Fans of the group's previous recordings may have trouble accepting the fact that Lost in Revelry doesn't have the high melodic consistency of We're All in This Alone.

Among contemporaries, Calla now stand alone, making dark, beautiful, intensely understated music that's as much landscape as narrative story.

His guffawing voice makes him sound like every rhyme he delivers is a punchline.

The album succeeds in creating a dreamy mood that is both soothing and slightly unsettling. And yet this mood is relentless, and, ultimately, all the songs begin to sound the same.

Up Above Is, in such, a gentle enough jam to work/non-work in an incidentalist sense; but compare it to folk that do this sort of gear with a fearsome seriousness -- like, most obviously, the Vibracathedral Orchestra -- and T&C come up as pale as a Midwestern mid-winter tan.

The set works like a spun-up set of carefully collated cuts, sequenced with stuck-tape-over-the-tabs-in-the-corners mix-tape affection that makes the whole seem like a sticky-sentimented sentimental love letter to the boys' record collections.

If you're a fan of tuneful, American-influenced pop-punk, Ash are waiting to burn a hole through your heart.

The songs are subtle and powerful, full of pain and humor.

Her most skillful and soulful work thus far.

Hypnotic Underworld is, paradoxically, actually the least hypnotic and least underground album Ghost have made thus far.

Utterly modern and utterly compelling.

His weighty messages are duly noted. Unfortunately, they're delivered so acrimoniously that the overwhelming lack of fun in the music makes his albums a chore to listen to.

Come Feel Me Tremble is a bit of a mess, like they stuck the disc on a wall and threw the songs at it.... But you could say the same thing for Hootenanny, and to me this captures a bit of the same magic.

The only obvious goal seems to be shorter, more direct songs, delivered with more straightforward demeanor.

While the album is pleasant, it takes awhile to open up. And once opened up, it's nice, but hardly revolutionary.

My Morning Jacket are much more upfront, and pretty easy to share. Band of Horses keep a lot shrouded in effects and indistinct lyrics.

Road-testing new material has produced a tight and confident work that transcends many third and fourth attempts by artists of similar caliber.

The band is never so consumed by brainy showmanship that they forget to rock -- this album kicks harder in places than Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath ever did, or The Strokes ever will.

What easily could have been a tired retread of rock snob classics instead makes use of the past to provide a recognizable framework in which to deal with the emotional rescue necessary after a damaged romantic relationship.

That unholy alliance of punk guitar and drum machine now shows off the organic contours of "real" band interaction -- check out how smoothly they funkify with one another on "Fake French."

Her songbird's voice has never sounded more beautiful than it does here.

A slow-burn knockout.

Doss on his own delivers a more controlled sound that recognizes quality over quantity without falling off the deep end of electro-dabbling, a fault that plagued some of OTC's later recordings. The result is clear, concise and powerful.

If you know the Divine Comedy's previous work, it's hard to imagine how Regeneration could disappoint; if they're new to you and you're a fan of literate, orchestrated pop music, give it a try.

This band's playing is so tight you wonder if the members aren't cogs in a machine.

Jurassic 5 deliver on this, their major-label debut.

Group Sounds may not be astonishingly great, but it mostly rocks with the raw, excellent sound RFTC has come to own.

Cex's production style favors an air of deep melancholy and foreboding, similar to the style of the Anticon Collective.

It is, in such, truly great, or truly arrogant, or truly conceited, or truly preposterous, or truly confused, or truly bemused, or truly profound, or truly magnificent. Or maybe all of these things. At once. Or at times.

Part of what makes this album work so well is that Gummere is willing to cede the mic to other bandmembers whose contributions contrast nicely with his own vocals.

The Strokes don't make the most original sounding music you've ever heard, but they make something that is only The Strokes.

Overall, Loose Fur is kinda interesting, especially as a historical document, but it's not much more than that.

Like a night taxi ride along a broad, lighted, skyscraper-lined city street, Happyness, the band's latest, feels wondrous, daring and slightly dangerous.

An exhilarating take on rock-'n'-roll caught, torn, between striving for the light and reveling in the dark.

His party peaks too early, though, with the gear soon settling into a middling middle, where the songs start to sound less distinct, and the changes start to become less pronounced, and interest starts to lag, and where, eventually, like a desperate host hoping to keep the party going, Hebden stacks on break after break in a gallant attempt to remind you that the disc is actually playing.

The music roars along, occasionally slowing to build tension, then letting loose with a corrosive guitar assault.

An odd, fascinating journey through the mind of a man who channels messages from horror movies, occult events, and other bewilderments, and turns them into songs.

Her most direct, distorted disc since she did Helium's The Dirt of Luck a decade ago.

They are pop and punk and rock and indie and a combination of all these things, but, more than all of the above, they are Harris' personal songs and they are incredible.

If you thought Mooney Suzuki's Estrus debut, People Get Ready, rocked, Electric Sweat will blow you away.

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.

Exceptionally beautiful and assured.

A monumental rock-'n'-roll album.

When they play, they sound confident and sloppy. When they sing, they sound sincere and sarcastic. They crunch and slash like early punk, toy with country like The Mekons, and use chiming melodies like indie rock. And all fastened together by a combination of mockery and carelessness, they come out with something that could easily stand up against any of the favorite rock 'n' roll records you turn to for a good time.

Every line is razor sharp and yet brilliantly descriptive.

Apropa't has a tendency at first to gently wash over you, striking no particular chord. But as you pay closer attention to the music, the melodic wash of it all becomes one of its addictive qualities.

It's magical and mysterious, compelling and complex.

The spirit of Syd Barrett seems to loom over this record more than either of the previous Radiohead longplayers, and that's not a bad thing at all.

A funkdafied smart-bomb that's one part Brooklyn, one part Madchester, guitar-meets-echo-chamber, a little Kompakt but still a little sprawling.

Basic but gorgeously textured pop-rock with a country tinge, Rilo Kiley's music is led by vocals that'll stop you in your tracks.

The album's tone and tunes and imagery and such are all still on the same haunted-house/boat-of-the-dead kinda kick they've kicked out on their three previous, numerically-titled jams.

A Certain Trigger has Maximo Park inserting enough creativity, energy and personality into their music to get away with lifting sounds directly from such post-punk bands as XTC, The Jam and Wire.

Ringleader of the Tormentors feels rushed and underdone in both the songwriting and arrangements.

Transcendent and well-turned, Soft Commands is another exceptional recording from a talented, aware artist.

A solid album, turgid and at times stormy.

Maryland Mansions wants to be a great record, but it's simply a good one.

The grooves are righteous and the vibe is right.

If there's one misstep on 100th Window, it's that [Sinead O'Connor's] talent and her range are underused.

For those who had grown used to Boredoms' percussion-orgy period -- from Super Ar through to Vision Creation Newsun, with OOIOO's Feather Float in the middle -- such intermittence will give the album a broken feel, making it feel like its indulgences in improvisation and its ad-hoc demeanor are acts lacking discipline.

While the sound is often thick -- layers of dewy guitars, keyboards, old organs, bass, drums/beats -- it's always concerned with the "space" of the piece, such thickness often casting insular environments in which Eitzel's voice can wander lonely.

The Photo Album is evidence of a band that's maturing, slowing down and trying new things.

Research has led me to conclude that the correct, and possibly only, way to fully appreciate this album is at extremely high volume on a decent hi-fi whilst massively stoned out of your gourd.

While previous records have consisted almost entirely of a simple guitar/vocals/drum-machine arrangement, this fourth longplayer finds different sonic deployments.

It's always pretty, but overall, the allure is almost meretricious, considering four or five songs provoke nothing beyond a pleasant ambivalence.

Their reverb-drenched nostalgia trip is full of enough talent and original thought, though, that the result is respectable and classy, not boorish and (yawn) retro.

Hot Hot Heat's compelling energy, original hooks and rhythms, and quirky, sometimes indiscernible lyrics combine to make Make Up the Breakdown one of the most energetic and enjoyable listens of the year.

This is a rare record that simply responds to the quiet masses who maybe feel just a bit to much too often, and offers them a soothing, downbeat source of comfort without preaching or apology.

In stark contrast to most Nashville and alt.country products, even when the words let it down, Barricades & Brickwalls is carried by its classic sound.

For the first time, Milk Man finds such a sound seeming not like the product of a collective caprice, but a formula that they're following, with the few songs where they get lost in total tonal abstraction seeming like didactic decisions to ditch the rock instruments and remind everyone they were once filed under difficult listening.

One of the best, if not the best, of the Brooklyn-based, Gang of Four-worshipping lot.

Her rock-oriented approach here will please some, but such a genre-hopping exercise is only occasionally provocative.