This feast isn’t without a good deal of filler.

Saint Dymphna is the sound of a band of psychedelic dabblers finally getting their shit together.

Although driven primarily by Meluch’s intrepid acoustic guitar, Temper is a many-layered affair, an engaging concoction of delicate electronics, birdsongs, and tape experiments that resonate with impossible harmony.

Even though his heavy drug phase seems to be largely over, Borrowed is his "Sgt. Pepper"--not because he’s spelunking far-flung experimental trenches, but because he finally understands that life is larger than his ego (self-depreciating as it was).

In 'Your Big Hands,' she and her pals work up a rowdy roadhouse groove worthy of Car Wheels–era Lucinda Williams. And 'Mexico City' has ringing ’60s-pop guitar twinkles that give her melancholy travelogue a welcome splash of whimsy.

Un Día takes everything the former Argentine TV star used to establish her musical style in the 12 years since she released her first album--her sometimes grainy voice, folk-leaning acoustic guitar, odd sampled sounds, and an impossible degree of looping-- and shows Molina’s music in its weirdest, most mesmerizing, ideal version of itself.

In Ear Park improves on Grizzly Bear’s psychedelic folk æsthetic by both fleshing it out and making it more accessible.

Minimalist guitar work (it brings to mind the tonic-based, repetitive structures of later Don Caballero), tape-distressed drums, and banged metal work together to reduce the album's throwback feel and give an edge to the sing-alongs. Too often, however, the band either let these sounds overwhelm the songs or cobble them into throw-away vignettes that interrupt the otherwise drifting cadences.

Blending in traditional strings and flutes, singular soulful vocals, trenchant dub pockets, and inventive production flourishes, this is the most powerful contemporary release out of Ethiopia in years.

Even Folds’s knack for a well-placed f-bomb has devolved into a lazy device masquerading as irreverence. His attitude may remain young at heart, but his irony’s over the hill.

Ejstes seems more concerned with texture and feel than with hooks. Translation: it all sounds better once you’re stoned.

This is DiFranco’s most sophisticated album, a musical convergence of her best qualities: warm singing, graceful writing, experimentation.

Koushik finally attempts to transcend his impeccable record collection.

Eschewing fleshed-out pop maps in favor of shiny fragments works oddly well for this duo, especially given the breadth and depth of the subject matter.

Eclecticism like this can be a drag when it’s forced or disingenuous, but Friendly Fires’ enthusiasm is disarming.

Although it’s not a major departure, Dear Science, does have a more open, brighter sound than "Return to Cookie Mountain."

Seaside Rock amounts to a log of underhashed production ideas from the test kitchen.

New Zealand multi-instrumentalist Pip Brown a/k/a Ladyhawke presents us with a treasure trove of found blips, as if the 1980s had been nothing but a gigantic mirror ball to smash and paste back together.

She layers airy, tightly harmonized vocal hooks over sleek synths, strummy guitars, and booming hip-hop beats, and the songs broadcast their emotional content--anxiety, melancholy, resilience--with a straightforwardness you rarely hear outside children’s music. That simplicity doesn’t detract from the ample melodic and textural pleasures, but it does give Down to Earth a limited shelf life.

Of special note is the 10-minute instrumental 'Suicide and Redemption': listening to it, you almost forget that there are supposed to be words in rock songs, since it’s filled with building riffs, escalating volleys of tension and release, and moments of frantic drum abandon from Lars Ulrich that should do a lot to redeem his standing in Modern Drummer’s Drummer of the Year polls.

Knowle West Boy is a survey of Tricky’s sonic versatility--straightforward rock and oppressive, moody atmospherics all have a home here--and it is frequently gorgeous.

The band bring the tang of that elsewhere pop back to Carried to Dust, however, planting big-hook sensibility and the willingness to evolve within its Southwestern mood pieces.

This record is a sequel to 2007’s "The Stage Names," and it shares its predecessor’s concerns: artifice, authenticity, and above all, the sniveling insincerity of hazy-eyed media zombies.

Any initial quaintness complexifies into something richer, more layered.

Besides sounding more like laptoppers Fennesz and Tim Hecker than proto-drone cousins Sunn O))), All the Way even dips into the glorious filter sweeps of trance music, here twisted toward sonic decay rather than utopia.

Brian Wilson and his karaoke-smooth backing band the Wondermints have instead given us something on par with 1970s Beach Boys--kinda bloated, kinda silly, mostly out of date, but with enough earnestness and pop intuition to be so, so, so puerile that hating it would be like hating Raffi.

Elsewhere we get lots of the usual earthquake bass and keening synth arpeggios and staccato horns, and, of course, Jeezy’s hypnotically commanding flow, all of it amounting to one of the hardest mainstream rap albums in years.

Slightly less coherent than his previous stunner, "Awfully Deep," Slime & Reason has tracks intended to fill dance floors and cuts that are more layered, their intricate beats and rhymes better suited to headphone enjoyment.