While Nguyen continues to write upbeat songs about passion gone awry and her band continues to do its part in complementing them, Know Better Learn Faster just doesn’t quite reach the bar she set for herself last time out.

These are the giants' shoulders that Grooms have chosen to stand upon, and with Rejoicer they have done so excellently.

Indeed, when everything clicks, Darnielle can't be denied, and even when there's cause for concern, there's always something worth taking note of.

Taken as a whole, There Is No Enemy is a solid album on par with the band’s more recent output.

Longtime fans will be enchanted by such quips and the naked introspection offered by Goodnight Unknown, and while not at all challenging, casual listeners will enjoy it simply for its strong collection of pop songs.

Exploding Head is a solid album that spits in the face of any sophomore slump expectations.

While The Sound The Speed The Light might not push the band beyond the ground they’ve already covered, it goes a long way towards proving that “more of the same” isn’t so bad when it comes from the right outfit.

Bonfires is certainly a step up on its efficient, bloodless predecessor "God Save The Clientele" and stands up no matter what’s next for the band.

With Childish Prodigy, his debut for indie-juggernaut Matador, Kurt Vile stretches and pulls the increasingly annoying “lo-fi” tag into interesting new shapes, distancing himself from his Woodsist-kin.

Ask The Night is a dose of a kind of southern comfort that my doctor might actually approve of.

Wildlife is nothing more than an album that sounds fine in the background--even at a volume you couldn’t help but pay attention to--yet ultimately fails to make any kind of memorable impression.

The harsh truth makes itself clear: overdubs and studio pre-meditation trivialize Johnston’s music.

God is Good shows a clear effort to steer their boat past the Nile, past Yemen, and into new territory.

This project was D.O.A. from the moment Ghost announced it a year back, and hip-hop fans should consider themselves lucky that there’s at least a few salvageable moments in Wizard of Poetry.

Anti-Pop Consortium are still vital enough to keep the momentum they lost, in dreadfully untimely fashion, when they inexplicably broke up in 02.

Folk devotees may have a little more patience for the proceedings here, but I find it doubtful that Seconds will come as much of a revelation to anyone.

This is their best album in years, but there’s no real progression here. Ono’s mindfuck of a performance is proof: when a band needs to include such bizarreness as their record’s experimental centerpiece, perhaps they are working a little too hard to prove their expressive worth.

There’s no sense of cohesion or flow between any of these songs, partially due to a clear lack of thought devoted to these conceits, but mostly because every M. Ward- and Conor Oberst-penned song sounds the same lately.

Even if Album doesn’t turn out to be all it’s been made out to be by the reams of hype already bestowed upon it, it’s certainly working at the moment.

Truelove’s Gutter abandons the lush strings and complex production of previous work for a more straightforward style, and the results bring to mind the honest, plainspoken albums that Cash and Jones recorded in the mid-70s.

Sacrificing none of their self-effacement in their pursuit of a more emotionally direct style, WHY? have stumbled upon something uniquely personal yet utterly commercial.

A real carnival of a mess, completely inconsistent, sometimes really horrifying, and, more often than not, entertaining.

Plaintive, spare, and narrative in approach, these songs--which seem to bookend the album--are among Raposa’s most affecting.

Times New Viking neither regress nor abandon their origins, offering instead a compromise where the harsh timbres commingle with increasingly more adept proclivities for memorable pop songs.

The acoustic slide guitar that opened "Fourteen Autumns" could have broken up some of this monotony. But it’s powerful monotony. It begs you to listen to it.

Family is a work of purpose, from a band whose previously wandering attention-spans rendered any chance of artistic success accidental.

Every track on Sort of Revolution would feel at home in a warm, European coffeehouse.

The key to The Dodos isn’t their lyrics, but their melodies. And on Time to Die, they’re strong and sufficient.