Utilitarian sensibilities typically create better, catchier results, but Little Boots’s producers can’t help flaunting their knob-twiddling abilities, justifying their paychecks while counterintuitively making Hesketh’s music sound all the more amateurish.

While rarely graceless and often impressive (“Two Humans,” worth noting, develops into something sexy before going for broke), everything on Fight Softly just seems too much. There’s a lot that’s pretty here--but there’s a lot.

Be Brave doesn’t live up to the rambunctious energy and junkyard swagger of the band’s debut LP, And Girls Club, but instead offers more subdued moments that allow Sambol’s frontman personality to transcend the clatter.

Although a little inconsistent in its layout, The Law of Large Numbers packs that same precise bite that brought the Delgados to public knowledge, scaled down/expanded to suit its creator, who before writing songs was a physicist.

Nitetime Rainbows has its moments of bliss, but they aren’t as enveloping as I’d hoped; the problem here is that you wake too early from the dream.

What's interesting isn't that an ambient record has suddenly introduced vocals, which is nothing new, or that these vocals are used exclusively for talking rather than singing, which isn't particularly surprising. What's really important is what this talking is totally, explicitly about: rather than just hinting at atmospheres and moods, vaguely suggesting a concept which can be seized upon as the thematic core of the music, Loscil provides what is literally an explanation of an album, which in turn makes the album about the act of its explanation.

What’s happening with Similes is that it’s doing everything ambient music is supposed to do but is finding a very forward and fresh manner of going about it.

The Golden Archipelago falls somewhere in that tenuous space, never able to live up to the power of its initial impression. It’s more the kind of thing that should be fully absorbed over the course of a few attentive, complete listens, then allowed to dissipate into the realm of a beautiful idea.

The thing Have One On Me absolutely excels at is the creation of remarkable moments amid its rambling odes.

It begins with two heretofore uncharacteristic forays into garage rock, wanders into several guitar epics, tries on an acoustic guitar and the French language, and somewhere in there plops down a typical Quasi number or two. Unlike their three previous albums, though, Coomes shows up with some bullet-proof material.

Though the album is an hour long, there are at least thirty minutes of excellent music here. Those who were excited by the direction implied by 13 Moons, however, can't help but feel disappointed.

Another hip-hop comfort blanket, The Stimulus Package reminds us a dope loop and a capable MC justify their own existence.

An overcooked vanity piece from a band inflated by praise, Odd Blood heads in every direction at once.

One Life Stand hasn’t brought Hot Chip completely out of the deep hole they dug for themselves one album earlier, and it’s still not as consistent as the inimitable, career-defining The Warning, but it’s unquestionably more “Boy From School” than the histrionics of “Shake a Fist,” and that’s a good enough reason to stay with this band not just for the kids.

It may just be his best record. I’m New Here manages to pack a lifetime’s worth of artistic growth in one completely unobtrusive half-hour.

In practice and in total, Eyelid Movies isn’t a contrarian or particularly abrasive debut—it’s entirely likable, paced well and efficiently, dishing out a little something for everybody but never seemingly exhausted by this task.

With Black Noise the trance is too sporadic to even really exist, which does make it a much more appropriate record for a casual listen--but sometimes a listener just wants to get utterly lost.

Rebirth is career suicide for everybody except for Lil’ Wayne, just as hanging with him drug-wise for a night would be (I see him coaching a new friend, “No, you have to inhale through your eye“).

In this way, A Chorus of Storytellers resembles the Flaming Lips’ Embryonic (2009) in that it’s a characteristic and maybe even obvious album that stuffs a band’s commercial instincts under a protective layer of feints and refusals

while on a different album “Healter Skelter” might have been a wonderful bridge between some of the more structured stuff Shining used to do; on Black Jazz it’s just the most weird and interesting version of the same track we’ve already sat through three times.

For this and a couple other of IRM‘s electronic-heavy songs, Gainsbourg sounds like she’s doing her best Trish Keenan, though the songs lack the warmth and haunting tension a band like Broadcast can create from similar soundscapes.

This album is a misstep, certainly, but an exciting one nonetheless; I can only hope that eight months from now this band bangs out another shorter record superior to this one in every way.

Teen Dream is just such a fantastic pop record because it never seems to try to be: it’s almost as if the duo had intended to make another mopey shoegazing affair and accidentally stumbled upon something transcendent.

There is Love in You renders "Ringer" primer, posits itself as perfect solution to messy experimentation, and while it’s hard to find the divisiveness in that, it’s also hard to be truly moved.

After a decade of contrarian, even petulant repudiations of the music that made the Magnetic Fields famous, Realism is capitulation, contrition, and celebration at once. It’s back to basics in the best way.

CUD aren’t the first or best among many, but what you can hear when you listen to Boca Negra--in addition to a really excellent neo-jazz record--is the sounds of a band improvising while actually not really improvising. They’re unconsciously pulling from something rich and energetic and fundamental to the way we appreciate music.

It's in the zealous craftsmanship of doing just about everything right and causing that aggregate rightness to harmonize in vibrant song about trying to be better that the truth becomes evident: this band is for real.

What we have here is a great album, un- or under-appreciated....What Transference does is it opens a space for this band to experiment within again.

Once the shock of the new dissipates, what’s left is an impeccably assembled record worth indulging with the vigor that any of Lindstrom’s Christabelle-less work deserves.

Why Vampire Weekend seem uninterested in being a no frills pop band is a mystery. They slather what would sometimes be solid songwriting with such production doodads, intertextual namedrops, wry smirks, and defensive irony that the songs themselves are crushed under the weight

What’s clear, however, is that Heartland is a huge leap for Pallett on every level. These are the most accomplished songs he has written, and he makes up for the ground he cedes--predominantly his willingness to present conventional, immediate song structures--by making everything else so uniquely his own.

He’s good at what he does, and, to boot, he continues to release consistently enjoyable music, perhaps single-handedly keeping the obsolescing trip-hop out of the next decade’s dentist office.

“Robocop” works on Storytellers too, proving that there are fleeting moments of emotional honesty beneath this steaming heap of artifice, a reason, for some puzzling reason and perhaps beyond all better judgment, to still find oneself interested in what this guy will do next.

We Are Young Money is like a microcosm of Wayne’s career: often frustrating, frequently brilliant, and thoroughly, lovably weird.

Fall Be Kind doesn’t exactly break past the barriers set by this year’s "Merriweather Post Pavilion," but it is an excellent extension of the ethos captured by that particular record.

What they have done on its proper follow-up is neither lazy nor hollow, merely undefined, making no clear promises on future plans.

It is High Profile rap music. He’s buttoned up here, ready for the cameras, and on occasion, things work ecstatically.

It’s music that, outside of a live setting where one has the benefit of watching her assemble her loops, calls for patience, and it’s difficult to anticipate under what circumstances her techniques could lend themselves to something either more ambitious or longer in form or structure.

Waits is still an impassioned and awe-inspiring performer; here we can still hear, as invigorated as he was before I was born--or so I can guess.

Real Estate is a remarkable debut, and I really look forward to more from this band in the future, please, which will undoubtedly be soon in some form or another.

Garbus’s peculiarities are often quite charming--often, not always, because there’s only so much so-called cute we can be expected to tolerate, and though Bird-Brains remains on the side of acceptability, it flies dangerously close to the line (er, wire).

It’s not only an addition to 2009’s unassailably fantastic class of ambient music, but in a way is unique to that class for the menace with which it’s threaded.

After a month of digesting Seek Magic thoroughly, oscillating wildly between manic enthusiasm and a kind of defiant distrust of this whole act’s shtick, I’ve committed myself to the stance about which I felt most comfortable from the beginning: this is a very good album, but there are certain things about it with which I take issue.

It is overarchingly ambitious for a solo debut, and despite Casablancas’ pre-release claims that this was going to be some classico-synth detour straight out the asshole of Tattooine, the album rarely, rarely stumbles into po-mo theatrics.

Raditude is thoroughly extraneous. It is Weezer’s worst album.

Live at Reading is a corrective to all that [i.e. journals, Guitar Hero], a reminder that nothing so trivial could ever sully music as irreducible as this.

I err on the side of good rap, something Unexpected Guest is full of.

Felix’s uses the second-person address and the confusion it--as well as conventional instrumentation played in freer forms within more confined song structures--creates to produce an engaging, if harder to parse, take on something similar.

If anything, this is an effective teaser for a new Broadcast album, since many of the tracks here could easily be part of great Broadcast songs, but in this form, they aren’t, and it’s clear that we both know that.

The tracks feel quickly and easily produced but fucking delicious.

When these songs sound like El Perro del Mar fronting the saddest, slowest disco band in the world, they work out best, but too much of this “mini-album” doesn’t quite get there.

This is what we’ve been waiting for; we always knew they could do it.

OOIOO transforms what could be mush into wonderful, brilliant songs that fold and mutate the ideas they’re based on into moving and coherent narratives.

Embryonic works so staggeringly well because it's so unafraid to place itself in the lineage of unapologetically over-the-top rock album.

Blue Record is, in sound and spirit, satisfying metal painted with broad strokes and big gestures.

Whatever its origins, Psychic Chasms extols no actual reasons for being those ways, instead touching on now-expected tropes and empty gestures to fund a handful of ready-made critical anecdotes and popular opinions.

The album's explication of its own interest in contrast and conversation is perhaps its greatest virtue.

Regardless of his collaborators or how he chooses to approach his songs, The Life of the World to Come is further proof of Darnielle's ability, evident since long before he traded a boombox for a studio, to imbue his imagery, his sentiments, and his many characters with astounding weight and power.

It’s better than Nouns, better than the best songs on Weirdo Rippers (2007), and for once, I think, offers this cool idea that Randy and Dean’s next record might move away from the unilateral and slightly prudish use of noise as nothing but noise.

While moments off Bonfires have already proven hugely worthwhile, predominantly because of the textures Mel Draisey adds, it still lacks the cohesiveness, the clarion voice, of a band singularly in control of a well-tread sound.

He for sure knows enough that this sound lives and dies by its honesty, and that Childish Prodigy is just that, just an honest album, the best he could have made now, the best of its kind for a long long time. More please!

They are doing the same thing they always do, which entails gorgeous and gracefully surprising variations on a deeply resonant motif.

Dead Man’s Bones is about death, right, and about love, testing where one touches the other, flirting with sensations similar and enduring the inability to confront or frankly deal with that intimacy. Had this record a thicker dramatic arc or something less confining than a spreadsheet of rules, then maybe the songs wouldn’t so inevitably miss their obvious marks.

The garish cover of Ghostdini is apt: this is an elaborate and unfunny joke, not to mention--if it even bears mentioning at this point—profoundly hateful to women

Why There Are Mountains is plain pleasing indie rock--how it used to be, how it’s ceased to be since, at least in spirit.

While a Basement Jaxx album used to feel like a below-the-radar party for real heads, Scars could easily soundtrack a celebrity bash. That’s not the Jaxx’s fault, of course, though capitulation suits them.

It’s a counterfactual, of course, but I’ve got to think that Monsters of Folk circa 2005 would have come up with something a bit more substantive than this.

Despite having ties to shitgaze, this isn’t a record obsessed with that aesthetic, and this works to its advantage, since these songs clearly aspire to be bigger than that and have very real potential to be.

Here we’re given a respite from Bon Iver’s heavy crises while still loving on Bon Iver; here, Volcano Choir is inevitably weightless--a pretty happy band with a pretty happy album.

Eskimo Snow simply categorizes those words in a bit more careful, less adventurous fashion than Wolf and company have revealed before. While this latest release is quite literally the second side of the same coin (or recording session), it feels flatter.

While A Brief History of Love isn’t quite capable of recapturing the rush upon hearing “Bittersweet Symphony” or “This is Music” for the first time, the Big Pink’s reverence towards those songs and their era and everything they represented is extremely well executed. And greatly appreciated.

Deeply individualistic, dark and woebegotten, one can’t help but root for his continued presence seemingly regardless of his efforts.

For an album so brazenly loud it leaves little impression; as a record supposedly about statements, it makes very few intelligibly. Most inexcusably, it lacks imagination.

While Skitter on Take-Off is a great album, At the Cut is a brilliant one.

A little more effort at the end would have been appreciated, but so long as you’re content with paying full price for what’s essentially twenty-eight minutes of listenable music, Backspacer works as a fun little rock n’roll record.

Nobody who has ever had some semblance of an interest in this band should ignore Journal For Plague Lovers, which is simply far more awesome than anyone had a right to expect.

Time to Die doesn’t seem to strive for anything, so it settles into being a pleasant little pop record, boring and bereft of character.

Which isn’t to say that the rest of the album isn’t impressive at certain points, though the law of diminishing returns weighs heavily here.

Ashes is A Sunny Day’s stripes, their first truly great album of scope.

It's not that the record is so unclassifiable--shit is downright pleasant to listen to--as it exudes the confidence to acknowledge its influences and contemporaries with the same convivial grace that has marked Q-Tip's entire career.

While it at least confesses that there’s a reason for the band to state it’s on your side—an admission of bad things in the face of a strong insistence that art not harsh anyone’s mellow—the album acts as a sort of side step to those bad things rather than a head-on address. Music this consistently gorgeous deserves a little better.

Suffice it to say, Milky Ways covers more territory than a dance album of its ilk rightfully should, though it never really clings to that designation in the first place and struggles to fit into any sensible line of kin.

Thorpe and co. can still sound as if they play against rather than off one another. But Two Dancers, a huge improvement that comes only one year after their debut, is certainly the sounds of Wild Beasts becoming a band to keep tabs on.

Despite the 26 minutes wasted by these final tracks, as damning as that sounds, this is still a very good Yo La Tengo record.

The real nuggets of the album, however, lie in the moments when the inherent melancholy behind Hart’s doe-eyed mysticism comes out.

The Blueprint's vaunted resuscitation of sample-based boom-bap rap production is replaced here by big corny synth wipes, a sometimes-fascinating corollary to Jay’s corporate sense of purpose.

Vivian Girls have responded in a way I never saw coming. Everything Goes Wrong is, proudly and brilliantly, a long player.

This being their (sort of) third album, HEALTH have ostensibly defined their formula and they seem content with that, tweaking without straying from their core of grating guitars, ghostly vocals, and the occasional synth.

Raekwon has not made a valid sequel to that classic--but he has quite validly added a couple hundred new bars to that performance.

For East of Eden to be such an assured sophomore release, Victoria Bergsman has a kind of steely reserve to take herself further out of the picture on records to come.

The hooks don’t sink in quite as quickly as compared to prior Monkeys’ efforts, but there’s also a lot more going on, and the newfound emphasis on atmosphere prevents Humbug from having the Side-B blahs that were prevalent on "Favourite Worst Nightmare."

The point is that all of the Hidden Cameras is in here, but it’s not all shined to a high polish and adorned with neon lights, and that works an interesting effect.

Watch Me Fall isn’t evolution, but it is certainly maturation, the first physical testament of aging as a slog toward something better.

As a breakup narrative, it’s successful. As pop music, it’s either too insular or simply unable to turn Silberman’s own experience into something one would desire to revisit.

King of Jeans, for the most part, delivers compact, devastating blows--the tautest, in fact, that the band has ever dealt.

The distance that keeps Elvrum’s tiny voice from ever rising above a negligible squeak is applied to our relationship with this pretty, roaring Wind’s Poem. It’s a harrowing problem, like getting stuck between a stone and a hard something, for every Phil Elvrum fan imaginable. And who isn’t nowadays.

Intuit makes sense, easy enough; it elucidates Knopf’s part in his more popular band, as if that were a secret, and it tentatively allows a familiar songwriter some more control, some new ground.

I love that Bay of Pigs sounds like an extended triumphant version of most things Dan’s attempted in the past, only bigger, better, and with more of a plot.