If Blues isn't as immediately classic-sounding as Molina's 2003 pseudo-debut, it still harbors enough affecting songs to make you pause and admire the man's craft.

It all recalls a traveling Klezmer troupe, unsure of its audience, warming up with tributes to "Schindler's List", "For Whom the Bell Tolls", and "The Godfather", while waiting to find out if they're playing a festival or a funeral.

By album's end, two coming-of-age stories are complete: the boy has grown into a black sheep man, and the literate musicians have become a hell of a rock band.

It's endearingly all over the place, but depressingly self-referential.

Arular is what The Coup’s second record set out to be but wasn’t: Party Music, both for the warehouse hedonists and the basement dissidents.

While the music is as delicious and diverse as ever, the Decemberists' meal ticket is Meloy's unmatched lyrical prowess, which borders at times on mod-Shakespearean.

Songs walk a delicate tightrope between the brain and the hips, and the libidinal release of the beat is denied, suggested, suppressed, and finally let loose to sweat it out.

Silence's instrumentals - choppy samples, organs, and horns, set to the tune of a staccato digital pacemaker - sound great, but they hardly stray from the formula laid down by Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives.

Second disc Chirpin' Hard is the crowd-pleasing Speakerboxxx to Hill's less-accessible Church Gone Wild.

Unfortunately, the band is not able to match their vitriol with memorable tunes.

Newcomers may want to start investigating with something less daunting, but even the casual fan of Cave's work will find this collection indispensable.

No Earthly Man demonstrates that all the glitz and studio production techniques used in making many records aren't really necessary to craft a compelling document.

While the new album doesn't quite topple 1998's Silur from its Tarwater throne, The Needle Was Traveling is certainly a more than credible addition to the band's discography.

Occasionally, you might wish for a more generous-sounding lead vocal or concise song structure, but 10th Avenue Freakout is populated with stimulating, rather than easily accessible, music.

Restraint and frustration are the dominant themes, but the short, aggressive outbursts don't always offer enough release to justify the fatiguing buildups.

Throughout, Doe strikes just the right balance. He's confident but not arrogant; laid back, yet full of vitality.

The Radar Brothers have been called "pastoral," "wandering" and "spacey." Their latest, The Fallen Leaf Pages, adds nothing new to this mix of descriptors.

Where Corpse works, it's merely a repeat of past successes. The few tentative steps into unfamiliar territory are marked failures.

Two tracks focusing on guest vocalists are stand-outs.... The other eight songs are more hit-and-miss, often depending on whether Bip's headed toward rock (the blah "Eyelashings," which sounds like a mediocre U2 song, without vocals or a chorus) or hip-hop ("The Move," a nice piece of synthesizer and vibraphone chemistry).

She's lyrically sharp as ever, and switches gears and works in nice melodies just enough to soften the edges, luring fans in before she pummels them.

No Wow is pure sex, pulsating blues-based rock and roll from start to finish.

Aside from the added guitar riffs and post-punk tones, Stars stick with a lush string section and neatly placed horns throughout, and their romantic appeal stays largely intact.

Despite the fact that Prekop isn't really pushing himself on this album, it's a near perfect distillation of his art.

The advantages that The Capitol Years have over many of their compatriots are the excellent voice of lead singer Shai Halperin and swoon-inducing harmonies.

Despite the relatively spartan proceedings, there is a substantial amount to latch onto here.

While Spektor possesses an intriguing voice, she uses it in such a cloying, affected manner as to be almost entirely off-putting.

The album's production, particularly the insistence on pinning Brown's hazy croon way on top of the mix, too often dulls any punch the music would otherwise have.

Where previous releases have been occasionally bogged down in somnambulistic reverie, the majority of The Earth Is Blue feels light as air.

It's easily the artist's most cohesive, polished work.

Over the course of Gemstone's 15 tracks, Green's heavily enunciated, lumbering delivery become more irritating than a busload of thespians on their way to an audition. Thankfully, Green's elementary-school melodies, which call to mind Jonathan Richman at his silliest, ultimately save this album from the topical hell to which it aspires.

An almost uniformly excellent outing.

Garnier displays an ability to approximate several genres, yet betrays his fellow travelers by failing to infuse any of them with individuality or innovation.

There's a layered, almost psychedelic feel to a lot of these songs, suggesting that Beam may not be the died-in-the-wool folkie some might have pegged him as.

The only thing that holds this collection down at all is the fact that you're listening to it at home, and, no matter how good your audio setup, it will never come close to the band's famously loud and beautiful live sets. And, at that, this comes close.

It's one thing to treat your influences with reverence, eyes and goals fixed on a past that brought them to you. It's another to fold them into the present, into the elusive omnipresence of the moment. And how Dead Meadow pulls this off on Feathers is an amazing thing to hear.

Filled with zesty pop confections, sing along choruses, and plenty of attitude.

An exceptional testament to James Murphy, both as a musician and producer.

For the most part, Outside Closer fails to separate itself from the pack of glitch-rock albums it now must share the market with.

Manzanita may be too diverse to be cohesive, but it is filled with interesting songs and the continued potential for great things.

Possessing a richly elastic set of vocal chords, Bird is in league with such silver-throated singers as Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright, but he rarely if ever over-emotes, a common criticism leveled at Buckley and Wainwright.

When the songs work – it's some of the best material Faithfull has ever produced. But when they don't – you're left... falling asleep in the car.

All in all it's not the noise rush we were craving - and no, it's not as good as Source Tags - but did anyone really think it could be?

The album has a sonic cohesiveness that makes for a consistently pleasant listening experience.

The found sounds on Digital Ash can seem an affected and unnecessary embellishment in certain places.... But in other places they work.

Stripped down and folky... there's no denying Oberst's presence as a major artist who continues to evolve and explore his craft with each release.

The album is harsher, darker, and just plain louder than Low have ever been in their 10-year career.

I Sold Gold is the rare record that can poke fun at itself, the world, and its fans yet transcend simple entertainment.

Both Costa and Lindsay Anderson have an uncanny ability to evoke multiple emotions through their lyrics. The downside seems to be their lack of range; all the songs feel the same.

The band continuously recycles itself into a feeble mass.

George has an indistinct voice somewhere between Suzanne Vega and Cat Power. Her lyrics are not mind-blowing, but not at all banal.

The lack of distinctiveness is what ultimately makes All Years Leaving utterly forgettable.

A loose, fun collection.

Nothing's Lost is heavier, denser and in its best moments, verges on pop nirvana.

It's a crackling, concise collection.

Despite mining decades-old forms, The Anomoanon's honest rock is hard to dislike.

It's funny and smart and a little annoying in large doses.

The sound, which blends a little of the pastoral, John Fahey-influenced digital music with calm, focused songwriting, gives a sense of romance to a fairly limited musical vocabulary.

You're a Woman, I'm a Machine might be the best party record on this side of '79 that your local abandoned warehouse has ever seen.

Behold 2004, your kings of yawn-rock, Son, Ambulance.

Cave's songwriting chops and incisive lyrics have, if anything, grown stronger.

Rendezvous is among the group's finest works.

Sounding like a lost classic from Britain's 1979 art-punk scene, the Futureheads' debut is an assured masterpiece of twitchy, nervous pop.

When layers of choir-boy vocals are added to the group's singing ("Hun Joro"), when feeble, naturalistic sounds are used in questing improvisations ("Sigur Ros"), or when acoustic instruments coalesce with a swath of electronics ("Dogun"), you'll find your jaw on the floor, too, stunned as ever.

Those who can overlook this slightly dumbed-down approach will find This Island is not without its moments.

As hit-and-miss as its 2003 predecessor.

Dents and Shells matches the intensity and concision of Impasse, while adding an organic, spontaneous feel to the proceedings.

[Disc 1 is] a revealing, if not quite essential, portrait of the artist.... [Disc 2 is] an inventive, rewarding look at the Pixies esteemed catalogue.

Love Songs for Patriots picks up exactly where American Music Club last left us: producing uniformly excellent music filled with heartbreak, loneliness, and - yes - politics.

In a way CVB's New Roman Times is on par career-wise with Rush's 2112 - well, minus the klezmer anyway.

Summer in Abaddon delivers an all-inclusive perfection that sets it apart from any other record this year.

The spoken-word Sonny and Cher act of Chains and Sue does gets tiresome at moments, lyrics like "you be the follower, let's kill the leader" aren't as clever as their authors believe, and the record does run on a fairly consistent mid-tempo bounce.

Mason's songs wander from folk to rock and dip their toes into country, but sound fresh, and never boring.

As long as they continue to compose such memorable material, there is more than enough room for Mono in the post-rock pantheon.

For every misstep on the mostly acoustic Spooked, there's an undeniable classic.

A buzzing, raw jewel of a record that hints at seemingly limitless possibilities for Beckett's songwriting.

Absolutely brutal.

For pure intensity and soul, Damage is now THE album in the Blues Explosion catalog, and essential listening at that.

Far less lucid than his past work, even by Animal Collective standards, all nine untitled compositions reflect a man whose soul is adrift.

A disarmingly beautiful album.

If you like your indie rock sweet and sophisticated with undertones of despair, you'll want to cuddle up with Universal Audio.

The album feels half baked, as though Morrison isn't quite sure which direction to take his nascent solo career.

A puzzling release.

They are a lot more inspired-sounding than many of their more contemporary-sounding colleagues.

On first listen [it's] profoundly unimpressive.... What each successive listen reveals, however, is a deftly understated and maturing pop craftsmanship.

What worries me about the obviously talented Junior Boys is their tendency to round their corners. The music is so safe, so pleasant; it's not hard to imagine it in the Starbucks CD rotation without raising an eyebrow.

The '80s idolatry is far too forced and distracting, and VHS or Beta comes off as trying too hard to imitate admittedly great, but definitely dated, pop music.

Occasionally, Memphis' songs coast on an attractive soundscape rather than going for a compositional or lyrical knockout punch. Nevertheless, I Dreamed we Fell Apart is often quite beguiling.

Zedek somehow twists her troubled characters and haunting tunes into things of beauty.

Gelb creates masterful songs for the ages.

The songs are likable, but lack a core.

Highlights the band at its most exploratory.

An unpleasant record to listen to.

So Jealous has a broad appeal, nicely connecting the dots between Avril Lavigne and Joan Jett, but shouldn't be slighted by the latter's fans for it's immediacy.

Like The Fiery Furnaces' Gallowsbird Park, or Interpol's Turn On The Bright Lights, Funeral is a debut record that simply refuses to be ignored.

A near perfect record that will have The Rapture,!!!, and every other dance punk band looking over their collective shoulders.

Shiny, soulless dance tracks that would have been mediocre even as Rick Astley backing tracks.

Some songs are sloppily stretched out and others simply half-finished, but the ample charms of Doherty and Barat are just enough to rescue any of these lows.

The album, impressive in its scope and sense of adventure, is a further reinvention in Björk's already massive discography.