Veirs’ songs are content to be four-minute pop numbers that exude hooks and instrumental magic; her album is content to be a collection of these songs, with no big finish or three-act dramatic arc.

It sets up the tension between the often gentle voice and its malevolent surroundings, and this, his third collection of re-arranged traditionals, oscillates between the sweet and the almost apocalyptic, often to great success.

There's a real, meticulous attempt at achieving the same playful, wandering state of mind of the pre-'80s experimental classics that inspire these songs, rather than pulling from any overwhelming examples.

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.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's third album might not set the world on fire, but it's a great little record in its own right.

Milk's musical vision is the binding force behind Random Axe and it's something that Price and Simpson clearly believe in; thus, all their bragging about how essential their complete gullyness is to the rap game. Because, despite lines crossed and opportunities missed, it sort of is. Nothing so far in 2011 has a total aesthetic and attitude that goes as hard as this.

New Amerykah, Part Two: Return of the Ankh is a record full of smooth, creative, grooving (but not too grooving) songs that are exceptionally well conceived, penned, and executed.

The best way to package this album-Flying Lotus, Madlib, and Ian Curtis in the weirdest musical threesome ever tailored for the likes of DOOM and Ghostface Killah-as the normal routes of genre identification don't quite do it here.

A well-crafted doorway into Thee Oh Sees' lovely DIY funhouse, and leave your rock 'n' roll expectations at the giant lips-shaped entrance.

Meloy’s ever-multiplying prog-rock ambitions are well on their way to swallowing him whole, but for now he seems to be comfortable enough as a guy writing sweet folk pop songs alongside ever-shifting song suites and polite hard rock.

When it's good, it doesn't get much better.

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

Unsurprisingly, the formula still works just fine, and in more than a couple spots, it’s revitalized and intensified to great effect.

In essence, Ferraro has crafted a noiseless noise record.

If this album is less immediately impressive than its predecessor it’s because apart from tightening their arrangements the sound is still exactly what you expect.

With Get Lost, McGuire has nudged toward both goals, and while in many ways, for long time fans, this is exactly what you'd expect a 2011 Mark McGuire album to sound like.

The cryptic, empty songs of Rain on Lens and wandering, upbeat folk-tunes of Supper have been usurped by a renewed focus and direction.

The Floodlight Collective exudes something astonishing and rare, particularly for a record on the fringes of indie rock, scoping into abstraction. It is, more than anything else, sincere.

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.

Assured in its fastidiousness, with enough schizophrenia to make whiplash a factor, Los Angeles cements Flying Lotus’s status as the best producer in a burgeoning scene bursting with talent, categorization eluding whatever scene that may be, whatever it means to be a producer.

Taken for what it is, a straight up and down rock album, ABAAC is quite good.

Lookout doesn’t have the feel of a major step forward for the Silver Jews: sonically, it falls pretty comfortably between "Bright Flight" and "Tanglewood" and doesn’t have the sort of big events that marked those two records.

Tweedy's lyrics have recaptured much of their surreal, grammar-defying, sinister charm, and he has mercifully spared us the smug, privileged nihilism that Clayton so rightly lambasted in his review of Wilco (The Album).

Like all AC/DC records, this is a troubling one to love.

It's thus a relief to see something, anything, resembling a coherent full-length emerge from that group of musicians, and for it to be as good as Shapeshifting is. More than anything, though, this is a success for Young Galaxy, who prove themselves far more versatile and open than they ever did before, and, as such, are likely to win over a new whole new audience.

On A Healthy Distrust his delivery has noticeably improved.

A seriously solid and enjoyable album.

Half-baked and juvenile, sloppy but cheerful, fresh and joyful, the Beets may be plugging a gimmick, but at least they're doing something with themselves.

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.

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.

Even the forecast backlash from fans of the trance era can't dent Barking's relentless enthusiasm, and given the sufficient exposure and time, everyone should be able to party to it. It's just that for an Underworld album it sounds distinctly un-Underworld, and more like someone's asked Smith and Hyde to ghost-write a Now! compilation.

It holds together better [than 'Echoes'] as a complete document, it contains at least seven potential singles, and sounds like a crack band at the top of their game.

The ubiquity of the Weeknd has saturated their latest mixtape, and ultimately Echoes of Silence struggles under that ubiquity.

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

It all adds up to blatantly catchy, deceptively simple wannabe-clever, can’t-help-but-be-cheeky art-punk.

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.

Winds Take No Shape is a great album if you like soft, catchy eclectic pop/folk music with smoky serious beautiful vocals and lots of eighties-like effects.

There are a few moments on side B that could fool you you've picked up an old Orb album, but otherwise The Dissolve is very forward thinking. Picture a melting pot on par with Burt Bacharach's.

While it’s nowhere near Thriller or Purple Rain, it does manage a healthy attempt at a reinterpretation of both.

What Fortino and Harris have done here and across Foreign Body is construct a kind of suspended reality, where the consequences of day-to-day life fail to adhere to their distended sense of duration.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lerner’s honesty lasts forty-three minutes, and supplies the predictable yet scrumptious party-time melodies that chase away clouds like a sidekick.

Goodbye's shoegaze fascination, organic glow, and subtle shifts belie its apparent initial simplicity.

If there’s a weakness to Makers, it’s the occasional unmemorable tune in the album’s middle section.

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.

Far more unabashedly romantic than One Time Bells, the Kicks have let go of any lingering desire to be a rock band and are warmly embracing new wave style pop a la the Cars or New Order or Elvis Costello.

Minor quibbles are easy to overlook on a record that is, the majority of the time, flawlessly executed.

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.

Portishead seem to be playing against intuition at every corner.

The Reminder may not surprise, but it does force one to ignore the cloying marketed image and just love Feist for the talented individual that she is.

Generally speaking that's good enough, especially since trying to find specific meaning in this kind of music is a largely futile exercise that I and others at CMG still occasionally agonize our way through against our better judgment. Perhaps the appeal of this music lies in nothing more or less than how painstakingly moulded it is, and in that respect Hecker will probably always release really impressive records.

This music can be difficult, but through its brooding emotional core and sophisticated, understated arrangements To Survive is also one of the most satisfying albums of 2008, melancholic and unloveable though it may often be.

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.

My Maudlin Career is just such a uniformly endearing record. It’s sentimental, yes, but pleasantly so, charming in its own little way.

It's not so much disorienting as it is illuminating to revisit ØØ Void, Sunn O)))'s second release from 2000, recently reissued by Southern Lord. After all, it sounds exactly as you remember-or exactly as you'd imagine-which is to say: glacial-slow riffs, suffocating drones, mind-numbing minimalism.

The Dreamer is a very traditional record, straight-up pop with a tinge of alt-country. It's easy company, a warm and thoroughly enjoyable summer listen.

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.

The record has more than its share of enjoyable moments, and more than its share of predictable "genius," but a seemingly new dread, a latent, sometimes crippling anxiety, lends the album a certain emotional edge, a hint of vulnerability, that is normally absent in the work of this Baddest of singer-songwriters.

With Broken Arm, Marnie Stern has delivered a frenetic and ridiculously entertaining debut.

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.

In the end, This Week suffers largely from the hype---there’s no way this album could be as good as it was supposed to be.

None of this is groundbreaking music, not even in comparison with their previous work.

His [Kurt Ballou's] success here makes De Vermis Mysteriis the closest thing to a standout that the High on Fire catalog can claim, and the band makes good on what Ballou brings to the table.

S/T II is that moment cupped in one's hand and blown like dandelion specks at an especially delicious breeze-it is, simply and thankfully, a record by Akron/Family as plain and as forward as we should expect.

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.

I don’t think it’s too harsh to suggest that each Iron & Wine album is not a step forward so much as a more sophisticated look at the same paces.

While most dubstep producers are working with the same ingredients, Blow Your Head reveals how those ingredients can yield beautifully varied results.

This freak of a record is almost obscene in its flippant disregard for the core elements of such a well-defined thing as what Boris is supposed to sound like... as crazy and over-polished and un-Boris as it is, New Album is still a new Boris album. And, apparently, that still means excellence.

Long and Kroeber deserve sizable praise for avoiding the pitfalls of such practices, even with some inevitable shortcomings that are to be expected from a relatively young band with big aspirations.

Apart from these few times when the band touches on musical history, lyrically there’s still the same ridiculous preoccupations: rugged, Midwestern imagery; new age-y spirituality; rather obvious weather-related metaphors.

The seamless blend of cutting-edge textures and an obvious deep respect for the essential building blocks of classic techno make Sepalcure a pretty resounding success.

All of this should read like the ingredients of a truly brilliant album. And perhaps on vinyl it is, but the mastering of Wavering Radiant‘s digital format is atrocious, as heavily brickwalled and distorted as Metallica’s criminal "Death Magnetic" (2008).

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.

The Renaissance functions as a representation that he’s never needed to say much of anything to be immensely enjoyable.

Together they make the fat sound lean, make the mean brighten up and the past (i.e. Fatlip) feel a bit more relevant than it should.

Wounded Rhymes' moments of true daring are few, but it's the first indication that Li's turning a critical eye on her own style-and that she's got a knack for reinvention.

While production values throughout the record consistently exceed those on Long Live, the real step forward is where it counts: with the songs themselves.

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

For all the positive aspects of Creaturesque--most importantly, it really is a consistently interesting and fun listen, which is rare for a record like this--there is one real weakness: Reitherman’s lyrics.

It is as "original" as this band is going to get, and for that we should be contented.

The album’s hyper awareness of its own mortar disrupts a bouncy pace that would otherwise fit Rhys’s suntanned pop to a tee.

There really aren't any bad or outright boring songs here, though Castlemusic's very best moments are largely front-loaded.

This is an album about getting shitfaced.

Overpowered is both impressive and incredibly fun, but fun in a way that "Ruby Blue" wasn't: you don't have to think here.

The band will surely never be able to banish the ghosts of their tenuous acclaim, but as far as sounding finally, thankfully revitalized by their obvious talent and ravenous taste in all shapes and colors of music, Sisterworld is the most refreshing thing I’ve come upon this year.

It’s perfectly reasonable to listen to Tape Chants at an ultra-low volume (a la Morton Feldman), but to absorb all of the color and contour of this veritable ocean of sound, I recommend playing it very loud.

"My December" ends up, curiously enough, a pretty freaking fun summer album.

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.

Hood’s contributions dominate To-Do; of the thirteen songs, bassist Shonna Tucker gets two, and even after his jaw dropping win streak on 2008’s excellent Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, Mike Cooley is only allotted three. But he still comes off as the crafty Southern gentleman with all of the best one-liners.

Pretty but not boring, eclectic but not overindulgent, Cyrk is the work of an artist still messing with all the possibilities in front of her.

Last Night Becomes This Morning is the exhausted, beaten down sound of the nineties lo-fi movement years after the party ended.

There’s something to be said for rewarding repeated listens, for golden nuggets in every song, never buried but never hollering.

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.

It’s a fine record -- one of his better in some time.

It’s a cohesive, well-produced, well-written set of songs that coheres as an album.