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.

An eclectic, highly promising debut.

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

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.

Suggests a progression and a retreat at the same time.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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.