The songs are mostly concise, ranging from less than two minutes to more than seven, but their motorik propulsion and detailed, gradual builds add more subtle rewards beneath synth-pop immediacy. [No. 101, p.55]

The album's most obvious failing is the way in which the vocals are presented and mixed. [No. 101, p.55]

Slow Focus finds them instituting a newfound affinity for broken, off-kilter beats, alongside their now-signature knack for teasing irresistible melodies out of chaotic, discordant noise. [No. 101, p.54]

Bug's poetry remains the stuff of nightmares, but the band's splayed-nerve shtick is wearing thin. [No. 101, p.59]

Pond manages to use just about every trick in the psych-rock playbook to create energetic, borderline-unstable earworms that bury themselves deep in your brain for days. [No. 101, p.59]

"Does this make this more or less weird than what I've come to expect from JOA?" the answer is yes. [No. 101, p.56]

If there's a complaint to be leveled, it's that the off threesome might have smoothed out its differences a little too much. But it mostly works. [No. 101, p.57]

For nine tracks in just 40 minutes, these are lighter than air and spry enough for your feet. [No. 101, p.60]

I Hate Music weds the North Carolina indie legends' eternal penchant for grind-it-out power punk with the pensiveness and introspection that colored their late-'90s/early-aughts output. [No. 101, p.56]

A thoughtful pop aesthetic that few others even shoot for. [No. 101, p.55]

The result is music that undulates and bobs, never really going anywhere, but accumulating density. [No. 101, p.52]

[It] only adds to the glory of his catalog. [No. 101, p.53]

Mediocrity this aggressive should cancel itself out at some point. [No. 101, p.53]

It's all beautiful and entrancing, but what's missing is a sense of discovery. [No. 101, p.52]

His voice wafting in as it from across some great, wide divide, he drapes heavy-lidded seductions and portending cautionary tales over several decades of occultish folk, ritualistic rhythm and acoustic blues, from Bron-Y-Aur stomps to paralyzed lullabies. [No. 101, p.51]

The whole affair has the energy of a younger band, one just starting on its first album rather than an act 30 years old. [No. 99, p.53]

The Olms offers ample reassurance that Yorn is one hell of a craftsman, even when he's striving for a less-is-more-aesthetic--though the jury's still out on whether he's an artist best left to his own devices. [No. 100, p.54]

The rhythm section is thoroughly strong, giving the band freedom to travel as far into the bleeps and bloops as it pleases, which is many miles. [No. 100, p.57]

Arthur goes at it more heartily than ever on autobiographical treatises like "King Of Cleveland," with a full-blooded band of renowneds and a funk that matches his usual finessed frenzy. [No. 100, p.52]

It's hard to listen, and that makes Dear Mark the kind of pointedly painful pop that forces me [to] rush out, buy 11 albums that came before it and never get around to opening the packages. [No. 100, p.56]

You get something that's very lovely and poetic and melancholy and vulnerable and unspeakably beautiful. [No. 100, p.54]

Another fine Vanderslice record with all he things we've come to expect. [No. 100, p.61]

As a 33-track double album, With Love has space for a small village's worth of memory lanes. [No. 100, p.61]

The group has managed to retain a sense of innocence, freshness and pure joy in the act of creation. [No. 100, p.59]

The new Apocalypse is leaner and funkier than the more jazzy and sprawling Golden Age Of Apocalypse. [No. 100, p.59]

There's a lot of worthwhile material for her to perform here. [No. 100, p.59]

The Style Council-style blue-eyed soul and precise power pop of the debut now have some company that doesn't work, like the '70s Nashville countrypolitan exercise of the title track. [No. 100, p.51]

It's not an overall disaster, it's certainly never dull, and there's plenty to keep the loyalists happy. [No. 100, p.58]

Smith keeps his garage-rock grounding--and his distinctiveness--intact. [No. 100, p.58]

Queens Of The Stone Age lumbers its way through a series of increasingly skronky, sludge-by-numbers jams and sound. [No. 100, p.57]

[The] sly, artful brilliance should come as no real surprise. [No. 100, p.57]

Overseas hits all the soft spots of longtime fans, while cohering easily into a new and striking whole. [No. 100, p.57]

While Femi's flame doesn't burn quite as strong as his dad's, the Kuti family still holds the belt as reigning champs of Afrobeat. [No. 100, p.55]

Jimmy Eat World has become a purveyor of modern rock that just so happens to have a noisier background that jerks like me won't let it live down. This permits recognition of well-penned, upbeat numbers like Appreciation" and "How'd You Have Me." [No. 100, p.55]

The production is crisper, the songs seem less abrupt, and the vocals are less murky. [No. 100, p.53]

This record's controls are set for the heart of the drone, and the crew knows precisely where they're going. [No. 100, p.53]

The Dave Sitek-produced Planta keeps things light and easy. [No. 100, p.53]

Though it's easily the group's densest, most challenging release to date, Tomorrow's Harvest will likely gratify anyone willing to dig deep enough to reap its wonders. [No. 100, p.53]

Hypnotic and punchy by turns, it's a riveting album that finds Bell X1 pushing its established aesthetics in admirably new directions. [No. 100, p.52]

It sounds like a band getting down to business, adjusting its identity to account for downsizing while consolidating its many strengths. [No. 100, p.51]

With All The Times We Had, they've nailed the harmony-drenched, foot-tapping folk/rock of the Seattle sound. [No. 96, p.55]

The riffs jump out with their junk out, wave wildly in your face, then leave you with the bill. Yet what's always been generally true of North Carolina's finest denim demons is that they're not afraid to show off their intellect. [No. 99, p.60]

A few more tracks like ["Chicks, Man"] would have made Elvis Club great, rather than good. [No.99, p.54]

There's no flashiness here, but a slow-burning passion makes this record smoke. [No.99, p.56]

Golden Age mines that elusive ground between the way things were and the way they're remembered, set to hypnotic acoustic and electronic instrumentation. [No.99, p.55]

It's good to have these Michigan noisemakers back, in fine form. [No.99, p.61]

Three cheers aren't enough. [No.99, p.59]

Abandon is a baseline, with Chardiet demonstrating a solid understanding of the fundamentals. [No.99, p.59]

A pleasant bedroom-style record that sometimes sounds more like rough sketches than fully formed ideas. [No.99, p.58]

This somnambulant slice of dreamy, low-key synth rock is a logical follow-up to Weekends. [No.99, p.58]

Marling is the gutsiest of chamber folkies. [No.99, p.57]

With Ultraviolet, Kylesa has retreated to a place of darkness and alienation. [No.99, p.57]

R. Cole Furlow reliably packs every Dead Gaze song with pathos, effects, blurred motion and voices, man, voices. [No.99, p.54]

Angergard vivid production is the perfect foil for Komstedt's warmly detached vocals, and fans of Saint Etienne, Beach House and Blondie's "Heart Of Class" should take notice. [No.99, p.53]

Monomania is stacked with track-to-track unshakable, albeit twisted, pop melodies and an atmosphere of unrest that will stick with you between repeated listens. [No.99, p.52]

It is, by any measure, a lovely, lovingly made record, its 13 tracks coming to enveloping climaxes via mystifyinng, electrifying turns of phrase. [No.99, p.51]

This one's a keeper. [No.99, p.52]

It's the rather unhinged propositions that sends chills in the warmest way, much like Will Oldham's timelessly classic mid-'90s output. [No.99, p.52]

From a fan's point of view, this [playing the same songs for years] rarely works. And it rarely works here. [No.99, p.55]

Love Is The Devil draws more obviously from film music, creating a moving, mostly instrumental platter loaded with evocative drones and coarse textures. [No.99, p.55]

It's hard to keep this album from simply asking why over and over again. [No.99, p.59]

Slow Summits is full of carefully arranged autumnal tunes: thoughtful, intimate, unaffected and wistfully romantic. It's secret music worth sharing.[No.99, p.56]

Intensely personal and musically powerful, Griffin captures the bold spirit of her family's history with top-notch songs. [No.99, p.56]

Debbie Downer, perhaps, but Austra sure knows how to make misery sound like a good time. [No.99, p.52]

A neat, consistently solid 34-minute record unconcerned with peaking or hits. [No.99, p.61]

Rogue Wave's fifth album features a handful of its best tunes yet. [No.99, p.59]

The music remains solidly Southern, using all three chords, but the lyrics reach for new levels of cussedness and vulnerability. [No.99, p.57]

Hopkins drifts too often into listless ambiance for anything here to actually set in. Even so, Immunity manages--more than any if his work to date--to accent Hopkins' greatest asset as a producer: his remarkable attention to detail. [No.99, p.57]

Partygoing is arguably as good as Memories Of Love. [No.99, p.54]

The results are gorgeous, but frustratingly circumspect: twitchy, mournful, would-be futuristic dark pop that's almost comforting in its claustrophobia. [No.99, p.55]

It's a warped ride overall, though not without some solid moments hidden beneath the surface. [No. 96, p.54]

A concept where every title is a different animal should've wielded funnier, more songful results. [No.98, p.55]

At times, the offering is inviting on the surface, but becomes a bit antiseptic or flattened once you actually get inside. [No. 98, p.53]

Serene, synthetic drones and sparse, resonate bass give the music body, and enthusiastically applied echo makes these instrumentals as dizzying as a vintage Lee Perry mix. [No. 98, p.58]

It's bolder, more focused and just all-around more rocking [than 2008's Party Intellectuals]. [No.98, p.59]

There's no shortage of pretty sounds, but it's too easy to drift into the reliable ebb and flow of this album's amniotic dynamic. [No. 98, p.54]

The failing of Plain, however, is its lack of direction and absence of cohesiveness. [No. 98, p.55]

There's nothing here that radically reinvents the delicate beauty of Drake's timeless compositions. [No. 98, p.61]

{Awayland} is far more confident than 2010's Becoming A Jackal, its vision more ambitious, its poetry more conflicted, its melodies more complex, its execution more polished. [No. 98, p.61]

It's an artful & well-crafted collection. [No. 98, p.60]

This half-hour slab of very high-energy punk would be cathartic if its root darkness weren't so persistently unsettling. [No. 98, p.60]

Comedown Machine may not quite hit the heights of the band's masterpiece-to-date, but it continues the band's healthy trend of finding curious new ways to twist and complicate its by-now instinctively recognizable sound. [No. 98, p.60]

Even at 16 tracks, RKives feels paltry and incomplete. [No. 98, p.59]

Not only does Bankrupt! propose a big, stadium-ready sound, it offers one that nearly suffocates its creators. [No. 98, p.59]

No matter the song or guest, it always sounds like the Melvins, and that's a good thing. [No. 98, p.58]

If the fanboys and motorheads are equally turned off by it in places, you get the sense the Puppets themselves--who sound happier and more comfortable here than they have in years--would be perversely pleased. [No. 98, p.58]

Boasting strength, durability and psychic stability on comeback Bloodsports, Suede shows its true dramatic worth on pensive, atmospheric exhibitions. [No. 98, p.57]

Take the fake phone call and run, don't elephant walk, away. [No. 98, p.56]

It is, for the most part, a distant shadow of former glories. [No. 98, p.56]

Playing to previous strengths, the band's third LP shuffles the decks, throwing six-string spiderwebs into spacey, bass-textured atmospheres. [No. 98, p.55]

Overgrown is a fuller, more heated album than its predecessor, denser and more tender. [No. 98, p.52]

There's no real depth allowed in the themes, of course, and it bears no small resemblance to most other post-LCD Soundsystem fare. But it's beyond pointless to fault another person's idea of goodtime music. [No. 98, p.52]

Top Of The Pops highlights everything that originally captured us, and makes a convincing argument as to why the band's following full-lengths are worth the money, too. [No. 98, p.52]

It's a denser, darker album than 2011's S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT, spending more of its time gazing outward, intent on gleeful subversion and taking delight in making noise for the hell of it. [No. 98, p.52]

What's great about English Little League very much preaches to the choir. But it's nevertheless clear this crew is ready to welcome some new converts once more. [No. 98, p.51]

MCII never quite gets to the point of pastiche, but its fondness for grunge-era distortion and '60s-style harmonies makes it entirely contemporary. [No. 98, p.53]

Michael "Fitz" Fitzpatrick still knows his way around a catchy hook, though, and there are more than a few memorable ones here. [No. 98, p.55]

Black Pudding is like any other Lanegan record, just with better chops. [No. 98, p.56]