While the album, at times, feels a bit monochromatic, it maintains its intrigue and never loses its vision.

The outright space exploration of Lindstrøm's previous musical outings is sometimes lost here. His dancefloor is fun, but its been grounded this year.

Decent Work for Decent Pay, a slipshod mélange of long-overdue remixes, is not what we're looking for. Unless you've been living in Kyrgyzstan without an Internet connection for the past few years, you likely wore out most of the tracks on Decent Work for Decent Pay long ago.

31Knots have produced a very good album--maybe even a great album--but one that simply does not reach the level it could have.

With experimentation comes error.

Sure there’s a lot of questionable ethical implications with The Black Ghosts mixed in with a good ones, but a goth band with a rock conscious is successful even if their success in breaking through the mold of navel-gazing is Pyrrhic.

The band's debut full-length, Morning Tide--released on Chop Shop Records--allows that sound to sprawl and unfurl.

Sam Champion’s sophomore album, Heavenly Bender, is a worthy rollick.

While Start And Complete happens to have been recorded in just one day, lo and behold, it turns out to be album of relatively straightforward songs, staying largely within the musical and lyrical conventions of the pop/rock universe.

Clunky, overblown, and decidedly Ross.

While it's likely to be a huge album -- and far more interesting than any other releases of its size -- it's not the leap forward his last couple albums were.

Maybe it's my lowered expectations for major-label rap debuts, or the fact that I never had Wiz pegged for out-and-out greatness, but Rolling Papers sure feels like a qualified success. The album's high points earn Wiz forgiveness for his mistakes.

This album is a detour from the straightforwardness of Per Second, which means that comparatively it also often feels disjointed and uncomfortable.

Not to give the Belles short shrift (they play with skilled abandon), but the record sounds like White... straight-ahead crunching blues-based guitar hooks that sound as if they were ripped from Zeppelin II, staccato bursts of noise, oceans of feedback, driving back beats and howled vocals.

It’s a noise-rock album you can play without annoying your friends, but it won’t aggravate the Tortoise worshipers in your group, either.

A blistering triumph of a record.

This is an album that’s extremely clean--the spic-and-span sonics might be the work of producer Michael Patterson. Even if it might help Great Northern achieve some broader success, all that cleansing has buffed away much of the band’s character.

Although the album does lag a bit toward the end--not due to a lack of quality but to the inability to match the album's earlier dazzling heights--it's a very respectable addition to the Swedish canon.

Few mainstream artists can hope to produce an album as wonderfully weird as The Sweet Escape.

Norman Cook’s concern for the state of his trade, while veiled in ironic drag, is hard to ignore. It’s what makes The BPA tick, but also what keeps the BPA’s debut album more in the theory-not-practice side of respectability.

Hallelujah the Hills steps out on their own turf with a new record label and a refined sound, they've also gone ahead and made their best record.

The band strips away any hard kicks and allows each song to quietly pulse at a more human pace. Ironically, the album feels best suited for traveling.

The songs on Illusion are detailed on the whole, but remain lightly so in other aspects.

Ferrari Boyz often sounds like a Waka Flocka solo disc that features Gucci Mane on every single song. Between the duo, Waka's lines tend to be the ones that stick with you the most.

This is alt-country (or folk or whatever) at its finest, music that elides from well-worn and comfortable generic trope to bursts of originality, music that revels in the holy trifecta of lyricism, instrumentation and production.

Bones' role as the accuser, sputtering anger at everyone around him, is wonderfully assumed here, and makes A Fool for Everyone an enjoyable glimpse at the life of an unloved rogue.

Replicants is solid, displaying the conflicted inner workings of a sonically agitated man, even if its restlessness makes the album feel too frenetic at times.

It's more like easy listening with a funk flare, and, like all easy-listening, there are times when it falls decidedly flat.