Mild as it might be, Mixed Race is a solid effort from someone who insists on sticking around.

Armed with bolstered production and the band's strongest songcraft to date, Alamanac represents not only the next step for Widowspeak, but perhaps the next point in our never-ending discussion of what "real" folk is in the 21st century.

While Toxic City Music hints at alienation, it never succumbs to it.

This isn’t an album that I foresee myself returning to very often, but under the right set of circumstances--such as the live performance that I attended last December--these are songs that contain the potential to deliver an unforgettable, emotionally cathartic experience.

Where The Messengers Meet subverts all the imagery suggested by the group's very name. It implies something incendiary, something rebellious, something explosive. And though there's evidence of a knowledge of all those things in the record's landscape, the path it takes proves a safer one, a trip to be had in good company.

Panic Blooms is a long overdue sound from a project that sees the absurdity in holding onto feelings while desperately trying to feel. It’s borderline pop.

Assume Form, at its center, feels like genre gloop spread over toast: good but too-easily digested. Sometimes it cloys. Sometimes it gets you through the day.

At last, HTRK are inhabiting their own spotlight instead of disappearing into negative space, and by shearing off the mystique, they’ve become much more riveting.

Less of an experiment in product-curation, Quazarz scans more as an effort in process-orientation, one that, whether consciously or not, divulges some of Shabazz Palaces’s obscure mysteries.

Tender New Signs does not manifest the insistent post-punk rhythms of the Led Astray Washed Ashore EP (2011), but it's not a huge departure from 2010 debut The Waves, though its sound is less chiming and more grinding (in a good way), the ethereality present only in vocals rather than in general suffusion, the darkness lingering at the edges palpable where before it was merely hinted at.

Over the three preceding records, the band has built up a loyal following by creating dark, gritty, but tuneful music. This album slots in nicely to the band's catalog as yet another release with undoubted new wave pop sensibilities fluttering amongst more damaged, foreboding vibes.

Besides adhering to his familiar sonic longings and rather than dampening the message, Far Side Virtual succeeds in exciting the collective memory of that generation now so conjoined to its technological appendages.

Let it also be said that Jemima Pearl’s voice has improved in a myriad of ways; throughout Be Awkward, she wails, rally-cries, and (especially on 'Becky') croons with a range of emotions that were bereft in previous recordings. If there’s one thing Be Awkward has in common with BYOP’s first effort, it’s the fact that it runs a bit long.

Canary is less unified, but there are great songs here.

The Silent League sounds pretty, but their gooey emotional stuff doesn't run very deep.

He might not be making sounds for fighting the many injustices of our current place and time, but Unseen in Between is nonetheless a solid compatriot against the confounding effect of going forward among them.

With any luck, Stereolab's hiatus will prove to be temporary, but if Not Music is the epitaph of their career, it is a suitably dignified (if not emphatic) one.

With them, hip-hop's fun again.

Truelove’s Gutter abandons the lush strings and complex production of previous work for a more straightforward style, and the results bring to mind the honest, plainspoken albums that Cash and Jones recorded in the mid-70s.

Transference offers up several solid additions to the Spoon canon and setlist, but narrowly misses living up to its pedigree.

There is a currentless drift to these nine doggypaddlers, what with the sloppy rhythms, plain-as-dirt vocals, and obligatory wah solos - but it's all so satisfying in its way.

This is a good album, sure, but a better collection of songs.

Perhaps direction is lacking on moments in ESTOILE NAIANT, but for the most part, patten has harnessed the objects of previous releases and refined them.

Black Forest (tra la la) is a nice little record made by an ambitious group of musicians from whom I expect excellent things. Three or four songs here are downright wonderful, and the rest, at the very least, aren’t entirely unpleasant.

Their most concise yet dense and appealing album since their first non-album, Description Of The Harbor.

Admittedly, it may not furnish any musical diagrams of how to move from A to B, but in its own illogical way, it succeeds in submerging us deeper into A.

By the end of the album’s blissful, sparse, empty-Saharan-landscape closer 'The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance,' perfection doesn’t seem to matter much anymore--especially when your mind’s too preoccupied on starting Vampire Weekend again from the beginning.