I Predict A Graceful Expulsion maintains a grounded, brooding focus that is designed more as a calling card to exhibit the next proper artist to warm the top of dusty stereo players of plenty middle-aged households.

Although this may not be a masterpiece in the repertoire, I can't say that it lacks anything in particular, in fact, the opposite is true. It gives too much. There just became a point where I needed to avert my attention away from the heart-ache.

All in all, it delivers the chuckles and a few guffaws, even if they are hitting up against the law of diminishing returns.

A real record of substance. Yes, it has the undeniable single; but boy, the nine tracks either side of that are really something.

The Money Store might be the very definition of acquired taste, and will most likely alienate the vast majority who attempt to give it a spin, but it's undeniably an extraordinary record.

It'd be a stretch to tag them as soul revivalists, but there's no denying these combustible pop tunes are still 26 of the most promising minutes you'll hear all year.

The songwriting [on Bloom] is rarely stronger [than on previous albums], never different, and more hit-and-miss than I thought Beach House were capable of. It's not their worst record, but it's already their most tired, and that should never, ever happen on a fourth LP. But at least it's pretty.

Each song is tediously nonspecific, the sort of doggerel any other prominent indie-rocker would cringe at the idea of singing out loud.

Put simply, it's lovely.

OFF! is packed with fun little references that make its place out of time all the more fun, and when the band can write head-thrashing, body-moshing rockers with gut-wrenching images, it's all the more reason to take a quarter hour out of your day to vent.

This is a record to really fall in love with.

Europe often finds itself lacking in ideas and sticking to de rigueur jangle and well-trodden indiepop tropes.

Death Deams almost faultlessly conveys the volatility and incomprehensibility of their particular genius. There isn't even one clunker in here, which is a lot to say in a year that's already seen another rock renaissance.

Quite frankly, it's f**king boring.

Purposefully ridiculous but brilliant.

A damn fine album.

What is required to create a record which is grown from the compost of the past and still remain original is something close; perhaps not quite; not entirely; but nearly, genius.

Light Asylum works best if approached as a work of fantastic campness; after all, this would explain the whip-cracking sound effects on IPC.

Of all releases, their latest is the most cohesive, lucid, and interpretable.

Clock Opera have delivered a debut which, just about, delivers.

The cheeky nature of Rock and Roll Night Club inadvertently elevates its reputation--falling somewhere between classic pop and performance art, DeMarco's talent for writing hooks should spurn any attempt to call it novelty.

It's quite good. It just feels like it should be-and wants to be-better.

Pierce cloaks these songs in white with a sort of pious ecstasy.

It is clever and witty like the band is want to be, but when listening to Rant I stopped caring about the lack of instruments and simply enjoyed myself.

Awful.

Much of A Wasteland Companion suffers from the unimaginative fluff that plagued 2009's Hold Time.

Noctourniquet, while not completely successful, finds The Mars Volta at their most pop and their most reasonable.

The problem is that Ishibashi isn't idiosyncratic enough to make this a memorable record... That said, he gets it so right on Manchester it's unbelievable.