If there's any band that's completely earned the right to gracefully knock themselves off, it's R.E.M. It only took them fourteen years.

FaCE manages to be new, fresh and experimental while still retaining the listenability of much of Pollard’s seemingly never-ending canon.

For their first lengthy introduction, they seem to have lost some verve. It’s a frustrating representation of what a tightrope their sort of exorcism music is.

It’s Not Me It’s You is neither grating or annoying. It’s merely boring.

It suffers both in comparison to Black’s other solo material and on its own decidedly alt-country terms.

Even though it strictly operates in one gear, Last Secrets navigates all the richness the high road has to offer.

Reefer feels like a pleasant departure from that tired self-parody; tossed-off but in a good way.

Over time Napa Asylum reveals itself as remarkably cohesive and more than willing to cede points of entry every few tracks. Still an exhausting experience, sure, but one that's often thrilling, and well worth the effort it requires of us.

It's hungry, vicious synergy that the Detroit duo's got going here and one can only hope that it's something they can eventually translate into something longer than an EP, or at least something with more depth.

The lion’s share of these tracks throb with a purpose that was mostly absent from their last effort.

Reptilians is a batch of competent dance-pop-not as groundbreaking as fans have hoped, not as obnoxious as non-fans may've assumed-overcompensating for all the patience they've tested and the goodwill they squandered on their looping baby-steps back to the Starfucker moniker.

Folks, to my ultimate chagrin, this Divine Providence album wallows in such unencumbered, unmoving crap-it breaks my fucking heart.

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

While their particular brand of retro goth garage is obviously built on an extremely derivative foundation of 60s garage, the Cramps, and the Damned, they're infinitely more interesting in practice than the majority of beige-rock being pushed by the UK music press.

The Sister is another fine record in Nadler's growing catalogue, yet one tied more to the well-trodden tropes (lyrically, stylistically) she's built her name on than we've grown accustomed.

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!

Although a respectable, yet fickle bid at club fodder, schmaltzy ballads, and trend riding one offs, something about it just doesn’t fit.

The Future Will Come is still a mostly solid as just about any full-length release on DFA, and if some of the best ideas die too soon or don’t go far enough, at least they appear at all.

To revise a debut with only a slightly more effective result is nevertheless disappointing for all of their fans awaiting an album as moving as their live show.

It’s one fat, grotesque record. A used-car salesman’s pitch during the Apocalypse.

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

Lost Marbles is no more inconsistent than most respectable bands’ A-side albums, and attains greater brilliance on a number of occasions than they could ever hope for.

News and Tributes does lack the visceral immediacy of its predecessor, and is a significant if subtle departure for the band, so it would be hard for anyone who fell in love with their debut to embrace it immediately. But, given time, the record gets under your skin in slow and somewhat surprising ways, eventually coming off sounding like a very good transitional album by a group with a whole lot more staying power than most would have credited them with two years ago.

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.

Popp sounds as if he's having a ten-year-old argument with himself, and though he's certainly earned the right to make the point that this argument still holds currency, O is less than convincing.

With Playtime Is Over Wiley is finally living up to his reputation by achieving consistency without becoming mediocre; delivering a steady, honed set that's sharp enough to split flesh from bone.

Quaristice--the band’s 9th full length, with about as many EPs--is probably the best album Autechre could have created at this point in their career.

The honesty of Bozulich and her band is striking, their creativity voracious.

Port Entropy, Shugo's fifth LP (depending on how you reckon Fragment, his 2003 CD-R self-release), decisively occupies the realm of the waking: the nimble, the abstract, and the exciting.

Better to think of this one as a purposefully delineated double A-side.

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.

Worldwide‘s participatory highs are intense, if fleeting, and that cover would look amazing on a t-shirt.

Despite some engaging song-craft, however, the album overall feels lacking in real substance and its fixations leave me blase.

What The Tale Tells employs stock language to present stock characters going through stock conflicts.

Angles manages litheness; First Impressions was all sludge. And despite the rumored ills surrounding the recording process, the resulting album paints the band as re-energized and optimistic, playful in a way their last record so detrimentally wasn't.

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.

The record is absolutely at a pace with the band's great debut.

There’s plenty of virtually virtuoso moments to make it worthwhile, and Doom just isn’t one to suck no matter how prolific he gets, but this sequel can’t help but disappoint after Vaudeville Villain.

Patrick Wolf still engenders a puzzling and sometimes fascinating discussion about romanticism and pretension and authenticity and songwriter worship, but what’s disappointing is that he seems to no longer be a part of that discussion, simply the subject of it.

Despite the fact that it’s an obvious misstep from a band that seemed bulletproof... it's still a strong album with a lot more charm than, say, the Bravery or the Killers.

Three more songs of similar quality and dropping the story about how this was just some free writing experiment and Sweaty Magic would probably have been one of my albums of the year.

On Talk to La Bomb, the main elements of the Brazilian Girls debut are still in place, but both vocal and instrumental elements head toward the middle, leaving us with a more polished and ultimately less satisfying listen.

Tokyo Police Club have readjusted their approach-a much leaner, Strokes-ier brand of indie rock, which allows them to continue to play to their strengths while conveniently avoiding the missteps that held them back before.

Listening to this record is like hearing someone who has some moral fiber describe their first one-night stand. There is seriousness, jubilation, unease, and regret.

There's a lot of rappity-rap cliches at work here: overwrought punchlines, vague disses, bitching about the industry. Kweli spends a good chunk of the album acting like a drunk, unemployed superhero, stumbling into supermarkets to aid old ladies whose purses are fully in their possession.

The remainder of Echoes is considerably more diffuse, engaging in levels of genre-hopping that might seem a little desperate were it not for the fact that most of the songs hold up.

Although flawed, Rockferry holds a startling amount of promise.

Kidnapped by Neptune is overly long and ambitious, even if it is a determined step towards something far more interesting.

Forth is a decent reminder of what makes the Verve great.

It's probably their most immediate and consistent record to date, tossing in a few decent melodies along the way in an attempt -- a failed one, I might add -- to enter the slightly less crowded lot of mediocre country-rock outfits.

March of the Zapotec is a serviceable, if less than memorable, expansion of Beirut’s already established sound via the Jiminez Band, a 19-piece band from Mexico. Realpeople Holland is fucking awful techno music that is desert-bereft, wholly disposable, and somehow makes Condon’s crooner’s dollop seem alien and unlistenable for the first time. If

Vocals seem to serve The Diver much better the more they're respected as atmospheric elements in addition to interesting texts, and the band make good on that necessary compromise throughout.

Pick out the antihero tracks and one or two missteps and you have every Beck album (no typo) crammed into one disc with more wit and charm and weird science and heartache than that dude’s cumulative catalogue.

ADULT. are an awesome band that have yet to make an awesome album. This one, however, is still pretty damn good.

Myths of the Near Future is probably the most assured British debut since Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled.

It is during this fifteen-minute stretch that the album transcends its familiar, blokey, mad-for-it Mancunian template and, though you've heard all these tricks before, achieves something charming, familiar, fucking good-and this is the level on which Delphic needs to operate more often if they're going to wring a lasting impression from this sound.

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.

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

The guitars are louder, the songs are a little more complex, and so the band walks a tightrope between power-pop and rawk.

None of the really experimental stuff is so egregious to mar the album; it’s just fairly disposable after one keen listen. On the other hand, the good, funky stuff isn’t quite as good or funky as it has been in the past.

Where the compilation loses itself is in its exhaustive nature. An update to the sound of older songs (albeit not much older) seems appropriate enough given how important production was to the scream and sheen of their self-titled album.

Perhaps its primary feat is that the music manages to sound fresher than anything industrial-tinged has a right to sound.

It’s not like everybody’s playing a different song. Everybody’s playing the same song. It’s just that, for great boring swathes, that song sounds stubborn. It sounds like it doesn’t want to be played.

All in all, Teenager stands as both a distillation of the band’s strengths and an impressive step forward, and perhaps more importantly, an irony-free, immensely relatable look at the heady emotional extremes of youth.

Yes, the beats are big and the sound is mainstream and commercial; however, the band sound restrained and uncomfortable.

Nite Jewel’s schtick may well revolve around crafting a distinctive and specific sound/mood and doing it well, but Good Evening‘s best moments arise when Gonzalez goes for just a little more range.

Together is paced excellently at a little over 44 minutes, feels like half of that, and not a single song warrants a skip.

This album simply sounds like their first with inferior production and less-memorable songs.

In the context of their seemingly blinkered attempts at finding some source of inspiration they've produced an entertainingly atmospheric, melodic record to bracing and accessible effect.

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.

Some of the more irregular numbers scream “demo” between their whisperings--think very early Arab Strap, midi beats in place of the crass Scottish semen puns--but overall it’s a solid little barometer, one or two cues offering insight into Casiotone’s current organic direction.

If this is your thing, you'll be happy (sad?) to hear that Eisold has done it again, and offers us yet another beautifully written and comprehensively detailed chapter in the endless book of self.

It was as if all of those constituent elements were combined in equal parts and to perfect balance and have since simply been maintained.

So in comes an album with zero individuality, zero originality, zero workaroundability...and it’s really good. How good this thing can get is sort of terrifying considering how bad this material might sound in the hands of other bands.

Though its pleasures may not be quite as direct as his work with Crayon Fields, and its tempos remain thoroughly slow, it remains a standout among a rapidly-increasing number of hardware and software-driven thrillseekers, more than ample evidence that O'Connor's work is worth taking notice of.

Even the best songs of Our Love To Admire can’t reach the boggling complexity and honesty of most anything from "Turn On The Bright Lights" (2002).

There’s something oddly sweet about how completely out of step Eels are with trends and genres, something nourishing about how secluded their music has become. Shame, then, that it must necessarily also be so exclusive.

At the very least, II manages consistency where so many collaborations sound like two minds in separate corners.

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

Pleasure essentially satisfies, even if I have to admit that it's hard not to feel absolutely, completely, and totally lied to by virtually everything about Pure X that isn't their music.

Born Ruffians are as eloquent in their summation of today’s indie rock style as any other likeminded band; in that sense Red, Yellow & Blue is as literate and aware as its title’s reference to primary colors implies. But knowingly limiting one’s scope to temporary fun predictably keeps the band from turning out something with lasting power.

It’s unquestionable that Shine contains more than a few of the most embarrassing recorded moments of Anastasio’s career... More often than not however, Shine serves as a fine reminder that Anastasio is a pro who’s been doing the rock thing far too long to release a crap product.

Substantive lyrics aren’t part of Pip Brown’s forte but, then again, they’re totally unnecessary in the genre to which she peddles.

The album is imminently listenable, providing a brisk background as easily as it rewards a close listen.

Heavy comes across more a shtick than Beginning Stages ever did.

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.

While sonically it's different from anything else on Rich Forever, it's a product of the same insecurity machine that produces the rest of the tape's insistent cajoling.

I’m convinced that Bechtolt and Evans have a ton of potential that’s simply going completely unrealized for all but about nine minutes of See Mystery Lights, which leaves it feeling like a party that never actually gets going for some inexplicable reason as everyone involved tries too hard.

The Dead Weather have released another quickly recorded batch of entirely unmemorable, unpleasantly limp rock music showcasing Jack White’s increasingly irrelevant take on garage, blues, post-punk, and guitar refuse.

Zimmerman's toned-down delivery and seeming refusal to belt out his lyrics, combined with the slow, slow sprawl of the tracks herein, make Dub Egg an exhausting and arid listen, even when its tracks are so individually satisfying.

Sets a new bar for self-consciously unlikeable indie rock.

King Animal bucks the trend by being reasonably good. It is unquestionably a Soundgarden album, and far better than anyone had a right to expect.

Said new record is what one would expect: wholly similar to their first three records in that it’s got three possible hit singles, a useless Side B, and is proudly derivative of at least six other bands. They are amusingly impervious to trends. So long as you can get your head around the fact that it’s, y’know, Stone Temple Pilots, this, their self-titled sixth full-length, is far better than any pointless reunion album needs to be.

Underwhelming.

Basically, if you're a Suede fan looking for a way forward in 2011, then factorycraft is your personal lifeline, a snake-hipped mating dance with a guy who's got a mouth like a Hearts supporter, a mouth that exists purely to confess-jealously, restlessness, rashes, warts, and all. Happy scratching.

Her multitudinous influences, free from the collagen that an omnipresent production team offered, have dissolved and separated out of their former matrix, the subsequent runny blotches of genre-hashing burbling up to fill Kelis Was Here with rubbish that has no discernible order.

Despite all the quasi-soundtrack leanings, Pivot also possess that rare balance of immediacy and densely populated song-spans.

Sings Live! is clearly an offering from Colin Meloy to his devoted fans who have either especially enjoyed his shows or have never had the opportunity to attend them. In that respect, this live collection achieves its (hardly lofty) goals, and for that Meloy should be applauded, perhaps not as raucously as at his shows, but, y’know, a golf clap would be appropriate.