In essence, Ferraro has crafted a noiseless noise record.

It doesn’t pretend to hold a candle to the big-dogs and game-changing double albums that cacophonised your youth, nor does it want to.

Hey Venus! is like a really good haircut: it's brisk, light around the ears, and after so many 'do permutations it's bound to get some compliments about how civilized it looks, how grown up.

When T.I. is on, he’s really, really on, and, at several points, King lives up to its own hyperbole. It’s just that those points correspond precisely to the places where T.I. is actually talking about how great he is.

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

Sweet Jesus, these guys sound like Syd Barrett.

What’s so frustrating about this effort is its potential to be great, a possibility visible even through its painfully apparent flaws.

'Superstar' boasts a sanguine hook and a sophisticated mess of rhymes about fame and backlash and fandom and such. Unfortunately much of the rest of the record lacks this clarity, and while the first part of that “sophisticated mess” description remains valid the second part becomes dominant.

The record is a gem. Twelve tracks with a sense of cohesiveness that side-steps homogeneity in favor of straight-up old-fashioned album workmanship.

Ultimately, that is the problem with most of W.A.R., though. Monch is so busy adopting the typical backpacker agenda of putting himself at odds with the mainstream that he takes steps towards a new conformity instead of just destroying sh*t.

For either Reid or Hebden completists, Live at the South Bank is a useful and worthwhile artifact. For someone seeking entry to the catalogues of two vital artists, this is a thorny and difficult listen.

He’s filled his abdicated spot with greater authority than ever before, patched up the walls punched in from Ghostface’s temper tantrums and assured us that villian-rap’s appeal will remain evergreen as long as it infused with this genius, this wild idiocy, these manic flights of syllabic invention.

Moderat never combines as effortlessly and endlessly as that still-breathless collaboration between Apparat and Ellen Allien, Orchestra of Bubbles (2006), but it is alternately as enjoyable as seeing these two collaborate should be and a roundabout disappointment.

While it requires some patience, The Maginot Line is far from impenetrable.

Love Letter is more like a respite, a detour from the beaten path we should just be glad exists, and something to cling to when the next porridge of jizz and tears, The Return of 12 Play: Night of the Living Dead, drops wetly on our heads.

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.

The charms of Harlem River are hard to explain, as this record thrives on a certain groove, a certain verve, that makes it an overall pleasure to listen to.

Take Care, like all of the EITS albums, still has quite a lot going for it: its bombastic gestures are still appropriately dramatic, its production still crackles and shines exquisitely, its conventional undulations are still paced for maximum emotional effect. But there is no surprise or wonder to be found here, no chances or risks taken.

Deerhood vs. Evil is just simultaneously astounding and utterly familiar, correct, and right.

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

The Ponys' arms are so full of the good old stuffs, they can't offer much that's new or really interesting, yet they're talented enough to make it difficult to care about that sort of thing.

Ashes is A Sunny Day’s stripes, their first truly great album of scope.

Young's best record since at least Mirror Ball and probably Ragged Glory.

The music of The Iron Gates at Throop and Newport is about as universal as this stuff gets.

Even though it’s as proficient as the Dodos have always been, albeit in subtler ways, there’s nothing about this record that feels arbitrary. It’s an album that feels like honesty, or at least a very well done facsimile of it.

A good few years on from the rise and partial Fall of the Decemberists, Meloy and Co. are managing, still, to carry the fire.

All Eternals Deck, the band's first album for North Carolina superindie Merge, effectively picks up from where the apocalyptic finale of The Life of the World To Come (2009) left off.

From the ground up, Plumb is through and through the work of a band that has absolutely mastered its craft.

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

Califone are continuing the progressive refinement of their roots, giving an assured argument for the possibilities ignored by folk musicians enslaved to tradition and a smart recall to all the forward-thinking others who have moved too completely and arrogantly on.

It’s an earnest and worthy effort to prove that this band can matter without the PMRC stickering its album cover.

To me this sounds like clear-headed music for lovers of straightforward disco pop--an unblemished set that asks haters and the insecure alike to wait behind the velvet rope where they’re most comfortable while the rest of us throw a cloth over the lampshade in the living room and put on a really great record.

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.

Powers definitely has the compositional wherewithal to make something special--he just has to put more of himself into it.

Half of me thinks the group was aiming for a bit of something hypnotized and dreamy, that they worship Spacemen 3 and the patience that entails. But then the other half thinks Cryptograms is something gritty and furious, maybe something religious, but still something of a turtlehead waiting to poke through.

The most interesting thing about Loud Planes Fly Low is the way it uses that rift, confronting the inherent tension and wringing it out. It may not be Howard and Crisp's best work to date, but it's perhaps their darkest, sincerest, and least expected.

It’s an intermittently interesting and somewhat forward looking work-in-process, but at the moment Hebden sounds like an underground hip-hop producer with a few ideas but no MC.

What Infra is, is perfectly pretty, atmospheric, rainy day music.

Parades is an album of slow-growing rewards from a band with whom relationships are formed, not instantly identified.

Timony sounds fresh and honest again, instead of encased in the anachronistic amber of songs about dragons, fairies and dungeons.

It feels both classic and surprisingly new; this is Real Estate, and this is all Real Estate will ever be.

Albums like Kiss Each Other Clean and The Age of Adz are so giddy with compacting layers and counter layers into the already mapped-out confines of their pre-existing aesthetics that they come across like snowflakes: each one is beautiful and unique, except that the detail is too small to see and anyways there's about a billion of them shits and you have to shovel the walkway and hope public transit isn't delayed. It's distracting, basically, because nothing gets a chance to breath.

The band seems unsure of what instincts to follow to get more intimate, streamlined rock; their attempts produce a hodgepodge of style that in turns prevents the kind of gut reaction that normally attracts listeners to rock in the first place.

It cements the Clientele as one of the best pop bands around today.

He's pushing himself ever so slightly, and while it might not be enough to draw in the unconverted, the rest of us will want to stick around for more.

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 result is a nearly anonymous album of stellar pop music, one where it seems all the attention was placed not on positioning Carly Rae as a cultural force, but on making sure Emotion makes you smile.

This record is hip-hop as post-ambient.

There’s a central and important paradox at work here, something that elevates the record above what might otherwise be emo-aspirations of gushy earnestness. Singer Devon Welsh makes himself the first target of an incisive analysis.

In the Reins is a clear success.

It is a slender, limber album, blissfully aware of itself and not daring to overstay its welcome.

But despite the hit-and-miss subject matter you can’t ever get mad. [Slug]consistently does a fantastic job with his (underrated) delivery, which has improved drastically over the last three records.

The result is a mellow, atmospheric album that still manages to embody the delicious, self-absorbed, fuck-all bombast currently making mainstream rap so exciting.

It's an appealing, bombastic hybrid of '90s nostalgia, and anything less than audience ear drum obliteration is not an option.

This is more than a diary set to music; it’s an interactive map. It is a scrapbook of love gone wrong, including ripped photos, amateur pencil sketches, tear-stained poems, and ticket stubs.

Object 47 does an excellent job of making a leap toward the avant-pop side of the pop/punk wire walked by…uh…Wire on "Chairs Missing" and "154."

Like similarly engaging pop music, Room(s) diversifies and moulds its winning formula into a variety of fledgling creations.

Franklin Bruno and the Extra Lens provide a welcome respite from the false but persistent mythology of Darnielle as a solitary genius; Undercard gives his songwriting some breathing room and a refreshing dose of collaboration.

Women As Lovers is a beautiful masturbation, and a little death for us all.

At some point in that outrageous lifestyle that flips between videogames and spitting stoned, stupid raps, he makes hard, smart decisions about what to lend his voice to and how that should be packaged.

Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, and WU LYF in general, are a band handicapped, seeming less like an actual group and more of an experiment. In what? In determining how much vocal pain listeners are willing to endure if the underlying music is actually pretty good.

Saint Bartlett, Jurado's ninth album and a perfect place to start for the uninitiated, succeeds mostly because it seems to attempt nothing in particular.

Sometimes, in the wrong mood, Tomboy can come across as eleven great songs chipping away at each other.

It sounds like a Manic Street Preachers album, which alone renders it still better than all of the similar arena rock you can name.

The Eraser is not Radiohead good.

Maybe it lacks the frenetic energy of Night Falls Over Kortedala, but I Know What Love Isn't is a great record in its own right, a showcase of Lekman's prodigious storytelling gifts that also makes an effort to connect those stories, and that music, into an emotionally resonant whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The three audio discs... are a mixed bag at best.

Chairlift are perfectly capable of producing a really good album; Something just isn't it.

Ashes & Fire might mark the first time he could ever been described as simply dull.

It's a deeply felt, lively record that stands tall on its own merits, and further proof that Tucker's talent is bigger than that which can be expressed through one band's sound.

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.

Hit After Hit doesn't achieve its titular goal completely and totally. It does come fairly close, though, and makes strong cases for the tunefulness of San Francisco's new garage music, Smith as a songwriter, and the appeal of something done straightforward if also done well.

Go, then, is strangely underdeveloped for how overdeveloped it feels; by no means a trifle, it's as hard to outright hate on as it is to be trampled by, just another lovely 40 minutes from a guy with easily another 40 up his frilly sleeve.

Parallax Error Beheads You improves upon [his previous] albums’ strengths--wide-eyed eclecticism among other things--managing greater coherence and scope than anything he’s ever done.

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.

Awash in grumbling drones and dissonant harmonies, swollen with a tension that rarely finds release, Of Sirens Born is at once terrifying and sublime.

Watch Me Fall isn’t evolution, but it is certainly maturation, the first physical testament of aging as a slog toward something better.

Eskimo Snow simply categorizes those words in a bit more careful, less adventurous fashion than Wolf and company have revealed before. While this latest release is quite literally the second side of the same coin (or recording session), it feels flatter.

Oversteps is reasonably accessible without compromising any aspect of what it means to listen to an Autechre album, which is the closest I can come to a formula for success when it comes to this band. It’s probably ten minutes too long in the middle, but the distinctive intro is a winner and the last three tracks are worth the trek.

Though it's their first time out, Weekend has created a record that bellows out of speakers, that bites and sometimes doesn't play fair. Though uneven in areas, Sports packs a sucker punch. Best sit still and brace yourself.

We’ve been shown angry Clark, blinded by passion and vigor, and we’ve seen drowsy, reverb-soaked Clark, but never before have the two parts struggled with one another in such a fascinating, rewarding way.

Forget the hype now; when they made this last summer, without hype, without de-habilitating expectation, they may just have created the finest indie-rock album of the year.

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.

Class Clown gives us what is most best and most constant about the band--their sonic restlessness, shambolic hooks, broken glory--and nothing less.

It sounds more coherent than episodic, placeless, and with a definite emphasis on the rock aspects that, on "Recording a Tape," were used sparingly.

In practice and in total, Eyelid Movies isn’t a contrarian or particularly abrasive debut—it’s entirely likable, paced well and efficiently, dishing out a little something for everybody but never seemingly exhausted by this task.

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

Despite its democratic structure, Unsound suffers from a curious sequencing problem, or what we around here like to call Channel Orange-itis--but few bands of their vintage continue to write songs this prolifically or professionally.

Destroyer of the Void isn’t a bad album, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect well upon Blitzen Trapper’s changes as a band.

This is the Strokes’ first record without its adherence to formula and form, with better guitars and bigger chords. And, you know, more fun.

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.

The cacophony raised by this album is not so much the kind that unsettles us in important and challenging ways, but is the commercial noise of a spectacle without a center, of emotion so generic we are instantly desensitized to it.

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

What’s left, then, is an album that’s overlong, but one that’s surprisingly easy to succumb to.

If Ashworth’s lyrical razorblade was blunted by the quaintness of Casiotone consistency before, his new compositional confidence allows its sharpness to shine and cut as deep as you could handle without running a bath.

Obsidian makes for a totally immersive plunge and, depending on where you are with your own head when you listen, either a welcome gulp of fresh air in recognition or a chance to hold your breath and dive deeply into life’s darker materials until you have to come back up again.

The lowdown: it sounds pretty much the same as "Bang Bang," but not as good. It's not that the record is "bad"--it isn't--but that it, like its title suggests, is less brash, less fuck-all incautious about its rocking.

There’s a wealth of great material buried within The Avalanche, if you don’t mind digging.