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.

There's nothing but clouds on Occasion for Song, but rather than uninviting it's eminently listenable; an unflinching, graceful, truthful exploration of how to go on living when you've lost a friend, of how to recognize a world that suddenly seems that much darker and less hopeful.

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 record is no departure, but when the form is this strong one isn’t needed.

The music Real Estate make is so melodic and plentiful that it could capture any feeling it wanted to--Atlas just transposes their sound into the evening.

While No Wow certainly has its missteps, they largely come as a result of the band’s most basic concept: simplicity and repetition.

A simple record to listen to under the sun that has a couple of knowing winks about going steady and treating your pals right, but nothing you need worry about.

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.

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

This is a break-up album, a cohesive work embodying a singular mood, and Nadler, like any great artist, sets the scene with such careful, immersive depth that it can be difficult to the seams in her work until you explore every inch.

LOSE is captivating because it uses all the right tricks.

Aside from its musical merits--like, it’s really beautiful--the City Wrecker EP is interesting in a typical kind of meta-Krug way.

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

Taylor and Goddard's pop impulses and the dance music they've always been exploring have finally cohered, yielding a collection of songs with the potential to be as efficient on a dance floor as it is in a bedroom.

There may be more pop structure and less willful wandering than, say, cLOUDDEAD, but there is still something strictly subconscious about the album at its most gripping, even as it consistently engages over repeat visits.

South have an ear for melody, uniformly excellent production values, and a good sense of dynamics; all of which manifests itself in some very satisfying melodic Brit-pop.

The Knot may not be a full-out Great Album, but it does contain a lot of moments that are dangerously close, and taken as a whole it is surprisingly well-developed for a band still getting started.

If Pink’s more evolution than revolution, it still stomps all over most of its close genre surroundings, leaving maybe Tiger Bear Wolf and The Woods as far as 2005 goes.

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

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.

It is Noir’s skills for arrangement and sequencing that allow the narrative to successfully play out.

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.

The result is that we have a transitory album, but also a typically beautiful and subtle one.

Together, “School” and “Silverbacks” make the best Wu-Tang one-two punch that I can recall.

The album still holds together with a surprising cohesiveness, which is essential when crafting a debut that relies far more on the effect of its ambitious whole than any specific genre-bending tracks.

As is scene tradition, these three don't make it easy to find the proverbial diamonds in their artistic rough, but dispatches such as Imikuzushi make a frustrating journey seem that much more satisfying.

A welcome new start for this talented band.

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 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 sparsity of their arrangements allows textures--the shushing of brushes on the snare, the scratch of the violin, the edge of distortion on the guitar--to shine through.

Musically the most important aspect of this collaborative effort is that their voices work so nicely with and against each other.

Akron/Family are in a state of constant flux, ever changing, so Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free strikes me as no great sea change (no more than usual, anyway). It’s just the latest iteration of a band that’s never twice the same.

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.

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

In the Reins is a clear success.

Late Registration really wants to be an album album, which makes all the more frustrating and undermining the fact that it mirrors the flaws of its predecessor: the glut and the stilted sequencing.

Little of the album fails to impress in its striking melodic strength or its lyrical intelligence---which shouldn’t surprise Eitzel’s long-time fans. But the album does have one recurring flaw: overextension of its ideas.

At the risk of sounding redundant, this being Super Furry Animals, there just isn’t that much to dislike.

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.

To Find Me Gone shows a band as adept at bucking trends as they are at invoking tradition.

This record is the “hardest” thing the Twilight Singers have released, but is situated squarely within the realm of anthemic arena rock, not the more straightforward stuff of Whigs nostalgics. Most of the time this works beautifully.

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

He’s on his way to building a grand monument to the craft he and so many before him have lovingly treated; he just needs to make sure each marble block is absolutely pristine before putting it down.

Fernow's more melodic output on Bermuda Drain is somehow even more punishing, a new development in the ongoing creation of what he calls "negative energy."

What makes the record work is his acknowledgment that he's just one more voice in that cavalcade, one that neither tries to hide or overemphasize the influence of the other shouts that came before its own.

With the handicap of not having entered a studio until his forties, White still creates work that maintains a deft wisdom even in its worst choices.

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

If Mogwai are looking for new routes to explore then Hardcore is a strong first venture.

The Last Romance, for all its disgusted veneer and inner conflict, both reads like a cogent statement and plays like a finely tuned instrument.

Leslie Feist has managed to produce an even more intriguing character, one with depth and doubt and apprehension and dread and all the other things that make up the other, harder, larger half of the human experience.

Vaguely melodious, embedded with overtones, sometimes placid and sometimes stormy, Black Sea is like a wave in that its diverse parts meld together to form a powerful, all-encompassing entity.

In the end, Hot Chip leave us frustrated, which makes sense since this is an album about frustration.

They’ve yet to lose it: Farm comes in a bit longer and countrified than its predecessor, but it’s also a more muscular and emotional album.

La Sera aren't quite up for that challenge, but their debut finds them rising above the careful posturing of their peers and creating something inarguably lovely, which, for now, will do.

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).

Volume II: High and Inside picks up exactly where its revelatory predecessor left off, but this time welcoming a few more indie-world guest stars, having a few more stories to tell, and reveling in slightly more robust production.

They ["The Stage Names" and The Stand Ins]were released as distinct (though interrelated) albums, and this one is better.

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

The band has a noticeably meaner, more muscular sound than on previous records.

Grass Widow have channeled a number of distinct influences, tones, and anxieties into an eccentric and strangely cohesive album. Past Time solidifies that there's nobody else out there right now who sound quite like them.

They’re all about mucking around with monstrously catchy, juvenile surf riffs and then suffocating those infant laughs with a tight plastic bag of reverb; warm, gleeful guitar tones are stripped to their menacing essentials and left to bake in rancid West Coast heat.

Down to the near-microscopic details, down to the faintest rough edge on his smoothest vocal landscapes, down to the last moments on the final track: it's a self-sustaining, well-rounded album that stands well without Bon Iver-especially without a drum solo.

If the forced lyrical growth is a little stunted, it’s more than made up for by the band’s newfound sonic ambitions.

These songs are all coherently-arranged, positive, played in major keys, very easy to listen to and enjoyable on their surface.

A sure-footed assertion of the artist's individual talents and landing it a spot among the best folk records of 2007 has to offer.

It’s still style over substance in a lot of cases, but it manages to be so exciting while being so listenable that I think it demands repeated listens -- even if those are at cocktail parties.

This attention to economy marks these records [I Don't Rock At All and Man With Potential] as two of Swanson's most digestible and re-playable releases to date.

It’s all quite charming and lovely.

The thing that stands out for me this time around is how little Tinariwen are confrontational about their experiences. Instead, it just naturally permeates their music--love songs with a thousand-yard stare.

This feels, to me, like the sort of rap record we rap nerds lament a dearth of: sprawling and smart, bursting with production that ebbs symphonically but never cluttered over five-minute tracks, a long, warm-hearted record whose length is justified by long, genial verses that build on one another via sharp delivery and three assured mic presences (and one outrageous guest).

Warpaint is Chillwave rendered Actual via the performance of actual instruments, rendered Credible via the presence of an actual rhythm section, full of big austere drums interwoven with deeply locked-in bass lines, and rendered Sexy via the music's performance by real life, actually sexy, adult humans.

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.

Coleman's exploring, surely, but he never abandons a sure-footed consistency, and the record works wonderfully as a whole.

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.

While that band has yet to make a record comparable to the sludgy majesty of their live show... Blue Cathedral practically explodes from the speakers.

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.

For all its supposed politeness, this is distinct, sharp music.

Removing the formulae and sensual stimuli from the Party leaves little that’s substantive or innovative. Even the most cursory of examinations would show the group to be an “it” band and not much else. However, Bloc Party’s absurdly good at being an “it” on Silent Alarm.

Jet Lag is a confident, mature, fully-realized record, and much denser than it lets on.

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.

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

The destination is certain in the screamer’s mind: he asks his band to draw up the new maps, and they do. On this level, 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons may be the most satisfying record the Silver Mt. Zion project has yet done.

Perhaps the best thing about this catchy, super-short record (it'll take less than thirty minutes of your time) is the balance it strikes between tight songwriting and a loose, improvisational feeling.

In the Future is a great second act, a consolidation of strengths, better songwriting and more ideas.

Yttling and Epworth have succeeded in making the Scream enjoyable and vital again, hardly a sure thing after the embarrassment of "Riot City Blues."

It simply, like her two (arguably better) albums before them, hurts too good to be ignored.

Through its overarching range, it ably balances silence with noise, restraint with reckless abandon.

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.

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.

With Clear Heart Full Eyes he's established himself, tentatively, as a man apart from his band.

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

All in all, Push The Heart is an admirable, sometimes striking record from a band with a few of those now in their catalog.

It's a rare thing how it manages to be both accessible and inclusive without giving in to any of the current trendy concessions, all the while demonstrating the practiced purist's taste for measured, genre-specific experimentation.

This record isn’t gonna kick you in the head the way that BoC’s last two outings have on occasion done. The break beats aren’t gonna blow you away and there’s nothing here that’ll really get your blood rushing. If you give it the time, though, Campfire reveals itself as an truly beautiful piece of work, better produced and with a tighter sense of melody than the Sandisons have shown in past.

There are, of course, a few missteps.... More often, though, the sparse arrangements highlight a resurgent songwriting force.

So, yes: this is cuddly, warm and intimate, just like all your favorite blogs have said.

A wane in consistency in its latter half keeps I Am Not from achieving the heights of Yo La Tengo’s best work, but it will unquestionably satiate their rabid fanbase awaiting a return to eclecticism while re-establishing Ira Kaplan’s status as an early fifty-something guitar god.