Once again Steve Albini-produced, their third effort doesn’t stray wildly from Matt’s laid-back vocals and the intertwining melodic guitar parts they’re now known for, but there is at least one effort to evolve.

This reinvigorated 40-year-old (!) Queens loudmouth makes a somewhat fleshy final Def Jam album, but it’s well-chiselled compared to his last ugly, irrelevant albums.

With help from bandmates Eric Fisher and Jenna Conrad, his eighth full-length could be the album to finally propel the little known guitarist to Arcade Fire-like heights.

Ultimately, your appreciation of the quaintly crafted pop ditties on Soft Airplane will depend on your tolerance for listening to an adult male trying to sound like a naive little boy.

Steeped in country, folk and pop, Desveaux errs on the side of understatement; her rich lyrics sometimes inadvertently take a back seat to the band’s nuanced musicianship, anchored by lead guitarist Mike Feuerstack.

It appears that Wilson came up with a couple of tunes about his own troubled life but realized it might be too much of a bummer, so he tacked on a few happy-sappy Beach Boys throwbacks to make for a sunny little song cycle about a magical place filled with sun, sand and surfer girls.

Surprisingly, it’s a light and catchy bunch of convincing hip-hop- and R&B-influenced Timberlake-esque club pop.

Provisions is a haunting, alt-countryish record that’s not unlike the Silver Jews’ latest work.

His clever quips, wonky wordplay, raunchy voice and oddball timing combine into something beyond reproduction by anybody, not that any other MC is daring enough to try doing this type of grimy, soulful crunk-hop

Instead of moving forward with a bold new sound, they seem lost and confused, eventually reverting to the sprawling space rock jams of their early years, which may be their comfort zone.

You’d think this might get messy, but the arrangements are so thoughtful that the result is sweeping and astonishing.

At 19 tracks, LAX is bloated and uneven, more often than not marked by weak beats and uninspired appearances. The Game’s skill and wit alone save this from being a complete disaster.

More importantly, though, the songs still totally fucking rock.

Rhumb Line gives the impression that mostly good things are ahead.

They’ve got the formula down now, so you can’t sweat the technique, but it would make for a more engaging spin if Stereolab could mess with the equation now and again.

Wrapped up in a tidy 10 songs is an album full of kinetic exuberance, rawness and sweat that retains just enough of a pop sensibility to keep things both memorable and erratic.

This album feels firmly in the gutter, and that’s a positive for slurring Dylan-phile Hamilton Leithauser, who moans and wails throughout, ruminating about lost friends and lovers while the guitars pour reverb-drenched notes over his sepia moments.

If the lyrics were cleverer, they might work as a critique of vacant rock culture, but instead they come across as the embodiment of what they profess to be sneering at.

The hooks and charm of their epic debut, "Logic Will Break Your Heart," were decidedly missing from their 2006 sophomore effort, "Without Feathers," but Oceans Will Rise marks a partial return to form for the Montreal quartet.

This isn’t exactly Johnny Cash doing Nine Inch Nails, but it’s a helluva lot better than you might expect.

When you consider that the first song is only a minute shy of half an hour long, this collection of epic ambient disco revisionism definitely counts as a full-fledged artistic statement.

The tunes are peppy and driving, the performances and production polished to a fault, and the lyrics simultaneously celebratory and wistful.

Death Vessel have come up with a uniformly bland set of delicate ditties for Nothing Is Precious Enough For Us that are lightly strummed in a way that’s so frightfully fey, it could make José González want to rip Thibodeau’s guitar from his hands and smash it against the wall John Belushi-style.

The record has a strong holiday flavour, so if you’re the type who gets nauseated by reindeer talk in March, maybe wait till December to play this.

It’s just the sort of gently strummed, sweetly harmonized and vaguely familiar-sounding pop music replete with quirky lyrical turns that is designed to make indie-rock-obsessed music hacks swoon. And they will.

Alphabets picks up where Animal Planet left off and the devastating Labels began in 1995, but it suffers from the law of diminishing returns.

Overall, the gangsta bravado and rabble-rousing sound uninspired and too familiar.

It even sounds like producer Ted Hutt tried to mimic Jon Landau’s production, since singer Brian Fallon sounds like he’s singing through vintage mics. It works incredibly well, though, as Gaslight earnestly blast through 12 tracks of melodic punk.