Songs is heavy on romantic longing, but the music is so coy and smart that it rarely feels mushy.

Black Dice doesn‚t shy away from risks, and this record is just as daring as Beaches and Canyons or Creature Comforts.

Amber Headlights has clear thematic and structural parallels to the Afghan Whigs' excellent 1996 rock opera Black Love.

This turn for the yee-haw is a bit mystifying but hardly a mistake; Howl is exactly the cry the BRMC needed to make.

There's just a little more space on this record for the songs to build and breathe. Twin Cinema is the first New Pornographers record you'll want to sit through from beginning to end.

Bright Ideas has an air of excitement and energy about it, and contains some of McCaughan's strongest songwriting to date.

The punk-informed material on Blitzkrieg Pop sounds like the missing link between Ministry's earlier, sensitive electro material and its later and more well-known incarnation as the nihilistic buzz-sawing and bile-spewing industrial unit.

Knitting Needles & Bicycle Bells is a near perfect collection of four-minute songs that recall a more ragged XTC, the skewed pop/rock style of The Kinks, and The White Album-era Beatles.

If the fifties rocked this hard, we'd be dead now.

There is some irony in following up a record called We Fight Til Death with one titled (and as vital as) Giving Up The Ghost. However, Windsor For The Derby doesn't sound as if it has succumbed to anything save for its singular atmospheric pop tendencies.

[Has] a mysterious backwoods vibe worthy of Murmur-era REM.

Surprisingly, the time frame covered by the collection does not detract from the listening experience, rewarding Cursive-completists with moments of power punk and the angular guitar work the band has come to be known for.

A shot of raw psych rock that's as adventurous as it is accessible.

A gorgeous, shimmering 40 minutes of music - a sonic road trip through parts unknown.

These are songs about horrible times in horrible lives; hearts are rotten long before they break and the sounds they make are awful and haunting and beautiful.

My only problem with the album is that it begins to devour its own tail about halfway through, at times sounding tedious, or worse, precious.

Lidell has created an album of flawless, imaginative, and radical funk grooves.

The compilation will not alter your opinions of Lali Puna. But between the new material and older cuts previously scattered across numerous singles and compilations,I Thought I Was Over That is something fans old and new will want to have around.

Humming By The Flowered Vine takes the rootsy sounds of classic country music (incorporating Hank Williams, Lucinda Williams and everyone in between) and plops them smack dab in the middle of Manhattan.

The results are predictably wonderful.

Slice Thrills up into its individual pieces, and Ellen Allien's third studio record is flawless.

The results are stunning.

When Pause came out in 2001, that sounded like an artist at his peak. But get this: He's still at his peak, and the view is no less scintillating, crisp, and sweet, rolling with drums and shaded by clouds of horn reverb and file-sharing swish.

The record's disparate experiments are unified by an overriding darkness, the black light Albarn shines on the dancehall. It's this unusual tone that makes Demon Days intriguing long after it's ceased to be novel.

Although an extreme statement, it is a major stylistic step forward for the band and pays off great dividends to those so inclined to follow them into The Woods.

Is Malkmus treading water? Well, maybe. But despite the complaints of those fans who can’t let Pavement go, he’s still making valid, adventurous and - most of all - fun music.

Perhaps the best overall representation of Belle and Sebastian’s distinctive brand of indie pop.

A debut album so confident and flawlessly developed it seems more like the work of a band hitting its mid-career creative peak.