These four Kinks followers have incorporated all manner of brass and strings into turn of the millennium Top 40 rock sensibilities, with shades of early Flaming Lips indie psychedelia and classic rock songwriting.

It's the kind of music any fledgling music lover deserves to remember.

To Realize, the superb sophomore full-length from the band, finds them wholly embracing what was once merely hinted at.

Call it experimental muzak, call it cultured post-bop fueled by the internet. Either way, it’s interesting to hear Ghostface sink so smoothly into their rhythms.

These climactic moments of “High Castle,” and the others like it on the record, are a kind of triumph of Forsyth’s musical grammar, too: the efficiency of communication, the transmission of feeling via the blunt physicality of sound.

While 936's perpetual schizophrenia is noteworthy, it's Peaking Lights' songwriting that elevates 936.

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.

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.

Armed mainly with just his guitar and voice, Panda Bear creates some of the most longing and heart-rending songs you'll ever hear.

The album is consistently entertaining, but lacking in some of the really revelatory moments of his earlier records.

The songs here are each separate, lonely or transcendent, self-absorbed and distinct, without the background, café-soundtrack quality of so many modern jazz singers: fleeting, melancholy, and dangerous creatures from Borges’ imaginary bestiary.

Gate of Grief puts the band back on the map, and while it sometimes stumbles, it nevertheless continues to slink around in the shadows, cackling.

Lucifer - Latin for "morning light" or "light-bearer" - is an unabashedly blissed-out affair, composed of expansive dub grooves and enough good vibes to fill an entire summer.

This album is a consistent, expansive collection of modestly experimental pop songs (covering familiar aesthetic territory, and exploring broad and intertwining personal/familial, political, theological, and philosophical themes), and well worth repeated listens and eventual internalization.

The flesh on the 11 ghosts of Strangers is heavier than on lots of Nadler’s past work. And the sonic space mirrors the lyric meat; this is corporal, forward locomotion.

The Genius’ latest full-length Pro Tools is no different; while its power as a long-player doesn’t hold up very well, random dissection brings out tracks destined for analog and digital freaks alike (in case that title--and the sparse cover--had you worrying).

Using a combination of brilliant textures and powerful, atypical chord progressions, Mogwai paint a picture equivalent to an auto-stereogram, popularized in those Magic Eye books 15 years ago. You almost need to loose your focus to let the music really sink in.

Definitely a worthwhile buy for those new to Engine Down and certainly must hold a place in any Engine Down fan's CD book, iPod, or whatever it may be.

Dark Developments is another remarkably fine album from a musician who has been around doing what he does so long that he’s often unjustly neglected.

Full of so many moments of exhilarating joy and equally exhilarating sorrow.

As the album unfolds, there is a genericness of atmosphere that, while not unpleasant, fails to blossom into anything more

Seasoned fans will be hard-pressed to dismiss I’m Up as a release chock-full of throwaways, but it’s truly a testament to Young Thug’s radical talents as a rapper for keeping an audience thoroughly engaged, even when the studio experiments aren’t always entirely convincing.

On the whole, Manners mostly evens out into a consistently listenable experience, the joy of one absurdly successful track spread out in variations and reformulations across the entirety of an album with inevitable dilution in the process.

Dylan shirks responsibility; he puts the onus on us. Fortunately, the impetus the album provides is all we need in order to define its brilliance.

The Men have simply absorbed another musical language and are trying to speak through it and the other languages they’ve spoken through on previous albums, trading Spacemen 3 or The Buzzcocks for Dusty Springfield (“Freaky”). Some don’t work (“Saw Her Face,” parts of “Half Angel Half Light”), some do really well (“The Brass,” “Electric”).

Although it lacks the conceptual cohesion and embroidered orchestration of their last three albums and has a few weak tracks, Animal Joy adds sentiment to intellect, an undefined rebellion to Shearwater's heady songwriting and thereby challenges that duality.

The minimalist arrangements are still here. The bored baritone voice hasn't changed any. The personal-yet-guarded lyrics can be found throughout.

For those who have followed his recording career for any length of time, this change might seem jarring, a small revolution, but when his hushed baritone arrives on the scene in the lead track "Leaves Eclipse the Light," the development sounds completely natural.