While Don't Climb on and Take the Holy Water is a nice change of pace and a pleasant excursion in the free-drone for an underrated guitar band, it lacks any real defining moments that would make it a more noteworthy and essential album.

The songs are better than solid. They're catchier than catchy. These songs are just good.

Eyes At Half Mast seems to be, on one level, an exploration of the horizons of the style of music that Talkdemonic themselves invented, but a lot of it retraces steps already taken, albeit with a noticeable upping of the proverbial ante as far as energy goes.

Octahedron isn’t a representation of the best The Mars Volta are capable of, but it is a glimpse into the power they possess when they better harness their capabilities.

Perhaps the most that can be said for Have Fun With God is that it is reverent of its exceptional source material.

Even if it is a bit less adventurous, many of the tunes are right up there with anything the band has done.

Fans of Iggy Pop would do well to give Preliminaires a spin, since it showcases a side of the artist not readily visible in his other work.

If you can get past the hype, you'll find that For Screening Purposes Only is a solid, sometimes spectacular debut from an exciting group of young'uns.

I Love You, It's Cool is an indication of the band's ability to actually live up to the hype and promises that have previously, sometimes carelessly, been thrown their way.

This is techno at its most individuated, the drama of small, melodic transitions between layers of simple, emotive phrases sought in weirdsigged box jams.

On Talahomi Way, the Llamas are in fine, optimistic form, taking a holiday outside of time, to a place where Brian Wilson converses with Shuggie Otis over mai tais, major seventh chords are once again heard in pop songwriting, and distortion is something that happens in a funhouse mirror.

Some Sweet Relief’s beauty starts to wear kind of thin on repeated listening.

Some will find the album’s often starry-eyed nature vaguely overdone, and it’s this more than anything else that will turn them off. However, for those who fall weak at the knees when the strains of R&B, soul, and hip-hop hit their ears, even in an idiosyncratically distorted form, the post-millennial quotations and evolutions of In My World will be love at first listen.

Co-opted as they may be, the best tracks tend to be the ones that aren’t attempting to mine old hooks for new hits.

They finally turned their funhouse mirrors inwards and crafted a Mature Album in a way that only they could, refracting their own past work through the same broken prism that they’ve spent years pulling pop and rap through.

It's obvious after a few listens that the weight of the talent collected here hurts White People as often as it helps.

The depth and craft in these songs keep The Sun interesting and make its inspired moments that much better.

Familial is a worthwhile attempt at the contemporary folk that has been bastardized by many, coddled by some, and ignored by most. In this regard, perhaps Selway has forged an experiment more daring than you might think.

Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is a weepy response to the Postal Service.

It's a joy to hear him in such audibly great spirits, even if his most cognizant album effort in decades isn't some kind of miraculous knockout

While Nothing Bad has great, well-written, dynamic pop songs, the album suffers from length.

Mediocre... I'm just so used to this indie dance sound that Le Tigre just sounds boring in the context of Fall 2004.

With Echo Ono, despite their disposition to meaty and minimalist hard rock, Pontiak have shown that there is music beyond what they know.

These are performative anthems, which use the sonic and affective history of their sounds to construct towering emotional peaks. It is essential inasmuch as it succeeds in touching on something inherent, drawing from a pre-conscious set of sounds to create music that is as striking as it is affecting.

There is nothing like Transatlaticism's "Sound of Settling" here to offset the never-ending stream of ballads and down-tempo songs.

The record can at times feel static and repetitious, revisiting the same structural devices numerous times and using a lot of the same timbres and ambient sounds on every track.

Kozelek spends a lot of time on Common as Light giving us his broadly “common sense” liberal pluralist live-and-let-live shtick, punctuated by grumpy bashings of “hipster” culture and its parades of regenerated tenement buildings and juice bars, music journalists, and Father John Misty, but it’s only on 10-minute opener and standout track “God Bless Ohio” that he really bares his soul.

Full of spirituality and hope, these new songs lack a thrust.