We have Father, Son, Holy Ghost: honest, occasionally crushing, often stunning, and all the better for the fact that Owens seems to be incapable of being anyone but himself.

While Wander/Wonder is assured and richly orchestrated for an artist with a long career ahead of him, there is just some aspect of real world struggle with which it fails to engage.

Its winning, all-pleasing debut, quiet as it may be in a scene overcrowded with showiness and incessant bids to polarize, is perhaps a mere pebble dropped in a sea-but with will and wit enough to ripple as far as a boulder.

Beat-wise, IV doesn't attempt to outdo the top-dollar Carter III production, whose murderer's row of producers and beats is likely to remain unparalleled for some time. But Wayne uses the less showy selection this go-round to deliver a definitively rawer album that only smartens the impact of some of his career's best vocals.

Mister Heavenly, for better or worse, have debuted as a strong musical voice, one with perhaps so much combined talent and perspective that their reverence occasionally gets the better of them.

The end result is a sound that feels both modern and ancient: the glorious sequence of arpeggios that rounds out "Return to the Violence of the Ocean Floor," for example, owes as much to Baroque counterpoint as to progressive rock or synth-pop. And yet, throughout the course of the album, these influences are melded seamlessly into a sound that is unmistakably Krug's own: dour, wistful, and tragic.

The second half of the album is a little bit less direct in its approach, leaning more on the natural beauty of Lipstate's sonics rather than pronounced melody, but there's plenty of detail to turn over here as well.

The entirety of Within and Without is a mishmash of half-recalled thoughts sterilized in a cloud of sh*t production.

Whatever your feelings on the swing in direction, As the Crow Flies is without doubt Jon Brooks' strongest set yet, likely to win the label more attention than its celebrity fans have already (even the famous felt uncomfortable in chemistry).

Musically, Mirror Traffic flows lazily, songs streaming into one other. Like an engrossing 3 AM conversation lasting until daylight, it's too immersive to give notice to the passage of time, but once it's over it's difficult to recall in detail, some heady dream.

Since Ferrari Boyz doesn't mark the reemergence of Gucci, it's best viewed as a warm-up for Flocka's previously-mentioned sophomore effort.

Our Blood, like most great singer-songwriter efforts, is open to interpretation, but it's the record's malleable sense of emotion that lends it its peculiar gravity.

Although these judgments point toward Slave Ambient being among the top records the summer of 2011 has to offer, the record's off-axis dichotomy, now favoring studio-assembled mellowness, steals enough of the bite and traction from these songs to keep it merely a contender.

There's a real, meticulous attempt at achieving the same playful, wandering state of mind of the pre-'80s experimental classics that inspire these songs, rather than pulling from any overwhelming examples.

Its tone is largely exuberant, even when its content seems dour; its ancillary themes seem surprisingly relatable and humanizing, even though its thesis stresses how uniquely untouchable and alone they are at the top.

It's well-produced with some nice drums, but it simply has no reason to exist.

[A] beautiful little album.

She may remain an intimate, closely held artist for a certain sect of listeners, but by any standards hers is some powerful, accomplished songwriting-and in many ways Marissa Nadler epitomizes this ever-maturing skill more lucidly than any of her prior work.

If Chopped & Screwed implies that Micachu and the Shapes want to obscure their relation to the still wonderful Jewellery, then this album isn't just difficult and unsatisfying--it's unfortunate.

Skying does for early '80s psychedelic Brit-rock what Primary Colours did for post-punk, and both are as satisfying with such goals as one can imagine. Can their '90s Seattle grunge tribute be far behind?

Dedication is definitely an accomplished record and a milestone for Zomby, rewarding continued personal investigation in the same way that Where Were U In '92? found its success in laser beam focus and visceral appeal.

There is little else more gratifying in being a fan of music than watching a musician, with every successive album, build upon his or her potential in such an exquisite, dedicated way that everything about their music is now a magnificent improvement over what came before. Roommate's third album is all that.

This turns out to be an interesting but ultimately disappointing experiment, and the reason for its failure is telling: unlike the posturing shitgaze set who lean on lo-fi as a superficial crutch, How to Dress Well never treated lo-fi as a simple affectation, and as a result he can't walk away from it so easily.

The most intense moments in Past Life Martyred Saints are evocative enough to drag you back through your own most overblown emotional crises, but when the buzz fades, you are plopped back into the halcyon present, strangely empty.

Last Summer is a difficult album to describe because it's made up entirely of these kinds of small moments, gliding gracefully from memory to memory, place to place, like an inside joke stretched into a one-act play.

Parts & Labor have turned what might have been the crippling loss of an essential member into just another development in a long and respectable career.

OS's greatest feat is in its restraint. The urge to collapse into all-out roaring is there for the whole forty-three minutes, but Skodvin and Totman have made a sort of pact: you stay feathery on the piano, I won't go to Hades in the mix.

It is a step in the right direction and, despite its failings, a potential sign of good things to come. As far as community art projects go, I'm inclined to say that this one still has legs, even if it doesn't prove that Portlanders can get people to use theirs.

White Denim remain unusually talented musicians for whom eclecticism is the rule, and expectation the harbinger of some totally bad vibes.

Innings succeeds as a minor expansion and development of the band's essential sound, and it's a progression that makes clear sense.

The tracks are at their most compelling--which is to say: very compelling--when they're listened to in isolation from one another or liberated from the album's initial lineup. The greatest favor you can do as a listener is to allow the same open air and breathing room the songs allow themselves.

Leave Home is manna for white noise aficionados and anyone who thought the last Future of the Left record was far too tempered (yeah that's right). The Men have done a good thing here.

It is his fourth record to be titled Finally Famous, which is preposterous for a lot of reasons, the largest of which being that he is still not famous.

At some point in that outrageous lifestyle that flips between videogames and spitting stoned, stupid raps, he makes hard, smart decisions about what to lend his voice to and how that should be packaged.

A punk band with a Steely Dan fixation they most certainly are not, but in their best moments these kids do rouse something as opulently degenerate and self-destructively lax as the Dan's cleanest work.

Shonen Knife can do a lot of things, but country music apparently isn't one of them. Where some may revel in how they don't fuck with the formula that's persisted over their extensive career, others will reach for fan favorite Let's Knife (1992) or save their money; that economic crisis Yamano maybe sings about is still happening, you know.

This album just goes to show that when Vernon does manage to find that perfect balance of production and deep-in-the-gut songwriting, it is going to be shattering. Even the harshest critics among us may, for a moment, forget about our thumbs.

Danielson's past successes may have been the work of a hundred voices gathering 'round to sing the same joyous song, but the most successful parts of The Best of Gloucester County embrace a different kind of communion altogether. Not just the community of Gloucester County, or New Jersey, or the indie rock or Christian communities, but one of all things.

Old 97's have maintained a kind of winking positivity, which is perhaps the key to their longevity. The Grand Theatre Vol. 2 embraces this unashamedly.

The album's aesthetic conceit may read better on paper than it plays on record, but it's hard not to be impressed by Oneida's continued dedication to experimenting with what is now perceived as their core sound.

Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, and WU LYF in general, are a band handicapped, seeming less like an actual group and more of an experiment. In what? In determining how much vocal pain listeners are willing to endure if the underlying music is actually pretty good.

That BlackenedWhite doesn't really bother with the kind of extreme lyrical content Bastard and Earl traded in is what makes it an infinitely more enjoyable listening experience on just the most basic level.

By no means is It's All True a masterpiece; the duo don't stick their necks out enough to entertain that notion. But by creating a palpable tension between smart songwriting and their knack for texture, Junior Boys have pulled a legacy back from the brink of indifference.

Van Pelt is not designing sounds to blow us into a new paradigm, but crafting textures to drawn us in, to subsume, to mesmerize, and perhaps, through a combination of these effects, to softly awe.

So Sagara sounds necessarily and unavoidably at odds with itself, a not wholly successful balancing act that lands its objects within sight and some distance from where its artist intended, but the effort is commendable and important.

Burst Apart, while far from perfect, is sort of a special album.

Goodbye Bread specializes in this kind of twisted subtlety; no longer content letting loose and letting the detritus fall where it may, Segall has crafted a record both familiar and surprising, both sunny and spooky.

Milk's musical vision is the binding force behind Random Axe and it's something that Price and Simpson clearly believe in; thus, all their bragging about how essential their complete gullyness is to the rap game. Because, despite lines crossed and opportunities missed, it sort of is. Nothing so far in 2011 has a total aesthetic and attitude that goes as hard as this.

As a whole, We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves doesn't necessarily offer the highs of his past two albums, or something as immediate as "Rights for Gays," but it is a remarkably cohesive listen.

On Pl3dge, Killer Mike is often captivating, but his politics are just noise.

Like on that grand finale the production on Black Up is meticulous but furtive, always pushing forward, often unwilling simply to loop. And Butler's rapping sounds perfectly at home in this sometimes chaotic environment, kicking it amidst the kinetic verve of his beats.

She's still a nearly peerless vocal performer, and if that's the one edge she retains over her otherwise edgier contemporaries, then it's probably for the best that her material be simple enough for her voice to really shine.

Howl of the Lonely Crowd is a strong, seasoned indie-pop record that'll sustain the cult while opening up yet another avenue for the curious to stumble across one of the more tragically ignored bands of their time.

The most interesting thing about Loud Planes Fly Low is the way it uses that rift, confronting the inherent tension and wringing it out. It may not be Howard and Crisp's best work to date, but it's perhaps their darkest, sincerest, and least expected.

More than anything else, Channel Pressure is a triumph of studio craft and evidence that the group has as much potential as producers as they do as composers.

The narrative of David is not quite as cohesive as Fucked Up think it is, the lyrics too cliché, but if writing a rock opera was the impetus required to push them to produce an album as gloriously overblown as David Comes to Life, then it's worth a thousand dead Veronicas and even more mopey dorks to mourn them.

Return is largely bereft of the chintzy, minimal Zaytoven beats dominating previous Gucci releases, and in their stead exists the dense ominousness Luger peddles so brilliantly.

Teenage Hate is the kind of record best heard straight through, as it's hard to pick out and pick apart particular songs.

Poised as hyper-indulgent fellas, Smother is a startlingly controlled album, one that's exactly as smooth and smoldering as its moniker posits.

Take Care, like all of the EITS albums, still has quite a lot going for it: its bombastic gestures are still appropriately dramatic, its production still crackles and shines exquisitely, its conventional undulations are still paced for maximum emotional effect. But there is no surprise or wonder to be found here, no chances or risks taken.

Despite being quite well-realized and able to sustain a single mood for so long, the album sounds increasingly like a missed opportunity as it progresses, with the two songwriters' work almost never achieving a real sense of cohesion.

You can get long way into Underneath the Pine without gaining any clear impression of exactly what kind of record it is that you're listening to. But amorphous isn't the worst thing in the world to be.

Gloss Drop shows a band still well ahead of the curve in terms of how they perform music, and one that understands how an aesthetic can be stretched to its most experimental limit and retracted to a simple confection without a wide chasm between the two modes of expression.

Bachelorette is not as immediate or inviting as My Electric Family, but I'm hesitant to condemn it for this. It's simply a different listening experience, one which creates a different mood.

It's a solid, un-embarrassing, simple-minded record that will do nothing to My Morning Jacket's reputation as one of the greatest American rock bands every American can, and will, get behind. Here's to riskier futures.

Laced is more than a real step-up for Psychedelic Horseshit, it's the best album of its kind I've heard this year.

So, yeah, Bury Me in My Rings is yearning indie pop, sometimes overwrought, sometimes appealing in its dorkiness.

If surf-rock is, at least for the time being, dead - or something that only feels briefly alive in scattered moments - then Girls Names is the last whiff and remnant of its spirit, whispering under the door and darkly skulking in the corner shadows.

It reaffirms the band as is, is a portrait of four musicians celebrating their existence rather than the question of self.

Air Museum lays to rest the shortlist of uncertainties I've pinned on Mountains in the past--mostly by not changing much.

Everything's Getting Older proving that, despite his wrinkles and back ache, Moffat's never going to shave his head/convert to Buddhism, and is still the scowling, contemptuous, but eloquent philanderer he was when he was tearing up the '90s--except now, he's a little more comfortable, and attacks using serene piano accompaniments.

This is Rhys wholly in his wheelhouse: offering up a handful of standalone highlights and clever deep cuts, hitting pleasure centers along the way, and quietly adding to a catalogue as deceptively substantial as anyone currently working the pop circuit with fifteen years behind and at least another fifteen ahead.

Even amongst his New Jersey-based peers and labelmates, Lynch's work remains disconnected from pop and from folk music while never being truly disengaged with it, and Terra serves as major evidence of his growing confidence as a composer and player.

There are a few moments on side B that could fool you you've picked up an old Orb album, but otherwise The Dissolve is very forward thinking. Picture a melting pot on par with Burt Bacharach's.

His constant assurances across Goblin that he doesn't really mean any of the hateful shit that he continues to say, including this disclaimer's attempt to dissuade listeners from actually doing anything Tyler raps about and the title track's assertion that because Goblin is a work of "fiction" Tyler himself shouldn't be blamed for anything bad that results, undermines any of the resonance Goblin might have otherwise had as a, well, purer document of depravity and, at his most extreme, a certain kind of madness.

He uses his guitar and ghost-like warble to render the ephemeral as concrete as cantaloupe.

With The Moonlight Butterfly, the Sea and Cake are in no danger any time soon of fasting in light of their diet of quality white bread, and it's not like anybody who is purchasing a "mini-album" from this band expects otherwise.

It is a cohesive suite of powerfully effective songs with one thing on its mind: "the inexorable march of Time."

Robin Pecknold's well-chronicled bout with writer's block and three years later, Helplessness Blues has arrived, and the good news is that it unquestionably sounds like a Fleet Foxes record-which is to say: warm and exquisitely pretty.

As with that last Aphex Twin full-length, The Only She Chapters plays to no one's expectations; gutted and reassembled, it will still unfurl like a disassociated string of insular oddities.

Hit After Hit doesn't achieve its titular goal completely and totally. It does come fairly close, though, and makes strong cases for the tunefulness of San Francisco's new garage music, Smith as a songwriter, and the appeal of something done straightforward if also done well.

Dancer Equired is short at thirty minutes, but it does the job of re-leasing Times New Viking's mad energy.

More critically, though, is that Eye Contact works very well as a stamp on this band's original turn with Saint Dymphna: now that we know that a lot of their contemporaries were also going to turn in this direction, it's nice to see a band that was once ahead of the curve still working so hard to keep their sound this fascinating.

With Our Heads is a lonely, long stretch of un-anchored time passing, the audible, honest-to-god equivalent of switching one's mind into Airplane Mode and eyeing the smooth, barely altered upper cloudscape for the duration of a flight.

The core of his sadness may still be a mystery to me, but his monument to it, in all its eccentricity, is by far the hardest thing to ignore that he's done yet.

Shaolin is simply tiresome, a heap of cliches with no animating force beneath its husk-like frame, not so much a follow-up to anything but our long-held anticipation for something better.

Though the thesis of this remix album restricts remixers to only one album, the remixers limit themselves further, and seem afraid to do too much more than reaffirm certain dance touchstones already done away with by Weber himself. They've missed the sanctity for the structure.

w h o k i l l is probably the most inviting album you'll hear this year.

The Fresh & Onlys have achieved something captivating with Secret Walls, conjuring up vast, mysterious spaces within economical songs, songs demanding repeating listens to decipher.

Sheff is he orchestrator, but through all the manipulating elements, all the new band members, Sheff seems to be more at odds with his art than ever before.

Callahan's made plenty of fine albums-some of which boast higher highs than this one-but Apocalypse is such a satisfying and downright elegant listen because of its commitment to a narrative arc; as soon as it ends and you step back, the album takes the shape of a remarkably complete thought.

Sometimes, in the wrong mood, Tomboy can come across as eleven great songs chipping away at each other.

Sure, the record isn't very functional outside of its given context, but if you've tuned into this program before then it'll be nice to know that one of the most congenial of indie pop acts can still deliver on their good name and to their respective audience in equal measure.

Salon des Amateurs is undeniably an important album for Hauschka, both for its distillation of his rigorous methods and its energized perspective.

Street Halo shows his commitment to his music both by tweaking it and sticking to the formula. It still makes him capable of bridging the brutal and the delicate. Only experienced crisis negotiators can say that.

Wasting Light is as good as mainstream arena rock gets now, twenty years after the fact.

C'mon doesn't break much new ground for Low in the way that their last two records did, and that's clearly not the goal here.

Share the Joy represents growth for Vivian Girls, though they're not totally there yet.