Stridulum was just a warm-up for Conatus, giving Zola Jesus the opportunity to gain confidence in traditional song forms so that she could burst out with a compositionally and emotionally varied set next time out.

Like a good term paper, much of Graduation sounds great in theory but flounders in its execution.

The Menham Street Band realizes the vision of No Time For Dreaming, with Brenneck at the helm. More Memphis than Detroit, they're always present but never pretentious.

As an unsettling exercise in pop terrorism, The Horror is a rare treat.

It's hard to paint this as anything other than what it is: a professional-sounding album of radio-friendly pop. It's as bad as that sounds.

This is a profound and giving music.

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

The music tries to express what words can't, which makes this Animal Collective’s most combustive, "live" record yet.

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

That Toro Y Moi's new record Underneath the Pine is distinctly a product of his songwriting, without sounding exactly like his 2010 debut, suggests that chillwave may still have some legs to it after all.

Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it before... it’s taking drugs to make music to take drugs to, or something. But it’s still pretty damn fun, and Black Mountain do it with a higher idea-per-song ratio than most of their fellow fetishists.

True Minds continues a proud tradition of celebrating dead ends and lost causes.

With Personal Record, Eleanor commits even more strongly to straightforward, sentimental, and concise songcraft.

Self-referential, unified, and insanely catchy, American Idiot's positives outweigh its clichéd delivery and ironic medium for corporate America critique.

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

As far as songwriting goes, i follows the typical Magnetic Fields album standard of several great songs balanced with a couple unremarkable ones, with the rest being simply really good.

For this record, the Brewises again borrow generously from late-60s and early-70s psychedelic rock (not to mention the first British Invasion), all pervasive vocal harmonies, whining guitar tones, bouncing bass, and crisp, dampened drumming.

No Color isn't a bad album by any means - it's great at times, never less than good, and certainly better than could reasonably have been expected - but there's no sign here of return or retreat to their old strengths.

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.

Known for their micromanaged and micromanaging tracks, it’s fascinating to see that even their words about themselves are efficient, each phrase and constituent particular effervescent in their appearance and disappearance, yet wholeheartedly lunging themselves into place, forming a whole crystalline and formative structure.

All this studious box-ticking and attention-to-detail comes at a price, which is that II becomes more of a tribute to the music of yesteryear than, say, a work of art that’s relevant to the world surrounding it.

TMLT feels like the Titus Andronicus record par excellence, it pushes and shoves at the boundaries of what such a record could or should conceivably sound like.

Heavy and heartbreaking, teeming with a warm, analog energy, Snow looks backward at each defining element that made the band so memorable to begin with. But like many of the best moments, maybe you just had to be there.

Fair or not, An Imaginary Country can best be described as middling: competent, but certainly not what we all were hoping for from an artist whose work up to this point has been so unequivocally stirring.

If they decide to get serious about being a band and not just a project, maybe next record they could take us to their own personal woods, instead of just telling us about boring generalized woods.

Abyss neatly encompasses the totality of her career, synthesizing the artist’s prolific catalog into her strongest and most ambitious album yet, a cavernous chasm filled with beauty, brutality, and endless possibility.

Garden of Delete is the exceptional post-performance of the readability conjured in the wake of OPN’s work, and as a result, it critiques experimental culture’s desire to fetishize.

Fearing that these songs were indicative of indie-pop conformity would not only be ignoring the group's rich and varied history with melody and rhythm, but also underestimating the ingenuity and convictions that Longstreth has consistently boasted throughout his recorded career.