The problem isn’t the music, which is lively and varied, but the disconnect between the artistic intent and the artistic output.

Cuban Linx 2 was a glorious mess, but Wu-Massacre throws so many punches I feel at times like I’m listening to a promotional album sampler for some amazing full-length to be released later in the year.

The problem seems to be a not yet fully developed understanding of how to make their pop moments gel with the layered atmosphere they seem committed to.

They finally hit a hipster-heavy scene with what should have been a maverick heat-seeker of a debut and end up too tiring to interest most of the hipsters who long ago became bored of swapping their “Alice Practice” 7” on Soulseek.

The type of pretension that rears its fluffy manicured head on Finding Forever is one flatly insidious, lying in plush vibing harpsichord wait ("Intro"), in pattered bongo spoken word nobility ("Black Maybe"), and finally erupting in a 7½ minute crossharp-cooing, Crash-namedropping, butterfuck of pretension, exploding the boundaries of how fucking wack we ever, ever, ever thought Common could get.

I’m finding these chocolate bar grooves and dark, open spaces in Watersports a pretty nice place to be, and if the guys in Mi Ami have mellowed a bit with age, they haven’t gotten any less interesting or vital, still embroiled with the spirit and verve that supposedly ended at the Black Cat not all that long ago.

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).

Inevitably, how they treat their dominant influences is what separates the Zutons from the Coral. While the Coral have yet to truly define their sound, The Zutons can bounce from funk, to zoot-suit swing (“Dirty Dancehall”) to alt-country (“Remember Me”) and yet have that tangible, original quality to their music that makes for an impressively cohesive debut album.

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.

It’s a predictable formula, a majority of the tracks building to a triumphant climax set to an egg timer, peppered with forced witticisms, seemingly culled from Postsecret, that have reached a new apex of laziness.

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.

Velocifero‘s flaws are mostly minor, stylistic quibbles that could be leveled at any one of Ladytron’s other three albums—namely, that each song could stand to be about thirty seconds shorter (more easily forgiven on the dance floor), and that they have a tendency to repeat the kicker far more often than necessary (same).

Still, as much as the warped good intentions of the album can get exhausting and embarrassing, Nas and Damian's creative side remains pure enough to carry one through the lunkheaded didacticism.

[It has] a woozy Beulah-plays-Beach Boys vibe.

Black Sands is an album so fully realized that comprehending the places he still so obviously has yet to reach is staggering.

The Russian Wilds is a demonstrative bid for being taken seriously, and these guys simply exhibit too much enthusiasm to be relegated to mere also-rans in the long shadow of Miller's previous band.

Ritzy Bryan’s choruses are as sturdy as they need to be and the songs are an improvement upon those on The Big Roar because they’re lither and punchier, packing more hairpin turns into shorter run times.

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

Think what you want about its theatricality, its twee --- at base, it’s a technically accomplished album, and if you’re willing to give yourself over to it, or do lots of drugs, a charming ride.

The disc tends to coast now and then, though it’s hard to say if that’s due to chinks in the songwriting armor or the band’s straightforwardness. Still, rock for rock’s sake is not without meaning.

Thrills is technical to a “T” and plenty competent, but its lack of stylistic push or spread marks its void of hunger or ambition, a space that the mechanized heart of Berlinette nearly pumped blood into.

This is easily the most stripped-down album of their catalogue since their first one, and, not coincidentally, the best.

Some Cities is easily their best since Lost Souls, and while repeated listens won't likely reveal it better than their debut, it's often equally as hypnotizing.

For Golden Smog, this is another fine album; fine, fun, but never great enough to make you forget that these guys are in other bands.

So it essentially comes down to the fact that “Come Down on Me” and “Go” are likely going to be two of the best tracks of the year, but that a great deal of ’64-’95 is less likely to stick to memory.

The album’s arrangements are as thematically monotone as the raw lyrics, building rock beds for Elvrum’s unpredictable, but dangerously uniform, vocal melodies.

The production swamps. Too many waves of superfluities covering weak melodies and spearheading disappointing "new directions," too often sounding like the work of a far less interesting band.

RKives as a whole, hopeful and appreciative above all else, a way for the band and the fans to celebrate what they had one last time before returning to the present, to careers already well into the next phase.

Salem evokes the seismic thrill of a good Gucci drop alongside all of Nico's ghostly beauty within the very framework and timbre of their productions. The result is no less than one of 2010's most exciting debuts.

Though at times deeply affecting, Voyageur is not the great statement of a record one might hope for after a four-year absence.

It’s a shame to see the character of Mike Skinner become so stale and hackneyed, especially when the beats are stronger than they’ve ever been before.

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.

Siouxsie has always seemed fearless and unstoppable; while this is refreshing, it is unnerving to see her shatter the persona she has so slavishly created for herself.

While MGMT may no longer peddle the kind of instant-pleasure-point melodic textures that propelled the band's most well-known songs into so many playlists, they're up to something far more interesting: releasing a major, mainstream objet d'art without for a minute fooling themselves that it "matters."

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.

The Rural Alberta Advantage are an excellent Toronto band that before this year nobody outside of Toronto cared much at all about; here’s hoping their follow-up manages to capitalize on what’s good here to make something really memorable.

Though I'd hardly go as far to call it their best album, which I guess makes U2 irrelevant by Bono's logic, its best songs can credibly stand alongside their classics, and how many bands can maintain this level of vitality 30 years into their career? I give.

This isn’t progress, it’s pleasant, capable, effortless stagnation; the dream’s already finished and we can’t, for the love of everything, recall what it was about.

What damns them is how they frequently grasp at Grizzly Bear’s familiar brand of prettiness, rarely capturing the effortlessness that would keep a better record afloat.

Relistening, the porousness and vapidity of the material makes it pretty obvious that rapper Jeezy’s personality is one note, gruff and brash, forever and ever. But in the album’s waning moments, 'My President' erases any genuine qualms, sporting the record’s best Toomp impression.

Littering their album with frail songwriting and all but killing off the aggression of their percussion, the band inexplicably jump into ill-advised stylistic misfires---with a few too many missed falsetto notes.

It practically goes without saying that fans of guitar heavy psychedelia and mind-altering substances will find plenty to enjoy here.

It’s conceivable that she can be marketed as a hipper Michelle Branch (the string arrangements get a little schmaltzy), but at her most accessible she’s still too resolutely quirky.

this is nothing amazing but after the understandably sombre "Margerine Eclipse" (2004), the studious "Fab Four Suture" (2006), and Laetitia’s cerebral study into duality of the self on "Monstre Cosmic" (2008), it is refreshing to feel the joy.

There’s just something about it --- I like Pixel Revolt, and I like it a lot.

The album's best moments are when Drew's fundamental pop becomes unhinged and thrashes passionately about its aesthetic playground, planetoids seeming at odds in their mad swing through space but connected by some invisible force.

Beautiful, thematic, meticulous, revelatory, and challenging.

Make no mistake, this is a slight record, but nonetheless one with more than a few enjoyable moments.

Tussle have sharpened their edges, sawed excess fats and driftwood from their bloated frame, and end up sluicing waters--at least some of the time. It’s the most cohesive decision they’ve made yet, but one wonders what Cream Cuts would have sounded like had it been unbound rather than streamlined.

Pros: Farina is an excellent drummer and singer, and MacKaye hasn’t lost any of his righteous anger. Cons: with only two people you just can’t be viciously loud.

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.

Visitations is cold.

Ditherer is a far-flying leap above and beyond anything that Fog’s done before, but not a shocking leap because it’s still very clear that this is Fog.

Essentially, Blood Bank is one pretty song--the titular, opening track settling somewhere close to what Damien Jurado’s doing these days--and two similarly pretty experiments in stretching Bon Iver’s sound.

There’s a lot of filler here, even for Ryan.

They now play with a heads-down resolve that is thrilling.

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.

I want to stress one last time, post-catch, that these aren’t terrible songs, nor do they add up to a terrible album. But the net effect is nevertheless one of tedium and disappointment, a partial reminder of "War Elephant's" potential instead of an attempt to realize it.

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.

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.

Ultimately, this is nothing more than workaday feel good bar music, technically well executed with the peaks and troughs in all the right places.

As a whole, it's not consistently buoyant enough to be a good pop record, and the politics that weigh down its middle section aren't sharp enough to make it into anything more than a middle section weighed down by some obvious politics.

If Chris Adams descended into his cozy lair to try his hand at glitch and rid his fingers of Hood’s snoozy bleating, he found a safe median, driving his ideas years behind the curve, distinguishing himself from his previous band by tinier and tinier increments as the tracklist exhausts.

So, no, this isn’t groundbreaking sound art, just really good dream-pop, as pleasant as this music can get without being--don’t deny the thought you indelibly harbored--cloying; that’s a space that we need bands to fill.

It is rewarding that the album should end showing his passion displayed as a performer and shining through as a song-writer. The only problem is, with the rest of the album being so slight, it’s may be too easy for most to stop listening before they get to it.

It wavers back and forth between showcasing the band’s strengths and having fun in the moment, more like a live show than a unified statement.

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.

This is serious sound art, and it evokes a now near-mythical pre-Recession time when experimental artists didn't feel the need to obliquely reference the outside world.

One of the most immediate records of the year so far, Here We Go Magic materialize as if they’ve always been here. Which, it turns out, may be right where they deserve to be.

It's a realization in retrospect that occurs too often throughout In Heaven. And in those moments one can't help but be disappointed, hearing Twin Sister such a cut below what they were doing just one short year ago.

At least 45 of X&Y’s 63 minutes finds Coldplay overdosing on pointless synthesizers in the name of “expanding their sound” while forgetting to write anything reflecting a decent hook.

This is an album made for car trips by a band best suited for noisy bars; you’re going to want to play it loud.

Deft, flawed, entertaining, thrilling, and disappointing, often at the same time.

There are hits on Good Girl Gone Bad, big clubfisted ones, but they're wedged in with facsimiles and reductions.

Rather than anticipating something new, Small Craft on a Milk Sea ultimately feels like one of the final surges of a style and format that Eno himself is outgrowing.

Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is actually pretty good, and sometimes it’s great, but it is quiet, sounding very much like it sprung from the Internet ether to politely ask for thirty minutes of your attention.

So, um, good? Yeah, but in the same way grilled cheese sandwiches are.

This is the sort of record you’re gonna put on when the sun’s shining and you just need some good old pop-rock.

Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams is as silly, day-glo, eccentric, and all over the place as its title.

Saturday Night Wrist continues the Deftones’ sad trend, another album of scattered transcendent moments in a field of attention-getting parlour tricks, still eagerly tugging at the listener’s sleeve to say, "Listen to this sound we created!"

A lock for most promising debut of '08.

Every song, for better or worse, is constructed with its own identity in mind, and if nothing else, Mondanile commits to each and every one of these attempts at distinction.

Though, technically, the production is much “improved” here, meaning that the album is louder and clearer, it’s still not a very enjoyable listen when the listener can’t shake the idea that something’s amiss.

It's not his best record by any stretch of the imagination, but it's one I'll reach for more casually and consistently than his recent stuff.

The problem here being that the clean production values are themselves another veil masking Williams' fundamental badness--and so this album becomes, like its predecessors, an exercise in misdirection and deceit.

The vast majority of the new Roots album lacks what has made their earlier albums so exciting: spontaneity, originality, musical chops, and a sense of purpose.

Strictly speaking not much has changed since this Japanese trio’s debut EP Neji/Tori washed up on North American shores, but somehow that previous effort had so much charming belligerence and ferocity and Destination Tokyo sounds bored and meandering.

Enemy Mine is altogether more defined in its varying forms, food groups falling out a cornucopia rather than coming together like the stew that bubbled in the "Beast Moans" cauldron.

"Bait and Switch," the best song on Port of Morrow, recaptures some of this eager, joyful glee; but in my opinion, the rest of the album holds none of these virtues.

Set Free’s singularity is also its greatest flaw, and a band that adheres to a formula as strictly as the AmAnSet does to its will never make a masterpiece, despite the fact that every track on this album is good.

Plague Park is in many ways a darker, less inviting listen than his previous work.

Load Blown is damaged as a whole, even despite its overwhelming internal coherence that makes for few surprises along the way.

The best the band could do is take this folk stance and make it somehow relatable to the sort of listeners like those in Chicago, blessed as they are with one of the most storied and diverse stocks of bands in the country. What Of the Cathmawr Yards ends up instead is a cold catalogue of personal taste and increasingly diminishing scope.

At this point, we can assume with a fair amount of certainty that they won't be throwing a diverse masterwork our way any time soon, and if the most we can ask for is a consistent run through low-tempo folk, Riot is probably as good as they're going to give us.

I'm elated to report that Zonoscope is a more than worthy successor to Colours, adhering to the tried and true follow-up formula of introducing just enough new wrinkles to their method to keep the proceedings from being a rehash, but containing plenty of the rapturous pop hooks that drew us to them in the first place.

Like a professor spewing a semi-clever lecture on civil rights and contemporary left politics where he’s pretty good at rhyming his facts but acts like rhyming is all the sinew that his presentation needs to connect the bones of his argument.

Phoenix has somehow managed to follow a universally acclaimed breakout record with one that not only avoids falling flat, but succeeds at creating and sustaining a subtly different atmosphere.

Panic Prevention is no classic, but a wonderful testament to intuition, which boisterously, and rightfully, posits Jamie T in that rare class of pioneering artist, one who has created a piece of work to stand with any of the other notable records released so far this year.