When they’re trying, as they do especially on the first half of the album, Cannibal Sea can be quite enjoyable.

There's something downright overwhelming about this disc, whether it's the unremitting playfulness or the way the band pulls together beauty and energy from the oddest of sounds or the way over top they sometimes launch into abstract political commentary.

Cursive aspires for greater things, and Kasher’s aims are marred by over-production, a Nickelback whoosh here, a digitized cascade there.

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 this technically is enjoyable alt-country circa a half-album before Summerteeth, genre-standard romance and arrangements muffle the otherwise "astonishing narratives."

The Way of the World is just one more Mose Allison album: exceptional in it’s own right but entirely expected.

Unfocused, haphazard, and a bit homogenous.

Prejudices be damned, this is the best hip-hop record this year, and if that doesn’t satiate your hype-riddled appetite, then you would be well-served to shut off your computer, removing yourself from the power of the web, and throw this in your car stereo.

All of its tracks are kila kila killer.

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.

It's not that the record is so unclassifiable--shit is downright pleasant to listen to--as it exudes the confidence to acknowledge its influences and contemporaries with the same convivial grace that has marked Q-Tip's entire career.

This one sees him expanding outward in any number of directions, and succeeding in nearly all of them.

Here is a great band putting out a just pretty good EP whose existence is really only justified by its brilliant title track.

LOSE is captivating because it uses all the right tricks.

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.

The Drive-By Truckers remain a distinctly American band, a band whose stories are on equal footing with the music beneath.

With Total Life Forever, Foals have objectively identified the shortcomings (shouted vocals, claustrophobic song structures) of their first album, and erased them while keeping their trademark mathematical riffing intact.

It's an excellent debut, and hints at a potentially significant force in indie rock in the coming years.

Too bad, then, that I Love You is underdeveloped.

Though the album is an hour long, there are at least thirty minutes of excellent music here. Those who were excited by the direction implied by 13 Moons, however, can't help but feel disappointed.

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.

A relatively straightforward rock record with no shortage of epic flourishes and catchy choruses.

Witching Hour could stand to be about two tracks shorter, but its quality comes as an unexpected, and highly welcome, surprise.

So Hot Chip have built a very admirable sound. What confuses the issue with Made in the Dark is that it presents so many glaring kinks that still need working out.

Sirens is no "Heartbreaker" - though the stylistic grab-bag is reminiscent of Adams’s debut - but it is a damn good start.

The Fresh & Onlys have achieved something captivating with Secret Walls, conjuring up vast, mysterious spaces within economical songs, songs demanding repeating listens to decipher.

This doesn’t seem so much a pop internalization of Deerhoof’s unique talent as it is a kind of album-costume where they adorn the talents of other bands.

An album at once tighter and more terrifying than anything they’ve yet released.

It’s an entertaining record to hear, but at times a devastating one to listen to.

Who knows if Josephine will ultimately have the staying power of Molina’s very best work, but he and his band are back doing what they do best--and, for all the talk of ramblers heading for the horizon, they finally sound at home.

Love is All has refined its basic ideas and yielded a follow-up much more playable than its predecessor.

New Magnetic Wonder’s high points are in its more quirky and musically ambitious moments.

If McCombs' first release this year evoked a sense of baroque horror, this one does loosen up, offering at least a few degrees of clarity in a catalog more defined with each passing year by its creator's desire to subvert the tropes of his genre and refuse anything resembling an easy reading.

Rabbit Fur Coat is an album of easy strumming and likeable melodies, a PG distillation of vintage country influences and the Watson Twin’s spot-on gospel harmonies.

The result is a collection of great, hard-driving tracks that feel poppier than any of the long-winding snores on that new Justin Timberlake album.

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

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.

Clinging to a Scheme feels more haphazard, more Revolver (1965) than Abbey Road (1969) as it goes from searing ambience (“A Token of Gratitude”) to the thicker-figured dance tracks. The album leaves you wanting more--whether this is for better or worse is one question you’ll have to answer for yourself.

More than anything else, Channel Pressure is a triumph of studio craft and evidence that the group has as much potential as producers as they do as composers.

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.

He’s back in the groove here: relaxed, confident, weird in his own special way, smart, and ready to make great albums again.

The Life Pursuit is unquestionably even more upbeat than its predecessor, but contains newfound degrees of confidence and swagger that elevate it over DCW in nearly every respect, resulting in the finest Belle and Sebastian record top to bottom since Sinister.

What follows are a series of maybe-serious experiments that aren't much fun.

It may just be his best record. I’m New Here manages to pack a lifetime’s worth of artistic growth in one completely unobtrusive half-hour.

Real Gone... is Waits’ grittiest work to date and is an excellent introduction, for those unacquainted, to his hard-boiled thirty-year run.

While it never outshines the alt-country canon that precedes it, The Brag & Cuss is a welcome addition to the genre, an album that understands its influences and rarely oversteps the boundaries they’ve set.

The Broken String is a collection of mostly likeable songs, one dud, and one song-of-the-year-quality track.

His delivery is exhilarating, but it made me nervous, jittery. It’s kind of like Miles Davis scatting, but instead of a trumpet he’s playing the entire writing staff of The Simpsons.

It’s in the songs that teeter on the edge, where the twang feels like the last button pressed before an apocalypse, that Shrink Dust becomes special.

An album that does the exact same thing as their previous records, only not as well.

Lullabies to Paralyze loses points for a handful of uninspired tracks and questionable production values, but I can’t imagine anybody who’s enjoyed the Queens in the past not taking to at least half of the songs on this album.

[A] beautiful little album.

Sometimes this gets boring, when tracks lull and hunch into the next and Sam’s voice doesn’t do much to challenge the monotony. Sometimes it’s confusing to hear such graciously restrained music eventually show itself as meticulous, experimental, and deep, deep, deep. Well, not confusing. Refreshing.

The Winter of Mixed Drinks is a minor disappointment, then, in that in wake (and perhaps as a result) of his heart’s subsequent rehab Hutchison’s songs can’t really sustain the weight-loss of their ego.

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.

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.

Regardless of his collaborators or how he chooses to approach his songs, The Life of the World to Come is further proof of Darnielle's ability, evident since long before he traded a boombox for a studio, to imbue his imagery, his sentiments, and his many characters with astounding weight and power.

Parc Avenue often strays too far into excess and departure for departure’s sake to enjoy the brand of a songwriter’s tour-de-force.... But as a fully realized and lovingly sculpted aesthetic, there may be few stronger full-length debuts waiting in this year’s wings.

Habits & Contradictions is a pleasurable listen with head-scratchingly pretty samplings and lyrics more or less liberated from value care of Q's devotion to "weed and brews" and the delirious enjoyment of something so simple as saying "fuck" a lot.

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.

Jim White’s latest collection of songs has a humanity about it that is too multifaceted to categorize in broad terminology or flowery descriptors and is quite possibly beyond adequate summation; overthink or undersell as much as you please.

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.

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.

This is an not an album designed for navel gazing introspection, but rather one to be played at neighbor-annoying volumes before you hit the town on a Friday night.

A sturdy if frustrating effort that exceeds and disappoints expectations all at once.

Comfort of Strangers isn’t only Orton’s best album to date, it’s her most daring.

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

A textbook example of restrained, stylish writing, Here We Go Magic have found their muse: a 40-something producer from England who just knows well enough to get out of the way.

Another hip-hop comfort blanket, The Stimulus Package reminds us a dope loop and a capable MC justify their own existence.

Trouble has its highs (the second chorus of “Rivers,” all eight minutes of “Shooting Rockets”) and lows (“The State,” a messy rocker that all but collapses in upon itself), but the band’s prowess and Bejar’s vision makes the songs an impressive, if jagged, piece of work.

Salon des Amateurs is undeniably an important album for Hauschka, both for its distillation of his rigorous methods and its energized perspective.

On A Healthy Distrust his delivery has noticeably improved.

When it's warm it offers a cool side, the underside of one's pillow, and when it's frosty it offers a coverlet of weight or the stable resting of a hand.

Mothertongue oscillates between the comfort/terror of singularities and excitement/terror of potentialities, but the possibilities this duality affords for Muhly’s future work are frankly exhilarating.

The style of songwriting is remarkably similar to that found on Teen Dream. Yet neither suffers much for it.

Why There Are Mountains is plain pleasing indie rock--how it used to be, how it’s ceased to be since, at least in spirit.

Holland seems confident placing herself inside a mythology much older than her years. It’s this fact, along with her penchant for lyrics about crazy dreams and old-fashioned moonshine, that make many of her songs, though originals, sound borrowed from another era.

It's not that Several Shades doesn't showcase Mascis's talents. It just denies us his flashiest ones.

The eleven tracks here are the most concise, effortless, and melodically conspicuous songs to come out of the band’s camp.

The line between cheese and accessibility can be thin, and whistling or handclaps or a hidden track or an overt songwriting method can all reek, but Friend and Foe has, just as ostensibly, no wasted space. The hinge is in the balance the band manages with every inkling of sound or production seeming both spontaneous and stultifying, both labored-over and cast off.

Masta Ace’s maturity informs his simplicity; experience strengthens the straightforward so that his words come methodically and sincerely.

The majority of Carousel just plain sounds the same. It might as well be the same pace, might as well be in the same key, might as well be the same vocal melody over and over; it's a carousel if there’s ever been one.

If this isn't the most mature mixtape K.R.I.T.'s produced yet, it may very well be his most honest, and coming from this guy, that's high praise indeed.

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

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.

A damned great indie rock record.

Special Moves illuminates the band's act for what it is.

It comes into the world jubilantly, then spends the next forty minutes kicking and screaming against your ideas of what you can landscape it against. It dies with a characteristically quick whimper. No cheap shots against Explosions in the Sky, I promise, but that’s not pretty. It is beautiful.

As a stand alone work this is one of the most convincing collections that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have produced thus far.

This turns out to be an interesting but ultimately disappointing experiment, and the reason for its failure is telling: unlike the posturing shitgaze set who lean on lo-fi as a superficial crutch, How to Dress Well never treated lo-fi as a simple affectation, and as a result he can't walk away from it so easily.

This variation in the songcraft amid absolute adherence to a predetermined aesthetic attests to the band’s ability to craft a well-paced, engaging arc, an album as much attuned to its coherency as it is to being a springboard for a few spectacular singles.

Parts & Labor have turned what might have been the crippling loss of an essential member into just another development in a long and respectable career.

Thus is the template that makes More Fish so relevant, rewarding, and unpredictably necessary: uniformly fantastic production (except Doom) and Ghost coasting just enough that he doesn’t utterly eclipse the people he’s trying to let shine.

The concept of a modern type of guilt is probably supposed to imply the effortlessly achievable comfort and depressed humility with which much of the album is sung. Perhaps ironically, the best way to enjoy Modern Guilt is with blinders on to this sort of temporal perspective.

Even by SFA’s lofty standards, the production on Love Kraft is little short of incredible.

While it feels a little sheepish to rag on a band for being a little too competent at what they do, the best you can really say about this, their fourth LP, is that it’s simply a good product that’s easily recognizable as a Doves album.

Find, here, Gorillaz’ third record, some sort of masterpiece within the band’s canon, and undoubtedly the best chillwave record ever recorded.

Kozelek appears to have returned to himself with Admiral, though the draw here is that (oddly, after so many years) he's finally discovered he can actually really play the guitar.