Sadly, This is for the White in Your Eyes sees a band with great potential whose ambitions too frequently get the best of them.

Alien in a Garbage Dump sounds like the work of a noise veteran relaxing and trying out whatever comes to mind, tossing out ideas without worrying if every one of them sticks. And in this case, this approach yields considerable rewards, the noise equivalent of summertime jams.

While VanGaalen seems to be overflowing with great ideas, I’d prefer if he reined them in a little more tightly on his next release.

Post-Nothing is convincing in its candor to the point of exhaustion.

Although still a strong album, YACHT would do well to better marry its aesthetic with the famous DFA beat factory, instead of giving it such clearly separate airtime.

A slightly boring rock frontman adopts a pseudonym to make a solo album, and it sounds like his main band, recorded in a just-passable studio.

While the album shows the band refining their sound, it also carries the threat that their future might be too refined, too polished and neat.

If one stripped away the halcyon, indistinct haze and the open-road aesthetic it furthers, you’d be left with precious little, save 10 unobtrusive, well-executed sleep aids. New Universe is its archetype--nothing more, nothing less.

While Nurses’ adherence to pop construction might not do them favors when it comes to standing out from the pack, it also means that their music is potentially more durable than many similar blog-hyped acts.

Whereas The Fiery Furnaces used to suffer from a lack of restraint, they suffer here from having too much.

Riceboy Sleeps is an elegiac set of powerfully evocative songs, functioning at its best as lovely background music while flipping through the pages of the art book it's bundled with. Listened to unaccompanied and in its entirety, the experience is frustrating and unpleasant, and its bloated feel renders a lot of it impotent.

Their distinct blend of shoegaze and Americana sounds more natural than it should, while remaining, at most, vaguely reminiscent of other bands. Once the clarity of their songwriting matches their musical vision, there won’t be any need to keep peppering praise with regret.

It’s just a solid album that, like the title implies, holds onto its historical surroundings as much as it moves beyond them.

Full of craft and purpose, enchanting and creative, Rites is a promising tease of better things to come.

Talbot Tagora are the latest Left Coast noisemakers to keep your eye on.

The guitars are jangly and questionably tuned; the drums are doused in whiskey but always manage to keep the train moving; and the vocals are passionately out-of-key but always a perfect companion to the aesthetic and historical world they float within.

The tracks blister with attitude and grit, but the persistent monochrome grows a bit exhausting all coughed out at once. The bitter sandstorm could stand more punctuation, even if it did make Horehound less terrifying.

This game of literal musical chairs completely cripples The Most Serene Republic’s musical aims to the point that the album’s 40-minute runtime feels 20 minutes too long.

For fans of some of Broderick’s earlier material, then, these qualities, combined with the relatively narrow range of instrumentation and short duration of the album, may prove somewhat limiting and not as immediately immersive as some of his best work.

Taken as a whole, Embrace is an enjoyable album. It’s predictable in places, at times even a little cliché, but it’s executed competently enough that these qualities are forgivable.

For as spare as her pallet is (many of the songs consist only of Fortino’s single or multi-tracked vocals accompanied by her own acoustic guitar), there is a staggering diversity in tone and feeling throughout the album.

Rarely will one find a detractor when it comes to Cage’s sheer talent, but--thanks to sterile production and the replacement of hip-hop beats with rap-rock thrashings (“Beat Kids”) and corny, overdramatized hooks (“Captain Bumout”)--Depart From Me demonstrates an immaturity that will render Cage’s career difficult to reconcile.

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.

These Four Walls is a consistently exciting album full of memorable songs, and one of maybe five records this year so far that I would recommend unreservedly.

While the latter two discs have their moments, they’re all too predictable when held up against the first disc’s ambitious blend of noise and dance.

On Catacombs, as always, McCombs stands as an unfashionable maverick who plays on his own terms, and if that is not good enough for the mindless millions, then tough shit.

Wilco (The Album) isn’t a failure--not by any means--but when a band has become so attached to the notion of change and then stagnates, it casts a heavy shadow that’s hard to escape.