The contrasting approaches clash, but even Thin Mind’s strongest offerings feel recycled. Think of the record as comfort food for Wolf Parade fans, or as an introduction to the band for the uninitiated, and the unadorned craftsmanship grows palatable. It’s a fine record. It’s even modern. It just isn’t progress.

Howl feels consistently meaty and comfortably crafted. [Oct/Nov 2005, p.121]

The band presently possesses more 'tude than tunes. [Nov 2006, p.81]

Ranging from old-timey to reverential, soul to Appalachian, Mountain stands utterly his.

Call It Love, her fourth album, was a chance for the Seattle native to move further into synthpop substance, but the beautiful, luminescent prisms she resides in often fail to reach emotional ground.

in•ter a•li•a is frankly as promising an album as we can hope to expect from a group of guys who set the bar and then ran away from it 17 years back.

Atop the stinging double-stop guitar licks of the Bottle Rockets’ no-frills latest, optimism and good intentions knock heads with the reality of human imperfection.

When It Comes takes risks, and while it could stand to take some more, there is something to be said for letting the most calculated risks stand out the most, and between Gavanski’s vintage pop/folk prowess, notes of experimentalism, and some sonic diversity, there is little doubt that this is a step forward for the artist after a more guarded debut.

The clear standout, though, is 'Kim & Jessie,' which convincingly recaptures the magic gloss of Tears for Fears with a propulsive undercurrent and an elegant use of space. One of the best songs of 2008 so far, it’s the key destination in a stunning journey.

Widow City covers so much territory so quickly that it can actually give you jetlag, and its geographical diversity is mirrored by its hallucinatory, irreconcilable lyrics.

Phosphene Dream's real achievement is that it takes the band's earlier murderous attitude and makes it impossibly bland.

While they still, ahem, swim in highly populated waters alongside Local Natives and king fish Sufjan, here Freelance Whales have made a strong argument for their crucial place in the current pantheon.

Ronson's strength has always been in surrounding himself with like-minded artists, both burgeoning and established, and that's largely true on Record Collection, a typically ambitious if uneven effort.

Though he recorded Adiós in the same sessions that yielded See You There, Campbell’s voice sounds better on this record: slightly aged, but still remarkably rich and surprisingly versatile.

A sunny, neo-psychedelic outing. Unfortunately, this translates into overly busy, fussy arrangements that sometimes mar the impact of the songs. [#13, p.119]

Both anxious and anthemic, the third most famous band from Leeds, England (behind Gang of Four and the Mekons) lobs social commentary as sharp as drummer Nick Hodgson’s ties, and tackles subjects as brainy as evolutionary biology ('Like It Too Much,'), the tenets of self-help ('Tomato In the Rain') and gender politics ('Remember You’re A Girl'), all at breakneck speed.

Like their forebears The Kinks, British Sea Power remain resolutely iconoclastic, supremely melodic, quintessentially British, and utterly unique. God save the Queen and her royal navy.

Chinese Fountain, while remaining true to the band’s “beach goth” essence, is blessedly direct, with sharper songwriting and engaging melodies at the center of every song.

While bedroom indie-rock is a beast Shamir has yet to master, it’s Revelations’ message of survival and optimism that sticks with you. And so one hopes Shamir finds his way, fully realizing the album’s flashes of greatness.

Antartica might fall short of the punk-pop immediacy of debut album cuts like “Motorbike” and “Goodbye Texas,” but it’s another fortifying garage punk record, hellbent on trying to shake you out of your shoes. After two punk stunners, this Los Angeles trio has every right to apply “caution hot” stickers to their guitars.

For as much as Oceania felt like a heavy return to form, Monuments is familiar in the sense that Corgan’s taking a thoughtful swing in a new direction.

Each track seamlessly flows into the next, making the album kind of just one long song about transitive early age....It's beautiful.

This Is Not A Safe Place never quite finds its footing. The lyrics are a snapshot of the band’s current frame of mind—those recurring thoughts that fire when you turn in for the night. They’re deeply personal and never self-important, but also not particularly cohesive or thematic on the whole.

With its excellent fourth album, Moon 2, the band evokes a cosmic utopia of its own making and yet remains tethered to a relentless, earthbound groove.

More than just a denizen of a passing trend or an artist cloaking lack of melody in reverb and fuzz, Washed Out consistently sounds like actual thought was put behind its music, which can't be said about a lot of its so-called peers.

Former Lives is a true solo album, with Gibbard showcasing a memorable and rewarding set of odds and ends from the last eight years of his songwriting career.

The trio creates a sound that is cohesive in approach and unpredictable in expectation as heartland rock mingles with new wave agitations and swampy blues brushes shoulders with swinging waltzes.

Barrie is now a glistening, confident synth-pop act with tinges of folk, and the warm yet tentative hue that clouded Happy to Be Here is mostly gone.

Even at their most technically complex, Twerps still maintain a low-key, laidback, indie-rock appeal. They pull off charming pop that sounds tender and thrilling at the same time.

The result is an awkward balancing act between a premature lust for accessibility and an obvious knack for the avant-garde, shirking traces of the latter in an ill-fated attempt at evolution.

The album’s meditations on what follows the mortal coil are as sweeping as the gulf between its genres, but both are handled with rewardingly nuanced subtlety.

Reminiscing on lost love and lust, Mould impresses with his songwriting skills.

Half the album [is] mired in embarrassing heartland cliches. [Feb/Mar 2006, p.96]

That’s the fundamental issue of Something Like A War: Kindness, in their efforts to cultivate and redistribute softness as a universal tenet, forgot the key rule of living honestly—your vulnerabilities must be specific enough to connect with.

It’s a shame there are not enough songs where Pop’s talent can shine on its own. Only six of 19 tracks feature Pop Smoke solo, not including the intro, outro and “Dior,” which is a bonus track that also appears on all of his previous tapes. ... However, there are still many highs.

When We Stay Alive represents that rewrite, but it doesn’t sound revisionist—it sounds quite honest, and often stumbles over its own pain and anxiety as it trips towards healing. These imperfections, though, are what give the record character and a sharp personality.

It’s a headier album, but one rife with significance.

The production on Damage and Joy is so clean and crisp that it makes the Mary Chain’s trademark clamor sound really purposeful (and nobody likes a tryhard). Second, the the Reids’ lyrics are so on-the-nose unremarkable (on “Mood Rider,” they rhyme “lust,” “must,” and “dust”) that they lose all ability to connect. Still, Damage and Joy is hardly unlistenable.

The album is undeniably solid, so why does it feel faintly underwhelming? Context is key.

That Ab-Soul tries to do both makes for a pretty entertaining ride, even when he technically falters. Ambition changes the definition of success, making this Ab-Soul record a better experience that can be picked apart.

The songs are fast and short; the energy throughout the album is infectious and continuous--which helps to not overwhelm with its cranked-to-11 setting and should have most eager and willing to keep coming back.

By the time the pop-induced sugar rush wears off you realize that, besides being done before, these songs have definitely been done better. Worse yet, all you've got to show for it is a headache.

Since they’ve never really been able to top 2004’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike, that means that everything on Semicircle is fun, but not much of it is super fun. It’s kind of like going a field trip; technically you’re not at school, but it’s still school.

Egon Schiele aficionados and jaded cabaret junkies: this is your music. [Apr/May 2005, p.146]

It's highly expressive songwriting, and Millan... has the lyrics to match. [Sep 2006, p.75]

His prototypically clever and articulate lyrical work infuses the album with a native intelligence that transcends the inherent limitations of any given genre.

So while In Light is unmistakably a 2011 indie album (In addition to the Dirty Projectors influence, there are traces of Vampire Weekend's trendy worldly pop bounce scattered throughout), Givers constantly rise above their reference points because the songs are usually excellent.

Creative movements make Bitter Rivals an exciting and powerful record, because it reminds the listener that sometimes it’s okay to follow an idea into unexpected territory and shake things up.

At its worst, The Golden Echo is admirably faceless, exhausting in its eager quest to be everything to everyone at once. At its best, it’s subversive pop brilliance.

Though Boronia lacks the imagination to separate Hockey Dad from the knockoffs, the band knows how to have fun in their music, and they know how to do so well.

Her eclectic song structures and subtle melodies with a tendency to stick help give these songs an indeterminate specificity, like confessionals where her audience can fill in the details with whatever needs unburdening from their own souls. Maybe the sense of place in her music, then, is whatever place it needs to be, for whoever needs it.

Morbid themes aside, Beneath the Eyrie is the most vibrant and alive of the three albums The Pixies have recorded since reemerging in 2004.

Far more than a modern-day reprisal of the MTV Unplugged ethos, Perdida is the sound of a band stretching beyond its own self-imposed limits to challenge what a so-called “acoustic album” can be.

On Little Songs, Wall proves he’s ready to grab that torch and run.

There aren't specific songs on Anything in Return that function as stand-out moments, as much as the whole album functions as one long moment that stands out for its post-modern, semi-nostalgic originality.

He’s defined not by what he loves, but by his doubts, and as a result, this album is far more interesting and complex than anything he’s done in years.

At best you could call Food and Liquor II a slightly above-average rap album.

The Tennessee native shows a dreamier, more daring side of herself on Rosegold, implementing bold new production elements along the way.

Summer Camp's debut Welcome to Condale is a rather diverse affair for being essentially a good-time summer pop record.

The album is far from the work of a legend resting on his laurels; instead, its inventive and genuinely fun sound makes a compelling case for why, 20 years after his debut, we should still be paying attention to Big Boi.

While the band is ferocious and tight, Pearl in particular has attained force-of-nature caliber formidability, not just in the burgeoning mastery of her commanding rapid-fire squeal, but in her frankly sexual gaze and world-devouring disdain for all things not awesome.

The People's Key is a return to immediacy after the arguably overlong concept album Cassadaga.

Unfortunately, they miss and it lands in the five-day-old dregs of a keg in an Anytown, USA backyard.

Grand’s euphonious opening tracks don’t disappoint, particularly the jubilant single 'Daylight,' which is so good it warrants a closing remixed version.

While the emotional payoff of the album proves more satisfying than anything she’s done so far, the individual tracks don’t stand alone as well.

For fans of what country was, For The Good Times could well be a hope chest for what could yet again be.

With his first solo release, Finn hasn't gone too far away from his core aesthetic, but the move is enough to justify his own album.

While † threatened to alienate with its sheer abrasiveness, its long-awaited follow-up succeeds in boring with its sprawling and unfocused Queen-meets-Skrillex mashups.

It's an uninspired ending to what is generally a sharp, full-bodied collection of tracks from what is now an equally sharp, full-bodied duo.

Yes, parts of this album are just plain bizarre. Day & Age isn’t as genius as "Hot Fuss," but it has enough merits to keep its makers hit-makers, albeit odd ones.

Like Stevie Wonder--who could throw together cloying ballads, funky grooves and reggae homages--Keys is willing to probe her oeuvre and now her own self for songs that resonate beneath the surface.

For the most part, though, Shout Out Louds match their musical grandeur with emotional grandeur. And messy romanticism is their natural milieu.

On Something To Tell You, HAIM tend not to over complicate things with their West Coast pop: something that mostly plays to their advantage, but at times leaves them playing it safe.

Another fine stop in Death Cab’s ongoing evolution.

The Strokes don't have much of their own to say here. [Dec 2005, p.106]

Having been an active band for more than four decades, Cheap Trick continues to be a model of freakish consistency with We’re All Alright!.

Writing powerful pop ballads about a failed platonic relationship, one sabotaged by distance, is part of what makes Reservoir stand out.

It's the most Dears-like thing they've ever produced: an ambitious, insanely layered, eclectic (sometimes too eclectic) concept album about the thick, looming boundaries that separate Heaven from the Hell we call Earth.

After the Dream is full of evocative, abstract imagery.

The debut is one of my picks for the year so far, a dance-hall record that grows on your and becomes more like a trusted friend who whispers wisdom from another universe.

Invisible Light has the aural quality of a relic tucked away in a cavern deep beneath the earth, waiting to be discovered by future generations, warning them of disasters and embarrassments they maybe could’ve avoided if they’d just dug the damn thing up a few years sooner.

It's not to say it's on the level of Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues, but it's pretty damn close.

10 songs, no filler, that won't necessarily knock you out of your seat, but rather leave you wanting to lean back and stay a while.

Scattered moments show the band capturing a spark of creativity to make this exercise in using different instruments for very specific purposes mean something similar to their LPs. The results are some of the more exciting moments of the band’s recent output.

Sitting through a slogging collage of beats for 40 minutes before ever hearing a verse is no easy task. It would be one thing if these tracks had a common theme holding them together, but there’s no central voice to bind one to the next. ... The only thing that will keep listeners pressing on is the star-studded back half of the record. The incredible amount of talent Shadow recruited is exciting.

Seemingly able to kick out a chug-a-lug stomper with absolute ease at this point, the best moments on Infinite Arms center around Bridwell’s growing confidence in the his deadliest weapon: his voice.

On Tiger there's more than a whiff of tequila in the air-yellowy-green shots knocked back fast followed by hazy mornings filled with nagging regrets. This could perhaps be considered "folk" in some generous sense of the word, but let's not be afraid to call it what it really is: unbridled, unselfconscious, swirling, head-pounding pop.

Whenever Future starts to glide along too airily, the Robinsons can be trusted to use their on-off harmonies to give their best songs a spark that helps them rise above as merely sounding pretty.

The House feels like a transitional work, one saddled with stylistic experiments and themes of rebirth, renewal, self-discovery and so on. Perhaps that bodes well for Porches Album #4, whenever it arrives. And perhaps it will tie up some of The House’s loose ends.

With Longtime Companion, Sonny Smith shows himself to be a stylistic chameleon, never shedding his skin to change its color.

An unchallenging, unsurprising, and un-garage-y joy, but a joy nonetheless.

Strapped isn't groundbreaking, especially by the standards The Soft Pack have set for themselves.

Underwood nails two tried and true country traditions: the drinking-to-death heart-wrencher (“Spinning Bottles”) and the faith-based, family-first hymn (“Kingdom”), proving both times that big, emotional ballads remain her bread and butter. Much of the rest of the album finds Underwood exploring pop and R&B sounds more than ever before. Sometimes, she’s successful. ... Sometimes, she’s not so successful.

Despite their gift for undeniably soothing melodies and luminescent keyboard and guitar textures, the duo’s album falls into the “grower” category, and it’s possible that less resilient listeners won’t stick around to be dazzled by its early morning shimmer.

Turner leaves behind considerable wreckage with Positive Songs--in ways both cathartic and clumsy. And as usual, he goes down swinging.

A happy-trails present to fans and entry point into a farewell tour, Croweology isn't remotely practical, but it is fun, a loose revisiting of Crowes songs resculpted in a good-natured, gather-round-the-campfire style.

The more charming pockets found within The Narcissist II's peculiar symmetry are worth waiting for, so long as you're willing to suspend your disbelief long enough to ingest the entire record. Otherwise, you might be missing the point.

Coming from a band that derives a certain amount of its notoriety from seeming jaded and indifferent, Gallagher's solo flight is actually stunningly pure and beautifully rendered.