The grand message that The Underachievers seek to spread musically can get a little boring, though, especially when they pretty much rap about it on every song.... AK and Issa Gold are getting better at rapping, and rapping together.

The band returns to The Power Out’s playground equipped with the chops their latest personnel lineup displayed on Axes. The album only benefits from it, becoming a more-than-worthy successor to both previous releases.

Alopecia, their third full-length release and second as a full band, is a darkly tinged juggernaut.

A hymn to improvisational specificity... a melancholy erotics of noise.

Bowerbirds continue to show great potential, with some truly beautiful music along the way, but Upper Air’s most interesting tracks ('Bright Future' and 'Crooked Lust') are the ones that deviate from their core sound.

On City Wrecker, in the swirling synths and bottled righteousness, you can hear Krug stirring the embers.

It’s a beautiful pop record, in its succinctness, its self-consciousness, and its sheer will to live.

At heart, Watch the Throne is a Kanye West production. It's more of a holding pattern than the seismic leap of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but WTT covers a ton of territory with aplomb; Kanye's hallmark versatility and tasteful maximalism as a producer are again in full view.

Many tracks sound like they're simply missing a piece.

The tunes sometimes lack a punch or vigor — not to say they aren’t catchy; I’m just not shocked when they’re misinterpreted as stale.

As far as collaborations go, Thao & Mirah does a good job of showcasing its contributors' strong points while still allowing them to mesh together as an organic unit.

2011 has yielded precisely one TyM release worth your time, and this is it.

The real genius of this record, and of Ghost Box's output more generally, is that it works even if you don't 'get' the references in anything like a conscious sense, even if they don't make you feel 'nostalgic' per se.

Despite references to hard drugs and depression, Boeckner’s songwriting betrays an unconventional joyfulness, marked more by the relief between emotional peaks and valleys than by its strict verse-chorus-verse structures. In fact, in my opinion, this is the first project of his that measures favorably against the solo work of his more cultishly-beloved bandmate and rival.

It's an agreeable listening experience with moments of catchiness and beauty throughout, and hints of an evolutionary path that leave future expectations open-ended.

The Air Force may signal that Xiu Xiu isn't as jarring and bewildering as they once were, but there's more than enough fortitude and craft present to ensure that Stewart will always be a good handful of steps ahead of everyone else making "experimental" pop.

Tommy is a kind of maximalist musical confetti, a mostly instrumental amalgamation of jazz, hip-hop, folk, and laid-back electronica. Disparate ideas flit in and out of these songs, often before the listener really has a chance to get acquainted with them.

Crafting a "singular" sound is as idealistic as the next musical virtue, but this album--the band’s debut--is glaringly commonplace.

Although warmer, almost folk-rock, Pickpocket’s Locket is as visceral an experience as any Mercer project, albeit in a new way.

Foster is a surprisingly competent and natural songwriter; freed from the constraints of tonal faithfulness owed to giants of poetry like Dickinson, Foster is able to draw from disparate genres to play with whatever form she's interested in from song to song.

At its best, ISAM enters the realm of pure abstraction without losing its sense of purpose.

For the most part, BSP is successful in their attempt to infuse a britpop sensibility into the otherwise insipid post-punk genre.

Easy Tiger’s not his best, but it’s got focus and a lot of heart.

This album is not going to win the band many new fans, but it is certainly a treat for the converted.

Even though Days To Bed is littered with the sort of tunes that indie pop fans obsessively search for, it suffers the same fate as the group’s previous releases. By the time you reach the final 25% of the album, you’re more than ready to go to bed — and not in a good way.

Wyatt processes his music through epic terms, even in its mildest moments, and if Union and Return isn’t a final destination, it is still undeniably a stepping stone, a vista for us to gaze upon with Wyatt as he campaigns on towards total, purified elevation of the mind and body.

“Harpies” is emblematic of the issue that prevents Glynnaestra from being an unblemished success, since despite its enveloping airs, the instrumental does often reverberate as a little undercooked and sketched out, as if it were the anticipatory intro to a more expansive and consequential piece. A significant minority of the album’s tracks could be charged with this offense, because for all their sheen and arch-modernism, they often don’t build upon their ostensibly innovative foundations.