The record maps for, and makes for, an unhurried listen, stringing between buttery grooves with an apparent smoker's-delight vibe; the set only goes up a notch when The Pharcyde step up to the microphone, their goofy, lithe lyricism upping the relaxed pulse for a pair of fine moments.

Overall, it is clear that Hitchcock is having fun creating music with Welch and Rawlings, and that joy comes through in the listening.

Heroes to Zeros, in spite of a few uneven tracks, makes the cut.

Unlike previous albums, Ovalcommers wheezes and squirms its way inside.

. Ditching some of the more Cali-like, pop-like and psych-like vestments of past longplayers, Argyle Heir finds the quartet-cum-sextet making the most medieval indie-rock this side of dungeon-dancing Helium honcho Mary Timony.

Their record runs through a range of instrumentalist archetypes and quietly surprising turns-for-the-worse, from electrified screech to tape-op minimalism, through pastoralism and soundscapery, to numbers where they knock out all manner of feigned sturm und drang.

The tracks fail to hang together in a convincing way -- often giving the impression that they were more or less strung together on a whim.

His best work since 1997's Built to Spill album, Perfect From Now On.

It is hard to say which side of Mogwai is more moving, the quietly beautiful or the transcendently loud, but the great thing about Mr. Beast is that you don't have to decide.

This is a compelling debut/reunion, with the two men seeming to push each other far more than any of their recent collaborators have.

As if its size alone weren't enough to set the album apart from his preceding Spiritualized outings, Pierce has removed all the sounds he thought were immediately identifiable as Spiritualized -- delay, phase, Telecaster, Farfisa -- and left the songs as largely orchestral numbers.

There's no question Aesop Rock makes essentially no sense half the time. The other half, he's painting abstract art all over fractured soundscapes. The music is smart and progressive; it's also pretentious and challenging.

Their newfound versatility detracts somewhat from their own identity.

In the midst of all this Neptunian mastery, there are two absolutely unlistenable "rock" songs that no fan of modern productionist fervor could possibly stand listening to.

At their best... Pearls & Brass churn out hard-rocking sculptures of distorted sounds at buffeting volume, but with a meditative, trance-inducing core.

Combining dramatic, ethereal pop vocals with moody guitar and piano theatrics, Summer in Abaddon recalls a tighter, smoothed-out Built to Spill, or maybe a Dismemberment Plan reunion.

With this album, French Kicks have taken a sizeable leap forward, taking the right bits and pieces from half a century of rock 'n' roll to make something new and, yes, unique.

Rain on Lens isn't awful, but boy, is it a long way from The Doctor Came at Dawn.

An eclectic, highly promising debut.

Alive to Every Smile finds TBS swanning through a set of soft-pop numbers giddy with the misty misery of melancholy and coated with the softest frostings of studio icing-sugar.

Too much of Half Smiles of the Decomposed, however, does not rock.

All for You is, for the most part, signature Janet.

Seemingly taking its cue from Congleton's willfully bizarre screaming, the band favors atonalism and discordance in its cobbled-together brand of mighty-uptighty protest rock.

Their sound is dirty and raw, sexy and wrong.

This record finds a band scaling the heights of their precise craft in a way that gives upward mobility a good name.

More than just a sick joke, Souljacker is a rocking, thought-provoking journey.

Sticking to a formula -- a formula that works for them -- the band sounds fiercer than ever on Riot Act.

Nick Cave, no mistake about it, is still a major talent, and Nocturama isn't nearly as bad a mid-career flop as Lou Reed's Mistrial or David Bowie's Never Let Me Down.... But nevertheless, this is also far from essential Nick Cave, as most longtime fans will immediately discern.

Suggests a progression and a retreat at the same time.

Atmosphere are clearly at the top of the emo-rap game; it's just not necessarily a game true schoolers will want to play.

Like early arcade-game programmers, Ratatat are working with a greatly reduced palette, and the synth reductionism means they're never going to escape cute.

True, only "60 Miles an Hour" sounds like a candidate for New Order's pantheon of hallowed singles; still, Get Ready might be the group's most consistent album from top to bottom.

Maladroit is the emo equivalent of '70s arena rock -- a bracingly cocky attitude that tag-teams with its partner, navel-gazing.

It doesn't have the edginess of the Kid's previous recordings, and cloaks its eclectic sense of play in tasteful, textured layers, but in so doing achieves a consistency that has previously been lacking.

Whether you listen closely, for the sonic textures, or in a cursory fashion, scouting out the allusions galore, with each listen you'll likely appreciate something different.

Although much of the record re-verses and re-crafts melodies in the same vein, there are a few gems that can't be missed.

While a nine-track, 30-minute-long album rarely begs for editing, what Timms has assembled here might have made better sense as an EP.

The disc essentially finds the now-quartet cleaning up and living right and letting the world see them as they are; their tracks are marked by much clean-fingered guitar playing (the added guitar meaning there's six-stringing back-and-forth) and only a recreational use and abuse of wah.

Pixel Revolt feels, at the end, like two EPs packaged together and passed off as a full-length. The justification could be made that the fierce, angry and frustrated responses to international armed conflict and girlfriends leaving are very much the same, though that would seem to be kind of a stretch.

Once you fall for "Yellow," the rest of the album will kick in, and fast.

Attention to detail particularly benefits the lush and endearing "Good Fruit," the rare track wherein lovelorn earnestness replaces self-conscious repartee.

They play slow, but it's slow in the way that Low once did, a sort of punk-rock rebellion against speed and belligerence.

They do a good job of mixing humor and fun with their politics...

Rather than letting one in on the game, Lafata's lyrics keep things at comic/ironic distances, where they're shrouded in the mystique of embodying pop-cultural critique.

They're merely using Psychocandy as a workaday aesthetic strategy and, despite loads of melodrama, they never sound pretentious about it either.

The tunes are tepid, but that's not to say they aren't enjoyable to listen to -- in fact, the songs aren't bad at all, but they're not exactly great either.

It's spontaneous and weird and, while its initial thumping may turn off those liking their trip-hop controlled, those who are ready to sweat a little will be rewarded by this unique duo's evolving imagination.

They're trapped by this, their one-trick shtick; it the same old song, played again, Sam, for all those girls in white belts who won't stop 'til they get enough.

Kannberg has made an album of fine indie pop that few could have expected.

The strength Moorer has shown from first album to second album and finally to this genre-leaping experiment in self-recreation is enough to not only merit a listen, but to make sure we pay attention to the fourth album when it arrives.

And flaws there are, with many of the tracks sinking into a midtempo morass with decidedly underdeveloped melodies and daft instrumentation.

Green Day have created a great punk-meets-rock album.

Donelly shows a grace on this disc that a lot of people her age aren't capable of.

Where their prettiness was once cloaked in a shroud of bashful melancholy, with [producer Joshua] Eustis on hand things get a little more grandstanding.

An abundance of morose, meandering material in search of a hook.

Swings like a pendulum from playful dance beats, cutesy female vocals and spacey synth effects to feedback-drenched, guitar-heavy rock fronted by a raspy male singer. And it does so with such affection that the unique power of their contagious, inventive sounds cannot be denied.

Honeycomb is a coherent and listenable collection of songs.

Coming up in the discothèque all disco/not-disco, Jackson's perspicacious hindsight gazes back to what was winning back in the day, now dragging it into the drag-and-drop to create pro-tooled playlist pop, its parts glued together into a seamless, shiny, mirroring whole.

There's a lot of empty space in these songs, the better to focus on Kim and Kelley's up-front vocal harmonies and classically off-kilter lyrical ideas.

While not as dark, muscular or streamlined as the band's excellent, eponymously titled 2003 album, Flat-Pack Philosophy grows better and better with each listen.

Todd... smartly allows her soaring, angelic voice to take the lead, leaving the sparse arrangement of strings and keys to take a delicate backseat. This also means her lyricism, poignant and wry, stands out.

The music here tries to be as unobtrusive as possible, its plasticky tone and carefully shined finish constructed to contrast with the earnest soulfulness of Usher's singing. And it's in his words that the album finds the substance that it does have.

Continuing an audio development from Dots and Loops, Sound-Dust is littered with a giddy array of hand percussion instruments — marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel stir up a polyrhythmic stew, its busyness and complexity sounding like the product of painstaking studio assemblage.

The Bay Area punk-rockers mix early Ramones with '80s metal.

Aside from Riches' rich language, there's not much traditionalism on the album, it being more concerned with stumbling in melancholy fashion through murmured countryish balladry.

It is, at one time or another, twee reggae, hipster rock-ism, synth-pop balladry, post-Interpol gothickry. It's an inconsistency that's both noble and annoying.

Part of the fun of the Beastie Boys is knowing that they're fucking with the rhymes and you; another part is knowing that they give a fuck about what's happening in the world. Those two things don't always work well together, though, especially when they say something watered down and deliver it as though they don't buy it either.

As forward-thinking as this sounds, it just kind of makes Gorillaz an Archies/Josie & The Pussycats for the new millennium. It also makes them and their album fit in with everyone else in the progressive hip-hop canon, all of whom see fit to make slightly ludicrous concept records.

Spending much of its time suspended in hollowed-out tones smudged only by desolate beats, Aaltopiiri is probably Pan sonic's most intense listening experience.

Throughout the album's dozen tracks, the sentiment Lightbody conjures evokes real pain and real beauty.

Love. Angel. Music. Baby. has been acclaimed as a bright-and-shiny pop-music tour-de-force, but once the initial thrilling rush of the stylistic sheen and artistic conception has abated, the album seems too fragmented to be anointed as such.

A welcome return to that good stuff Gang Starr has delivered over the years.

In the end, it is musicianship that makes Duper Sessions unquestionably successful.

Cruelty Without Beauty is the sound of Soft Cell reclaiming the musical territory they staked out in their 1981 hit debut, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, offering up hooky, dancefloor-oriented synthetic soul, now jacked up into a higher gear for the clublands of the new millennium.

All those instrumental colorings are clearer, and the individual qualities of the voices in their choir shine through even when they're all belting it out together.

Feels a little bit contrived, at times, an elaborate game of dress-ups unleashed under the unlikely title This Is for Real -- a claim which, if not deliberately ironic, sure seems the complete opposite of the fabricated fashion-conscious compilation-of-quotations that the album actually is.

Take[s] their haunted-house shtick to frightening extremes.

While the pair probably had a lot of fun making the record, unfortunately, it isn't the most enjoyable listen.

Daybreaker bears all the strengths and beauty of the earlier Orton CDs, but it also shows some growth.

Hiatt delivers a batch of songs that powerfully evoke certain places, certain times, certain characters, with an eye for detail and an understanding of the complexities of human behavior seldom seen in songwriters these days.

A jangly collection of contagious pop tunes made melancholy by a dark songwriting style.

May well be the best of its seven studio albums, one that even approaches the heights of the stellar Singles Going Steady collection.

Listening to Introduction is like viewing the world through someone else's glasses, skewed, disturbing and perhaps causing a bit of vertigo.

They've broken their own mold and achieved something unexpectedly fine and durable.

The glassy-eyed micro-manic bass-'n'-breaks belligerence on show-offy tracks on this Squarepusher longplayer is either tellingly tired or terrifically tiring, with Jenx's wicked licks of brown-note boogie either spuriously slow in the foot or a swift kick to the collective ass of a collectively ass-kissing musical community.

They don't always sound consistent on this debut, occasionally misfiring with underworked material, but overall the strengths overshadow any weaknesses, and when they truly hit their stride they're devastatingly effective.

Their inventive, experimental-leaning music dances through history, passing from blues to rock 'n' roll to pop to experimental to something uniquely theirs.

Easily the band's most consistent, tonally tight disc thus far.

The album largely treads the same brazen minimal-electro territory; and most of the dick/tits/cunt-centric songs will be familiar for anyone who's seen Peaches' girlie-show shows in full-frontal effect over the past couple years.

Cash might surprise with his choice of covers, but in nearly all of his selections, he locates some personal meaning, or introduces new emotional elements.

Cold and lifeless.

The songwriting is self-assured and thoughtful; the album is unified as a pastiche of romantic musings.

Their new pop direction finds them drifting about, directionless as opposed to eclectic.

[The songs] are just similar enough to blend together in a close listen, but they also work as a diverse soundtrack behind whatever it is you're doing.

Low Kick and Hard Bop doesn't necessarily lend itself to all listening situations, and may even be tiring at times. It can, however, enlighten and surprise the listener.

Bitter Tea offers immediacy, but little reward for return visits; offers vastness -- at a dawdling 73 minutes -- but nothing in the way of big ideas.

It's a relaxed and ambitious collection that confirms Ryan Adams' reputation as a top-notch singer and songwriter who easily jumps styles and evokes comfortable sadness with every turn.

A gorgeous and moving collection of love songs.