Sheâ??s funky, confident and fun, and thatâ??s just on the first song.

At the end of the day, this still isn’t a great album. It lacks continuity, much of a sense of rhythm, and the character that Banhart’s 2004 releases took on.

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).

A little more effort at the end would have been appreciated, but so long as you’re content with paying full price for what’s essentially twenty-eight minutes of listenable music, Backspacer works as a fun little rock n’roll record.

The way In Ghost Colours exploits my affection for synth pop and empty, detached vocals, I should be knocking down Dan Whitford’s door trying to get a strand of hair, but the album unfortunately loses its resonance on subsequent listens, its sheen lessening to a duller shade with each closer inspection.

Last Summer is a difficult album to describe because it's made up entirely of these kinds of small moments, gliding gracefully from memory to memory, place to place, like an inside joke stretched into a one-act play.

Despite its painfully obvious flaws, Distortion isn’t bad in the sense that it lacks gratifying melodies or does not possess a certain nostalgic charm.

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

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

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.

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.

Everything is in complete control, which says a lot about their zen-like mastery of the garage rock cubbyhole, but for me half the fun was the audible battle happening right there in the mix: the sweet sound of instruments bucking around, splashing cold water into cold faces.

I’d reject the idea that this album is laid-back in favor of saying it’s too light-hearted.

It is maybe a bit surprising that it's so damned interesting to listen to, and that, along with everything else on The Something Rain, is a powerful testament to the skill of the musicians Staples has surrounded himself with.

The melodies are entrancing, made even more intriguing by their submergence within the reverb, together resulting in an album whose scope and sound are impossible to ignore.

II is a lovely little record, but many of its charms are scripted; even charming people get old when you are forced to spend too much time with them.

Miguel De Pedro has instead delivered an oeuvre that plays like a stream-of-consciousness narrative of his growth, and of his many, many tangents, as a musician.

Garbus’s peculiarities are often quite charming--often, not always, because there’s only so much so-called cute we can be expected to tolerate, and though Bird-Brains remains on the side of acceptability, it flies dangerously close to the line (er, wire).

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.

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.

Perhaps it took a grueling creative journey and a battle with self-doubt to get there, but the end result is a band that has retained its brash experimental flare while discovering its heart.

With Show Your Bones, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have proven themselves worthy of the hype, and, more importantly, the excitement caused by an undeniably fantastic record.

Personal Record doesn’t always have the focus and sense of place that made Last Summer great, but it’s pop music on a grander scale, both in sound and theme.

It's not perfect, but in the context of its subject matter one feels like its accidents are worth more than another album's successes.

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.

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

Even at its most seemingly ascetic, The Moon Rang Like a Bell is among the most generous, tender, radiant albums you’ll hear all year. It just wants your ears.

Another understated near-masterpiece from a band that doesn’t need to make a bang to make a deep impression.

It has its flaws, and it certainly isn’t some great reinvention of krautrock, but Transparent Things is an incredibly likeable album.

It is true, this album does have songs and nearly all of them suffer the same fate: a few great ideas ruined by the need for everything to be so overblown and melodramatic.

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.

Rick Ross would like you to know he has sodomized women in Acapulco. Lord knows we all aspire to such Olympian heights, but in that admission lies the crux of the impotence of Rawse's extensive discography: this is all pretty unnecessary.

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.

Let’s get two things about Government Commissions out of the way. The first is that the set is utterly inessential.... The second thing is that the first thing doesn’t matter.

There's a stunning balance between fluid variations and deviations that in total feel like improvisation and the strictly confined, loping-in-circles gait of traditional hip-hop-a process which then lends itself to being described as simultaneously dynamic and hypnotic, loose and hard, jam and the jam.

Dedication is definitely an accomplished record and a milestone for Zomby, rewarding continued personal investigation in the same way that Where Were U In '92? found its success in laser beam focus and visceral appeal.

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.

Until the group learns to keeps pace or more effectively makes space for Thorpe, their singer will remain the first, best, and only reason to listen to Wild Beasts.

Compared to All That You Can’t Leave Behind, it’s immensely sincere, well-thought out, and meaningful... [It] also happens to be loaded with hooks.

This is a step forward, and the new studio approach is a constructive development.

The Imaginary Adventures of Pardon, Mannerfelt, and Co. just happen to be a wonderfully suitable and measured vehicle for the dense and compelling work of Roll the Dice, and In Dust is sure not to leave anyone wanting for a more promising wilderness to explore.

Really, everything is utterly in its right place on The Eternal, which is also its most glaring flaw, and its this lack of the new that makes it kind of a bummer, though, at the least, a pleasant one.

Six Demon Bag’s a romp, short but sprawling, careful but passionate.

Sexsmith’s got a knack for melody, and Froom’s got a knack for bringing it out.

The finest songs here are as solid as any other rock music you’ll find in 2013.

So Living With Yourself is a lot like, well, living by yourself-comfortable, unchallenging, plenty of time to get introspective and think about things that once were.

Their latest, Castle Talk, isn't a staggering improvement on that front. It feels--and, in its middle section even more than on Power Move--not so much a cohesive, self-contained album as a collection of Screaming Females songs that will sound very good live.

It’s the Casiotone defence mechanism: take your innermost awkward lumps and bathe them in rose-tinted easy listening. Ashworth successfully translate this to his new instruments no fewer than nine or ten times on this eleven track set.

One Life Stand hasn’t brought Hot Chip completely out of the deep hole they dug for themselves one album earlier, and it’s still not as consistent as the inimitable, career-defining The Warning, but it’s unquestionably more “Boy From School” than the histrionics of “Shake a Fist,” and that’s a good enough reason to stay with this band not just for the kids.

So yeah, the cheese gets awfully thick, but unlike most other groups purposely pushing the boundaries of bad taste in the past few years, Dan Bejar remembers to at least bring along some great songs.

For every elastic, tuneful, vacuum-packed “Phantom Limb” or “Australia” -- pop craftsmanship of the highest order, redolent of Chutes’ front-to-back triumph, crystalline, flawless and packed so thick with thoughts and words and hooks that they unravel marvelously indefinitely -- there’s an obvious b-side.

Gloss Drop shows a band still well ahead of the curve in terms of how they perform music, and one that understands how an aesthetic can be stretched to its most experimental limit and retracted to a simple confection without a wide chasm between the two modes of expression.

In the end, we needn’t concern ourselves too much with the machinations of some emotionally arrested Peter Pan of pop. Moz will always have the last word, anyways, which makes the barb from the album’s closer all the more appropriate: “This might make you throw up in your bed, I’m OK by myself!”

Thing is, though, that for every failure Graduation puts me through it has many a saving merit that only the nigh witless audacity of Kanye West could afford

Every song on this album is outstanding.

Fans of old school R&B (or really, any of Daptone's artists) would do well to give him a fair shake. It also goes without saying that everything on No Time for Dreaming will sound better live. Bring your megaphones; here's a guy impossible not to root for.

The Horror is one of the label's most tenacious offerings yet.

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.

Strawberry Jam might be art, but more interestingly, Strawberry Jam might be pop. Okay, avant-pop.

Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters is an album with a sum worse than its parts.... Still, there’s a lot of promise here.

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

You can get long way into Underneath the Pine without gaining any clear impression of exactly what kind of record it is that you're listening to. But amorphous isn't the worst thing in the world to be.

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

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

This EP sounds, in many ways, like a showcase of new equipment and technology, proof that White just might be one of the best pop producers working right now. However, the songs might be too cerebral, lacking the brevity, structural simplicity, and dare I say petulance that made "Lust For Life" so easy to fall so hard for.

It’s the music here, not the sharp-toothed lyricism, which sets the record so far apart from the rest of the field.

I’d suggest that it’s a grower, but that doesn’t seem apt, as there’s very little depth to let grow here. What it is, however, is a winner, an album that seems loathable at first but tenaciously refuses to quit grinning.

It’s a humble record, yet one with the timeless appeal to become a classic in league with the work of Waxahathee’s influences.

Ejimiwe’s nervous energy makes Some Say I So I Say Light exhilarating, whether it’s a lucid dream or a sleep-deprived reality, and fills it with moments that you might mistake for codas.

Nowhere is this idea of acceptance clearer than on An Imaginary Country. In a sense the album evokes nothing so much as Hecker himself, diligently and intuitively molding his sounds through synthesizer, guitar and laptop, and as a result may be the most symbiotic album of the year.

As it stands, 'To Clean' and 'Rain On' deserve their place late on your sweetheart mixtapes, and they’ll be charming in their small doses, but they’re much too rare here, nestled between puzzling decisions and bedroom leftovers.

The best thing, really, that can be said of Because of the Times is that it works the hardest trick: seeming deeply personal and inclusive, but still having an embrace elastic enough to be universally appealing.

Our Blood, like most great singer-songwriter efforts, is open to interpretation, but it's the record's malleable sense of emotion that lends it its peculiar gravity.

It’s simply R.E.M. finally making a concerted effort to sound like themselves, and realizing that’s not such a horrible idea.

It's in the zealous craftsmanship of doing just about everything right and causing that aggregate rightness to harmonize in vibrant song about trying to be better that the truth becomes evident: this band is for real.

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.

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."

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.

Convivial is the closest Ripatti has inched toward making something that would fit in with the more outrageous and flamboyantly mainstream house productions that dominate charts and hip clubs these days, and at the same time still very heady, engaging music.

When these songs sound like El Perro del Mar fronting the saddest, slowest disco band in the world, they work out best, but too much of this “mini-album” doesn’t quite get there.

This EP is thus a fine, if also slight, document that showcases the duo's serious potential-and hints, perhaps, at how it could be used to produce a more ambitious set of songs as he approaches his next album--more than it fulfills the promises of Pallett the almost solo performer/arranger.

In making these songs more personal and more intimate, they’ve managed to make them more poignant, and even if the quality of the overall album doesn’t match the brilliance of the four or five phenomenal songs here, nothing is so cantankerous as to really offend.

Each moment is devoted to the continuing shifts in dynamics and song, and Aloha sounds sharper than ever before.

Becoming a Jackal is downright convincing-maybe sustaining-even these few weeks after first hearing the thing. I'm surprised, though maybe I shouldn't be, by just how cool and atypical that feeling is.

This is all I really want an album to be: an immense, five-star production fronted by a compelling, three-dimensional character with an unrivaled faculty for craft.

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

At Mount Zoomer is a tremendous success.

By no means is It's All True a masterpiece; the duo don't stick their necks out enough to entertain that notion. But by creating a palpable tension between smart songwriting and their knack for texture, Junior Boys have pulled a legacy back from the brink of indifference.

With the possible exception of his work with Brian Eno, Backwards is his most technically honed album to date. This is the stuff of an artist refreshingly confident with his work.

In Ear Park sounds so much like Grizzly Bear that it’s difficult to recognize, at first, that it does occasionally retain the bedroom DIY aesthetic for which Department of Eagles are known, especially in the sense of its canned percussion, and at the album’s best it keeps the music attempting the scope and lushness of Grizzly Bear.

Diamond Eyes incorporates all the same basic tropes as every Deftones record before and almost certainly after it, but here, for the first time in ages, they’re crafted and performed with more than mere hints of the assuredness and pummeling hooks of their one (yes) great record—a full-course meal to the last decade’s worth of scattered crumbs.

Not so much a change of pace as a consolidation and careful re-allotment of her powers.

Freakout is a struggle between balance and shambles; the compositions constantly wobble beneath a gravity that threatens to bring them down for good and to render Broder’s brain inane for all time.

Want Two disposes of almost all of the commercial elements that had been blamed for One's downfall without revealing a satisfying work in the process.