviting. The adolescent only hopes to participate.

Katy Goodman seems to be changing, developing, maturing (whatever you want to call it) as an artist at her own pace, and however slowly or carefully that may be, we’re all the more fortunate for it.

Harcourt's piano proficiency separates him artistically from guitarists who tinker with mere chord-banging to accompany lyrics. There are a few misshapen puzzle pieces on this one, though.

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.

It doesn’t offer any major stylistic advance over Album of the Year, admittedly, but its 10 songs are constructed with an incomparable craft and creativity that few bands in rock and metal can reproduce.

There are no embarrassing stabs at pop crossovers, no bitter jabs at the record industry. Just tuneful and accomplished, if somewhat anachronistic and faceless, BIG MOODY ROCK.

On Neighborhood Watch, their delivery is stale and unimpressive, much like the overproduced Expansion Team.

The songwriting of its back-half just doesn’t stand up to its front-half or the rest of the band’s catalog.

Ultimately, the listener must be contented with the reality that Parallax Error Beheads You is a record that truly speaks for itself.

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.

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.

Collaboratively, then, You, Whom I Have Always Hated makes for a solid metal album, but the attribute that gives it an edge works also as a reminder as to just how imaginative this collaboration could be the next time around.

SZA remains a captivating, interesting singer, but the focused singularity that made S such a rewarding listen is largely absent here.

Atomos is, to my ears, a more uneven offering than the debut, lacking the gem-like balance of its predecessor. The upside is that Atomos is perhaps a more challenging listen, featuring a broader sonic palette that contains more distinct highs and lows, both of mood and of merit.

With minimalism, especially of this improvised sort, if you don't like it, give it another listen; and if you still don't like it, ok.

Aside from these conceptual assertions that it evokes, Feed the Animals is a good record. Though it’s broken up into 14 tracks, it functions best (and as Girl Talk intends) as a single 53-minute mash-up.

With Ume’s sweet, soft melodies mixed so gracefully with their bone-crushing riffs, any notion of contradiction between the two are dispelled.

Oftentimes she’s content to let one spidery riff circle the drain endlessly (“Quicksand”) and more than once she goes completely a cappella, an effect that would normally lend an album a sense of intimacy, but I Abused Animal seems resistant to emotional refuge.

Because the album can’t be one complete thing, Age Of is its own archenemy; its own princess stranded in a high castle; its own climb up the Holy Mountain. A radical incompleteness haunts it.

They’ve left the cutting edge musically, which can have valuable results, but here it feels ambivalent and a little tidy.

I'd like to say Automato is an album worth slobbering over, but it's not.

It creates an illusion of depth, and its intervention is interesting, rather than distracting. It thickens space and imagines worlds that once were.

On the whole, Imitation is self-consciously danceable and overconfidently messy. It’s restless music for restless people, and while it entertains plenty for stretches, it doesn’t quite hold the focus that a 40-minute collection of songs demands.

Nadler's shortest and sparsest full-length yet. The decision to limit it to little more than a handful of tracks ensures it's succinct and absent of any songs I could comfortably call 'bad' or even 'not good,' but it also means there's no room for any of the risks that made her older work so fresh and adventurous.

This is cinematic music, fitting a noir mode.

The melodies don’t propel; they put buffers and stopgaps between other moments of intense sound design. Like a luxury car at a car show, they exude and ooze sleekness and velocity. But hidden within that is a terror: the terror of being surveilled, minute by minute, devoid of ontological access to the eternal or the metaphysical.

Here, obsessed with his own mortality, Conor isolates himself from what stirs his best writing.