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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Clumsy it might be, familiar it might be; redundant it sure isn't quite yet.

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.

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.

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.

It is exactly the record you’d expect Kevin Barnes to make right now: briefly, the concept record as heart failure. Seriously. Never before has engaging in serious cardiomyopathic trade been this remote, or satisfying.

Soft Will is the perfect summer record, hazy and ill-defined and hard to remember but oh-so-euphoric.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.