The subdued guitars and steady percussive clip-clop are a noticeable change from the band's usual jangly late-afternoon pop, but even on the richest melodies lyrics and delivery drive the album.

At the end, Wyatt takes the For the Ghosts Within's over-riding mushiness, runs with it, and it makes it totally work.

North is an album intended to be accessible, and it embodies its time and place more honestly than most records released this year--which is a risky thing to say while also acknowledging that the title refers to a time as well as a place: the Northern England of Joy Division and The Human League.

The real measure of Knoxville's success is that it always feels it has ended too soon.

Fields, the third release and first full-length album from the Swedish trio Junip, both meets and defies expectations.

The Fool brims with potential for something more substantial, but never confronts those depths.

Even at Phosphene Dream's best moments, you can't help feeling that this is a very competent, earnest reproduction of things that have already been done.

This time out, more than ever before, it really feels like Brooks and Co. are half-assing it, victory lap style, when they could have soared once again.

The Books have always been both playful and serious, but their latest album moves between the two easily and without making the listener take note. It is so subtle that even when paying attention, it still feels natural.

For the most part, Write About Love is a disappointment. That's even truer, I suspect, because Belle and Sebastian aren't the only ones getting older.

The 13 songs on What It Means to Be Left-Handed are all, in their own way, enjoyable. The ideas and collaborations on display are impressive, as is the stylistic range. But there's still a bit of cohesion missing there--something that makes What It Means to Be Left-Handed feel more like a collection of individually good ideas and less like a singular artistic statement.

You can hear him trying to sort out the differences between Aeroplane's past and its/his future without resolving them yet. Appropriately, if you often find yourself unwittingly listening to pop hits from 1975-1985, you are the target demographic of We Can't Fly.

As a listener, you pretty much have Eskmo pegged by halfway, and it's disappointing that there aren't any sonic curveballs in the second half.

Stevens inspiration or jumping off point for The Age of Adz was outsider artist Royal Robertson, and, much like Robertson's artwork, the themes in the album vacillate between the mundane and heartfelt and surreal and grandiose.

It's a difficult accomplishment, encompassing pop and the avant-garde while also featuring a particularly striking element (in this case, Hegarty's voice); all three are well-represented here.

Stoltz's recreations are means to an end; he wants to write songs about good-old fashioned topics like falling in and out of love that sound fresh enough to make you play them over and over.

She writes amazing, heartfelt songs, interesting in tone and composition.

1,000 Years, Tucker's solo debut, shows a remarkable amount of growth both as a songwriter and a performer from the loud guitar maelstrom that punctuated Sleater-Kinney some years back.

Look, this isn't a Clinic record that's gonna convert anyone not already checked-in, but it is another encouraging move, proving that the band is not content to stagnate in the confines of its sound.

With Crush, these kids found a way forward, and strangely enough, they found it by looking back.

Deerhunter has come into its own, and the halcyon result is not to be missed.

What's up with all this defeat? The answers, in no particular order: Because he's Neil Young.

This is not a one-hit wonder situation, or even an album with only one good song. With King Night, Salem exhausts all its resources in a singular moment, which leaves the rest of the record to suffer through its own paralysis and mediocrity.

There is little time wasted in this record's nine songs, and that Mesirow packs so many wonderful sounds into it without really complicating the chord progressions or basic melodies is perhaps the truest testament to her talent.

Women's last record had poppier, brighter aspects than Public Strain, and it's hard to imagine what they might add to this sound beyond an amp'd up production that would wreck their very deliberate effect.

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky distills everything Gira has ever done. It's a shockingly dense record, the Gira experience in 45 minutes or less. All killer, no filler, for real.

The Trip is casual, low-stakes pop that is easy to live with.

Entirely derivative but somehow not obvious, the record is surprisingly--and pleasantly--strange.