All too often, this new material fails to leave much of an impression.

On a musical level these new songs are clearly identifiable as the Poster Children's work, but the band covers a broad array of lyrical turf on No More Songs About Sleep and Fire.

The music here combines the scrappy, psychedelic folk of Hour of Bewilderbeast with the more melodic and sentimental "About a Boy" soundtrack.

Whether they're shrieking or pleading, dancing or shivering, they're always exuding an intensity that never fails to find a way to hit you hard, really hard.

The Beachwood Sparks balance deft restraint with hot guitar licks, making Once We Were Trees the best Byrds album since Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

A set of tunes blessed with melody but hardly immediately memorable.

While their sound may be familiar, Camera Obscura are anything but run-of-the-mill.

The songs aren't always as good as one might hope, especially in comparison to The Mekons' peak period.

Margerine Eclipse is a decided improvement upon their last three albums, discarding the dense and difficult song structures that plagued those albums.

As a whole, The Secret of Elena's Tomb is a compendium of many of the things Trail of Dead have been to date: provocative lyricists, well-honed musicians, and now film directors.

The album straddles R.E.M.'s past and their future, sounding fresh, assured -- and on par with their best previous efforts.

Like previous albums, this one is full of sharp, sudden observations, rueful admissions of failure and surprising sweetness.

No, this album is not superfluous -- far from it. The Avalanche brings Stevens' exacting vision on Illinois into sharper focus.

A sombre, sorrowful collection.

Often, it's all too much -- too many synths, too many drums, too much reverb; it's as if every subtlety of that first record was magnified in the production process, its once lithe and supple frame vulgarly pumped with steroids.

His 12th record holds no surprises for longtime fans, and yet here it is, his best, his greatest.

In stripping things back Mercury Rev suggest that in their case more actually was more, that bereft of the digressions and expansions they're just another band with a nasal, naïve-sounding singer, a way with a hook and a penchant for using the studio as an instrument.

Much of this dreary lyricism will be seen as English-as-a-second-language charm by so many -- and the album's lyric sheets, which put forth all the spelling-mistake-riddled broken English with pride, seem to be of the same belief. But loving that about this disc is like so much faint praise at best, and a pernicious kind of cultural condescension at worst.

It's not far from the sound that Yo La Tengo have made their own, especially in their more contemplative, less psychedelic moments...

Let Us Never is the latest sophomore album to make its creator's (actually really good) debut sound kinda paltry.

Somewhere in the mess of feedback and sonic sluggishness is something that strikes a nerve, makes you want to hear it again.

Drawing notions of rhythm, tonality and structure akin to the work of avant-garde greats Roscoe Mitchell, Sun Ra and Kool Keith, Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp is an inventive, spaced-out fusion of classical free jazz and futuristic electro hip-hop.

The resulting sound is tougher and more insistent, a succession of incessant rhythms layered with fuzziness and distortion.

Amongst the bubble-and-squeak, there's much audio delight to savor...

What's particularly exciting about this release is the second compact disc, which features an animation by Katsura Moshino, adding a bizarre visual narrative to Takemura's rich audio playground.

The chaff-to-wheat ratio remains distressingly unbalanced on Torino.

Ultimately, I suspect Costello non-devotees will find that too much effort is required to get into these songs and there may not be sufficient emotional payoff to justify the investment.

What makes At War With the Mystics different is spontaneity -- and not spontaneity in a jazz sense. Listening to this album you get the feeling that absolutely anything could happen -- as if it's taking final form only as it reverberates off your eardrums.