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

While Nurses’ adherence to pop construction might not do them favors when it comes to standing out from the pack, it also means that their music is potentially more durable than many similar blog-hyped acts.

The "black" of the title is not racial blackness, but the blackness of the void, the "abyss" of occultism. And that void, evoked by the dark, inchoate pop of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, is indeed beautiful.

Cruel Summer is half a classic and half a concession to mediocre talents.

They are making pretty, tightly structured pop songs cheaply, or at least pop songs that sound cheaply made, and pretty, and melancholy, and somehow detached and futuristic.

Its library-lite funk may be full of syrupy drift, but the progressions are crafty enough to keep the listener from glazing over.

Although it’s a dark, drifting ride, Perfect View makes other recent minimal synth albums (Chromatics’ Kill For Love was so flat I haven’t heard it since last September, and I still feel bored) look positively one-dimensional in comparison, and does it in a third of the time.

The songwriting is pretty much entirely solid, and there are brief flashes of idiosyncrasy, but this album boils down to being a product of the excitement of influence and just being young playing and writing music, without ever remotely threatening to stand up as something worthy of all the critical saliva that’s already dripped onto bedroom carpets worldwide.

Sure, Phil Ek's production is as crisp and effective as ever, but while it emphasizes immediacy, it also draws attention to the repetitive, redundant elements of these songs.

Who Killed Harry Houdini?, the band’s second full-length release and first on major-label affiliate Mute Records, continues the group’s tradition of making happy, light-hearted pop music that’s simultaneously fizzy and sticky.

It's All Around You middles about with infuriatingly placid tracks that suggest a fading band merely treading water.

When it Falls, while not a masterpiece, is a nice album which will likely appeal to a very broad fan base.

Living Thing sits uneasily in some sort of odd pop no-man’s-land: it’s not quite smart nor fully-realized enough for the sad-sack indie set, and it’s too despairing and insightful for the pop set.

Drums Between The Bells is challenging and complex, but evocative, rewarding, and not altogether fragmentary, not even (or especially) when you bust up the long-playing order.

Elephant Shell has it all if you’re looking for youthful mistakes from a well-meaning (but again, young) band that really, really, REALLY shouldn’t let the hype go to their heads.

This is cinematic music, fitting a noir mode.

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.

On one level, these tracks might be compared to ambient music in its non-teleological synthesized progressions that are more concerned with exploration than attainment. But there is still an astonishing feeling of fluid movement maintained throughout, thereby avoiding stagnancy.

It’s an album of stitched-together aspects that feel incongruous, though interesting.

This sumptuous sonic depth exceeds that of a live band, but still feels like something The Luyas will pull off live without a hitch. Evocative and avoiding narrative, brooding but warm to the touch, you'll feel compelled to return to these songs without actually learning the mechanics of their nature.

After several spins, it appears that 'edginess' is precisely what's missing here; in fact, the listener is left pining for it, as almost every track floats along at its own pleasant, blissful pace--easy to swallow but difficult to digest.

His choruses are instantly memorable and his word-soup lyricism easily places him in the upper echelon of intelligent emcees, somewhere between MF Doom and Dose One.

For the most part, Trail of Dead veer back and forth between styles mined on "Worlds Apart" and "Source Tags," making The Century of Self the strongest of their recent efforts. But it’s still an inconsistent one.

It’s certainly a strange pairing at first glance, but it’s a testament to both Prudhomme’s versatility and Lopatin’s curation that Remembrance is a perfect fit for the typically hi-def, post-internet sounds of Software.

If there is a compliment to be paid to Hurley, it is that the band refrains from delving into the sort of WTF territory they've explored of late.

The production is slick and striking, even when it fades to black (“Xanny Family”) or gets tangled up in layered hi-hats (“Program”)--these tracks sound equally as engaged and provocative as anything on last year’s masterful DS2.

Another album to blow up the cemetery to.

A subdued effort.

I think a big part of the problem is the singing. The lyrics are alternately cloying and curious, and they’re sung in a pretty and formal manner.

It's just annoying to listen to.

We’re given a de trop of horrid synthesizers, only to be outdone by worse choruses and banal refrains.

A well-done lo-fi pop album lost of the things we’re used to: contexts and whatnot that make both us and the analytical process feel much easier, helping us pretend that we really know what’s going on and how to get behind the ideas.

Many of the other songs on this album feel rather static and enclosed.

For as spare as her pallet is (many of the songs consist only of Fortino’s single or multi-tracked vocals accompanied by her own acoustic guitar), there is a staggering diversity in tone and feeling throughout the album.

It’s not Sonic Youth, but Ranaldo, haunted with memory and philosophizing all this time stuff, sounds like he’s indeed having the best time of his life.

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

Takes the listener on an unmitigated aural journey through the outer reaches of electronic music.

Self Help Serenade is not an unpleasant listen; it has simply and unfortunately been played out over the years by scores of other bands.

Lysandre is full of problems/problematic things, and most of it rests on one of the album's biggest problems: the insistent, ever-present "me."

I hate to say it, but Love at the Bottom of the Sea is such a drag: a damp and dreary album, drowning in bad faith and bad jokes.

Silicon Tare sounds like 2010, which could be a good thing, depending on how you look at it.

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

With no pretense and few frills, Rhyton have created an excellent document of tripped-out modern instrumental rock, drawn from open minds and extraordinary musicianship.

Shots isn’t a perfect record by any means.... However, by the time the epic closer “Ghost Blues” enters its nasty twin-guitar breakdown, you’ll want to pour yourself another drink and hit Shots’ high points anyway.

All of this is borderline insulting to its target audience, myself included. For a moment in “Brand New,” Williams lets us see his hand, and it subtly reveals how incredibly marketed and capital-centric this album is.

Waiting in Vain captures the modest landscape of America’s backroads and countrysides.

The lyrics here are trite and the melodies saccharine.

I think it’s safe to say that this third Volume remains the most autobiographical of the bunch.

Soft Money continues to blur the line between downtempo electronica and underground hip-hop in its own distinct, highly gratifying way.

There is a deeply impressive EP to be found on this album.

Picking up where "Z" skidded off, Evil Urges is like a carnival, like life (after all, My Morning Jacket is in cahoots with The Band), like cigarrons, discarded cigarettes dredged from the Cimarron River, and cinnamon sticks in a pot of boiled apples on the stove.

Lost Themes II isn’t the monster transfigured. It’s an echo chamber for the transforming horror to howl in.

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.

Without an adequate treatment or storyboard, [I Decided] feels listless and wanting immediate predicate. It lacks a ready place on the shelf.

I listened to this CD quite a bit, and it took some work for it to grow on me. I’ll admit that it finally did, but I’d say Knapp and Koster’s experiment was more failure than success.

Collaborations abound, and most of them work.

The fact of the matter is, despite lesser numbers, they have demonstrated progression as artists.

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.

All these flowery production choices can at times be quite seductive, despite the glaring mishandling of the vocals astride them.

There is a poise about Scintilli in its strongest moments that was absent even from those early blazed trails.

Chalk this one up as a failed experiment, albeit one that ups enthusiasm for explorations to come.

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.

On Iradelphic, Clark makes a sizable sonic departure from this tried-and-true brand, accelerating his recent investigations into vocal song structures and exploring rudimentary acoustic guitar textures, with mixed results.

His strengths are all being restrained, but you can tell they're struggling to get free.

Even by Cornell's extremely shallow standards, this is unbelievably lazy production. [Joint review of both discs.]

Repo runs out of ideas so quickly it starts to appropriate its own ideas.

It was great listening in on Hungtai’s world, a filmic mixture of life and life-that-can-be.

Pussy Cats Starring the Walkmen more than makes up for the lackluster A Hundred Miles Off.

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."

Oddly, he's got a ton of talent, a great band, an excellent producer, and lots of committed fans, but he still comes across as needy and overbearing.

Total comfort food.

If the album can be considered R&B proper, it’s one of the most consistent and fulfilling longplayers the genre has yet birthed.

This dropped-ball feeling that NehruvianDOOM exudes derives from how it handles and telegraphs (or rather how it doesn’t handle how it telegraphs) its supposedly unifying theme.

Much like the surrounding semblance, densely concealed behind a name with clear sci-fi connotations, the music on The Host can be difficult to really get into.

Where it is intellectually interesting, it may not be aurally satisfying.

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).

The selections run the predictable gamut of great to interesting to wholly disposable, but the breadth of material here nonetheless reaffirms Springsteen’s talents as a songwriter and interpreter of others’ work.

While Arcade Dynamics is a major turn for Mondanile, it's aesthetically in line with the trajectory of many modern acts that also hide behind effects and atmosphere as they develop their songwriting chops.

The mood from track-to-track varies drastically. The pieces do work, though.

Despite its misfires, Tongues does make for an intriguing listen, and the record is punctuated with the occasional highlight.

An album that's inspiring in its ambition.

Unfortunately, I Dreamed We Fell Apart straddles the unhappy line between experimental music and very un-experimental lap-pop.

The ease of the instrumentation and the hushed vocals do their part to loosen you up as the music whisks you away to the innocence of childhood and teenage dreams that have never left the recesses of your mind.

It’s catchy, committed, prehensile punk rock.

Although technically their fourth album, Shadow Temple is Prince Rama's major bow in front of the increasingly intense glare of the online indie music press. But rather than withering from the mounting pressure, the band has forged an incredibly assured record that plays by its own rules and succeeds in creating its own unique world.

Friley has taken the sound of his debut EP--the four songs of which all appear on Paddywhack--and maintained that arresting, zombie barbershop quartet aesthetic, while also extending it into new developments, intervening piano lines and looped organ riffs, with which it blends in ways that never jar (your preserves).

Like the craft of the best tracks here, the album itself describes a smooth and clearly bookended parabola, an unexpectedly rainbow bridge, but one that, unlike the most well-known of these, is a pleasure, not a revelation.

The album holds to the unambitious qualities deemed upon indie pop and twee pop, exploring no new territory while doing just enough to make it sound like themselves.

So, if you're with indie-pop’s backward-gazing contingent, or if you prefer it when ‘achingly beautiful’ actually aches, or if you want an example of style-versus-substance as a false dilemma--then get this record.

A highly successful debut release.

The songs on Pyramid serve admirably as precise and severe mood pieces; they are great for rocking out to while one devotes half a mind to something else.

In its many moments offering something warm and comfortable, Into the Blue Again might have been able to gain the status of one of those albums that could settle restless nerves, but this undercurrent of coldness counteracts this idea, leaving some tracks unsatisfying, passable rather than pleasing.

The album’s certainly well-produced, occasionally catchy, and at times even soothing in its simplicity, but it can also be dull and uninspired, like something I might put on when I want inoffensive background music for a relaxing social gathering.

No doubt there's an EP's-worth of gems buried here that are worth returning to, but for the most part, New Love resembles its thematic obsession: it's a strained affair.

Oblivion Hunter recaptures missing pieces of the Lightning Bolt jigsaw and reconfigures them in a new context, painting a broader picture of the band's roots while giving us the sense that it might not be a singular instance of "lost" material being pulled back from the edge of eternity.

Drake offers little here that does not retread the sonic and narrative territory of his previous work.

There are only so many times you can key into someone’s heart before they change the code, and after about 20 listens, the veneer crumbles a bit, and it’s a little too easy to see the gears turning underneath. But that’s not the most frustrating thing about the record; the most frustrating thing is that Sia has so much access to us and just doesn’t do much with it.

Elf Power have discarded many of the classic song styles that make their debut so strong, allowing a love of arena/anthem rock to mutate into a lolling interest in marches on later albums, kind of a return to old-world aesthetics that blends a potentially solid band into the grey tapestry of indie rock like so much frizzing wool.