The band seems unsure of what instincts to follow to get more intimate, streamlined rock; their attempts produce a hodgepodge of style that in turns prevents the kind of gut reaction that normally attracts listeners to rock in the first place.

It cements the Clientele as one of the best pop bands around today.

This is the New Year. And there’s plenty of Bedhead in the New Year. Just not enough, unfortunately, in The New Year.

Nothing Hurts ends up being its own worst enemy: it obscures its biggest strengths, choosing not to showcase them but to drown them out in a familiar and uninteresting haze.

He's pushing himself ever so slightly, and while it might not be enough to draw in the unconverted, the rest of us will want to stick around for more.

Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You is a triumphantly together record, focused and witty and emotional and present in the way that only someone rediscovering his life’s work can be.

The result is a nearly anonymous album of stellar pop music, one where it seems all the attention was placed not on positioning Carly Rae as a cultural force, but on making sure Emotion makes you smile.

This record is hip-hop as post-ambient.

There’s a central and important paradox at work here, something that elevates the record above what might otherwise be emo-aspirations of gushy earnestness. Singer Devon Welsh makes himself the first target of an incisive analysis.

Here we see the often-resourceful Deacon approaching a big canvas with too little paint, and the result is a record which feels bloated, overlong, and ultimately empty.

Forgiveness Rock Record doesn't provide anything interesting to talk about in and of itself. Its actual thematic talking points, as far as I can tell, tend toward political pedantry.

In the Reins is a clear success.

It is a slender, limber album, blissfully aware of itself and not daring to overstay its welcome.

But despite the hit-and-miss subject matter you can’t ever get mad. [Slug]consistently does a fantastic job with his (underrated) delivery, which has improved drastically over the last three records.

The result is a mellow, atmospheric album that still manages to embody the delicious, self-absorbed, fuck-all bombast currently making mainstream rap so exciting.

It's an appealing, bombastic hybrid of '90s nostalgia, and anything less than audience ear drum obliteration is not an option.

This is more than a diary set to music; it’s an interactive map. It is a scrapbook of love gone wrong, including ripped photos, amateur pencil sketches, tear-stained poems, and ticket stubs.

Really, the sad emptiness of these raps needs little explication from me.

Object 47 does an excellent job of making a leap toward the avant-pop side of the pop/punk wire walked by…uh…Wire on "Chairs Missing" and "154."

Like similarly engaging pop music, Room(s) diversifies and moulds its winning formula into a variety of fledgling creations.

Franklin Bruno and the Extra Lens provide a welcome respite from the false but persistent mythology of Darnielle as a solitary genius; Undercard gives his songwriting some breathing room and a refreshing dose of collaboration.

Women As Lovers is a beautiful masturbation, and a little death for us all.

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.

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.

By now, Sage Francis is emo; however populist you cut it, he’s treading familiar paths, rhyming in familiar cadence, arguing with the asshole authority of an artist much too comfortable with his niche.

This might sound like a blunder, but Diplo can never be criticized for not being adventurous enough; though he can be criticized, magnanimously, for Major Lazer.

Saint Bartlett, Jurado's ninth album and a perfect place to start for the uninitiated, succeeds mostly because it seems to attempt nothing in particular.

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

It is familiar. It is, despite whatever priggishness keeps some publications from printing the band’s name in full, safe.

It sounds like a Manic Street Preachers album, which alone renders it still better than all of the similar arena rock you can name.

The Eraser is not Radiohead good.

Maybe it lacks the frenetic energy of Night Falls Over Kortedala, but I Know What Love Isn't is a great record in its own right, a showcase of Lekman's prodigious storytelling gifts that also makes an effort to connect those stories, and that music, into an emotionally resonant whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The three audio discs... are a mixed bag at best.

Chairlift are perfectly capable of producing a really good album; Something just isn't it.

Ashes & Fire might mark the first time he could ever been described as simply dull.

It's a deeply felt, lively record that stands tall on its own merits, and further proof that Tucker's talent is bigger than that which can be expressed through one band's sound.

Somehow the mistakes she made before-experiments with Swedish folk tunes, reggae-pop, and fringe-aesthetic miscellanea, having achieved varying degrees of success with each attempt-have become character-building idiosyncrasies she now seems borderline faceless without.

What's the same is bigger and broader, bringing its faults into stark relief. This is, I stress, Best Coast's Proper Album, and so rather than Where The Boys Are's loosely defined "songs" we get Songs: feeble, noise-soaked throw-back translations of everything from doo-wop, girl-group, pop-punk, to pseudo-grunge.

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.

Go, then, is strangely underdeveloped for how overdeveloped it feels; by no means a trifle, it's as hard to outright hate on as it is to be trampled by, just another lovely 40 minutes from a guy with easily another 40 up his frilly sleeve.

Parallax Error Beheads You improves upon [his previous] albums’ strengths--wide-eyed eclecticism among other things--managing greater coherence and scope than anything he’s ever done.

It's never a matter simply of pop melodies buried beneath noise, but of beauty wrapped up in menace, references tied to deeper ones, history feeding back at itself.

From admittedly unsympathetic ears, it’s a fruitless mess caked with vanity and smothered by its own insular delusions of prosperity.

Songs in A&E retains all of the weight of its self-imposed seriousness, its capital A artistic gravitas, but unfortunately leaves the uplift of invention to the memory of Spiritualized albums it so readily evokes.

Awash in grumbling drones and dissonant harmonies, swollen with a tension that rarely finds release, Of Sirens Born is at once terrifying and sublime.

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

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.

Oversteps is reasonably accessible without compromising any aspect of what it means to listen to an Autechre album, which is the closest I can come to a formula for success when it comes to this band. It’s probably ten minutes too long in the middle, but the distinctive intro is a winner and the last three tracks are worth the trek.

Though it's their first time out, Weekend has created a record that bellows out of speakers, that bites and sometimes doesn't play fair. Though uneven in areas, Sports packs a sucker punch. Best sit still and brace yourself.

We’ve been shown angry Clark, blinded by passion and vigor, and we’ve seen drowsy, reverb-soaked Clark, but never before have the two parts struggled with one another in such a fascinating, rewarding way.

Although they have some serviceable indie disco hits, Clor are merely the latest production line band to explore a niche in the market, though their attempt at nerdy, computerised post punk rubs one off as a flawed blend of, of all things, The Downward Spiral and Zwan.

Forget the hype now; when they made this last summer, without hype, without de-habilitating expectation, they may just have created the finest indie-rock album of the year.

Flavorless.

There's a bright side to Tennis moving beyond the measures of this LP: while tackling newer songmatter, delving into their return to land, maybe their songwriting habits will similarly shift gears with a degree of scrutiny that steps up to the plate and complements everything they brought to Cape Dory.

Class Clown gives us what is most best and most constant about the band--their sonic restlessness, shambolic hooks, broken glory--and nothing less.

It sounds more coherent than episodic, placeless, and with a definite emphasis on the rock aspects that, on "Recording a Tape," were used sparingly.

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.

Anything ends with all expectations met, but little else. Martina Topley-Bird has the kind of voice that deserves beautiful and strange accompaniment, and as such, most songs beg for so much more.

Increasingly abstract or not, Richard Buckner’s a great songwriter.

Despite its democratic structure, Unsound suffers from a curious sequencing problem, or what we around here like to call Channel Orange-itis--but few bands of their vintage continue to write songs this prolifically or professionally.

Begone Dull Care spans eight aimless, meandering slow jams--each averaging a bloated six and a half minutes--and, returning to the pacing issues that threatened to put "So This Is Goodbye" fans to sleep, there’s simply not enough to distinguish one track from the next.

Destroyer of the Void isn’t a bad album, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect well upon Blitzen Trapper’s changes as a band.

This is the Strokes’ first record without its adherence to formula and form, with better guitars and bigger chords. And, you know, more fun.

Anyways, ignore the write-ups (uh, except this one), which won’t be able to help quoting all the spiritual mumbo jumbo about dualism, and enjoy what seems, to me, unstated genre practice at play on a very large stage.

The cacophony raised by this album is not so much the kind that unsettles us in important and challenging ways, but is the commercial noise of a spectacle without a center, of emotion so generic we are instantly desensitized to it.

Myth Takes is a taut culmination that may just tear dance floors asunder with its locomotive inexorability.

What’s left, then, is an album that’s overlong, but one that’s surprisingly easy to succumb to.

If Ashworth’s lyrical razorblade was blunted by the quaintness of Casiotone consistency before, his new compositional confidence allows its sharpness to shine and cut as deep as you could handle without running a bath.

Obsidian makes for a totally immersive plunge and, depending on where you are with your own head when you listen, either a welcome gulp of fresh air in recognition or a chance to hold your breath and dive deeply into life’s darker materials until you have to come back up again.

The lowdown: it sounds pretty much the same as "Bang Bang," but not as good. It's not that the record is "bad"--it isn't--but that it, like its title suggests, is less brash, less fuck-all incautious about its rocking.

There’s a wealth of great material buried within The Avalanche, if you don’t mind digging.

It bears all the signs of an artistic statement, stretching for meaning even as it reconstitutes and tears at the corners of its component definitions. It is both complete and incomplete; logical and wayward; good and, yeah, bad.

In many ways, Kensington Heights is what maturity sounds like, done right: too young to relinquish their punk energy and too experienced to let it limit their songwriting, the band has combined their twin urges into a single path.

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.

The Jicks do an incredible job of coming into their own as a band, channeling Malkmus’s sarcasm and foolery in a less controlled setting brilliantly; they just can’t, because of the immediacy of the album, tease out the full quirkyness.

So the record fails as a self-sufficient statement, but after eight years of existence Enon has at long last become an entity capable of releasing a great album rather than just a collection of great songs that have little to do with each other.

The Back Room is an agreeable, sturdy, and surprisingly re-playable debut, one which should probably keep any brooding college kid who’s worn out his copy of Antics happy for the coming autumn.

Freedom Tower is a Blues Explosion record, no doubt, and in that sense it’s not for everyone.

Down There, David Portner aka Tare's debut solo joint, is a further dot on the still-empty dotted line of Animal Collective's career, built on a span of eight or so albums through which these guys have willfully, lovingly defied expectations and definitions and even maybe their own individual talents.

Ultimately, Arthur & Yu’s singing (the moniker adopted from cutesy childhood nicknames) becomes the simple reason to bend over, submit, and love the album, even when whimsy threatens an otherwise wry batch of dirty lyrics.

It's a safe album, almost exactly what you'd expect from Chao. The artist continues to be the best (perhaps only) provider out there of Clash-inspired polylingual punk rock, but for a musician who built his solo reputation on quirkiness and innovation, the disc feels a bit flat.

It's okay to mourn Apparat's past and question his trajectory. Just don't ignore what rests at the center: a record that, if nothing more, soaks in the present moment.

Year Zero massively benefits from lowered expectations. Reznor channels his anger, focuses it and takes a much-needed breather from his tried-and-true formula of nihilism and the question of self-destruction, but at its core the album has very little to teach us or anything original to say.

Feed The Animals isn’t much of anything at all. It’s just another clip show of all your favorite records.

A strong album with some growing pains.

The album manages to achieve that perfect pop effect: the ability to deal with enormously sad and personal subjects within the medium of happy, upbeat music.

Beyond simply being a fantastic musician, he’s a master of imaginative storytelling, and manages to perfectly capture the feeling of such a cruel yet contemplative season.

If He Dies is not only the best iteration of Moumneh’s sound to date, it’s also the clearest showing of his motivations.

Arrow, the band's fourth album, doesn't differ significantly from their prior efforts, though the fiddle and pedal steel flourishes of 2009's rootsy The Mountain have been largely excised in favor of more hot shit guitar soloing care of new recruit Mark Nathan.

It's an album both in tune lyrically and out of time stylistically, and that's what has All Things Will Unwind approaching relevance.

His flow is, as always, commanding, effortless, and unrelenting, making it hard to grab individual lines when each is intricately related to the next.

The Hawk is Howling is an immensely satisfying, patient, and expertly crafted album that ranks among their best.

It’s sad when a band runs out of ideas.

M83’s latest, given careful attention, is a rather impressive and blissful experience.

A disappointingly safe album of reasonably enjoyable pop songs by interesting musicians masquerading as average ones.