On Three's Co., Rademaker's songwriting has matured, which combined with the bigger production, makes for a thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying listen.

Yes, believe it or not, The Get Up Kids have produced the first truly surprising album of 2011.

The result is album of beats and grooves, alternately plodding and engaging, punctuated by the occasional bursts of Black Dice's signature sonic playfulness.

Even with him covering just about every lyric here, this album never stagnates.

This irresistible combination of intelligent production combined with a simple four-four tempo guarantees that this music isn’t just for spiky-haired kids with their fingernails painted black.

Kratitude is dense, urgent and filled with inherent contradictions.

What Untitled lacks, is focus. In the world in which R. Kelly operates, what's required of a great or even pretty good album is either several singles or a feeling of overwhelming personality from the artist. Most of the time, the two things accompany each other.

Paralytic Stalks is a record made by a genius or a hoity-toity psychopath depending on your perspective--call it whatever you want, but it certainly isn't boring.

Save for the unnecessary interludes, the strength of Press Play is in its ability to employ so many different styles, sounds, influences and mold them into one extremely coherent package.

The Beautiful New Born Children is the rawest of the Stokes mixed with the youthful punk energy of early Replacements.

There's a deep sincerity here among the saccharine, and no amount of painstakingly throwback falsetto harmonies can shroud May's songwriting from its fluttering, well-intentioned heart.

Mastered by Nilesh Patel (Daft Punk, Depeche Mode), Robotique Majestique has the Austin-based Ghostland Observatory throwing down a solid, synth-heavy version of their stateside electro-punk, making their third release less guitar influenced than the occasional rock moments of "Paparazzi Lightning" (the duo's 2006 debut) and 2007's "Delete. Delete. I. Eat. Meat."

Pepper finds the band attacking a multitude of oddball genres--the disc spins from post-rock to electronica to rock to sheer noise--with a frightening focus for such sonic stream-of-consciousness exploits.

Throughout the course of Quicken the Heart, Maximo Park prove they still haven’t rectified their quivering post-punk with the anthems they are concurrently and desperately trying to craft. But despite that conflict, they can still occasionally pull it together long enough to bang out some good ones.

The Submarines are at their best when toying with charmed synth-pop.

Their discography may be sparse, but Mirror Eye, released on the always-intriguing Social Registry label, is the finest embodiment of their drone-adelic sound to date.

It’s great headphone music and would make a suitably dense soundtrack for a drunken stroll through the Lower East Side, where much of the inspiration for NYC was found.

Help Wanted Nights lacks the cohesion of "Blackout" or "Album of the Year," but it seems excusable to have a loose collection of songs--good songs, at least--that accompanies an as-yet-unseen movie or play, especially in the wake of the super-cohesive "Happy Hollow."

It just goes to show that on a DJ Khaled album, you can't be Eddie Van Halen. You've got to be David Lee Roth.

Even if this EP is the byproduct of a band that's working out the kinks, it's still a promising glimpse into what to expect from How to Destroy Angels' 2011 full-length.

Consistency is not Yo Majesty’s strong suit, and Futuristically suffers from an uneven and unfocused approach. Despite this there is plenty to enjoy here.

My Guilty Pleasure is more cohesive, its production more varied, its songwriting more effective.

Malice N Wonderland is not, by and large, very ambitious.

Invisible Ones stands steadily as an encouraging signpost in Fink's career.

Spine Hits feels too spacious, lacking the depth that both [newly-departed singer] Fannan's swelling vocals and improvised jams filled the band's two previous releases [with]. Regardless, Spine Hits is an enjoyable listen.

It's the most cohesive and listenable record he's made to date.

The band plays its own game of seduction throughout the album, giving us danceable, practically glandular beats while singing lyrics of fear and loathing.

Aside from... one unstructured, unwieldy track, Dumb Luck proves highly smart and skilled.

The strength of the album rests not on one aspect. From the dense lyrics spanning a wealth of topics to the perfect production, The Art of Love & War proves that Stone isn't going anywhere.

With their third album, Entertainment, they succeed best whenever they are warming up their familiar electro sound with pop elements rather than aping worldly sophistication.

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.

The members of Massive Attack are using the EP to continue to explore their old sound with new voices, in much the same way that the idea of splitting the atom is concurrently old and futuristic.

Ladies is a strong debut and, overall, it presents a pretty unique environment to get lost in.

It's speculative fiction in album form, gleefully out of step with most sounds of today, demanding attention, but more importantly, keeping it.

What Darkel does offer is more of a good thing: songs that sound like the follow-up to Moon Safari, if Air weren't so progressive.

Though there are some uneven points, particularly when Thornton tries to project straight pathos or regret, The Boxmasters prove once again that they are much more than a celebrity vanity project.

While she may have slipped down the pecking order, Witness proves she’s still a more interesting pop star than she’s often given credit for.

While the flowing, assembled vibe of Mother of Curses makes for a unique listen, it rarely reaches beyond the realm of sonic curiosity.

This is another satisfying and remarkably fresh set of tunes from Robert Pollard.

The album's strength really, is evoking so strongly the excessive, lonely culture that the music comes from.

Despite its handful of down moments that are either too thickly house influenced or too slow and off the mark, Generation shows that the Audio Bullys’ brand of dance music has staying power.