Cryptacize have made an album that sounds welcomingly familiar for fans of Cohen’s aesthetic, but it won’t likely gain them a much wider fanbase.

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

While Nurses’ adherence to pop construction might not do them favors when it comes to standing out from the pack, it also means that their music is potentially more durable than many similar blog-hyped acts.

The "black" of the title is not racial blackness, but the blackness of the void, the "abyss" of occultism. And that void, evoked by the dark, inchoate pop of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, is indeed beautiful.

Cruel Summer is half a classic and half a concession to mediocre talents.

They are making pretty, tightly structured pop songs cheaply, or at least pop songs that sound cheaply made, and pretty, and melancholy, and somehow detached and futuristic.

Its library-lite funk may be full of syrupy drift, but the progressions are crafty enough to keep the listener from glazing over.

Although it’s a dark, drifting ride, Perfect View makes other recent minimal synth albums (Chromatics’ Kill For Love was so flat I haven’t heard it since last September, and I still feel bored) look positively one-dimensional in comparison, and does it in a third of the time.

The songwriting is pretty much entirely solid, and there are brief flashes of idiosyncrasy, but this album boils down to being a product of the excitement of influence and just being young playing and writing music, without ever remotely threatening to stand up as something worthy of all the critical saliva that’s already dripped onto bedroom carpets worldwide.

Sure, Phil Ek's production is as crisp and effective as ever, but while it emphasizes immediacy, it also draws attention to the repetitive, redundant elements of these songs.

Who Killed Harry Houdini?, the band’s second full-length release and first on major-label affiliate Mute Records, continues the group’s tradition of making happy, light-hearted pop music that’s simultaneously fizzy and sticky.

It's All Around You middles about with infuriatingly placid tracks that suggest a fading band merely treading water.

When it Falls, while not a masterpiece, is a nice album which will likely appeal to a very broad fan base.

Living Thing sits uneasily in some sort of odd pop no-man’s-land: it’s not quite smart nor fully-realized enough for the sad-sack indie set, and it’s too despairing and insightful for the pop set.

Drums Between The Bells is challenging and complex, but evocative, rewarding, and not altogether fragmentary, not even (or especially) when you bust up the long-playing order.

Elephant Shell has it all if you’re looking for youthful mistakes from a well-meaning (but again, young) band that really, really, REALLY shouldn’t let the hype go to their heads.

This is cinematic music, fitting a noir mode.

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.

It’s an album of stitched-together aspects that feel incongruous, though interesting.

As enjoyable as it can be, Telekinesis! is only good enough to make you wish it were better.

This sumptuous sonic depth exceeds that of a live band, but still feels like something The Luyas will pull off live without a hitch. Evocative and avoiding narrative, brooding but warm to the touch, you'll feel compelled to return to these songs without actually learning the mechanics of their nature.

After several spins, it appears that 'edginess' is precisely what's missing here; in fact, the listener is left pining for it, as almost every track floats along at its own pleasant, blissful pace--easy to swallow but difficult to digest.

His choruses are instantly memorable and his word-soup lyricism easily places him in the upper echelon of intelligent emcees, somewhere between MF Doom and Dose One.

For the most part, Trail of Dead veer back and forth between styles mined on "Worlds Apart" and "Source Tags," making The Century of Self the strongest of their recent efforts. But it’s still an inconsistent one.

It’s certainly a strange pairing at first glance, but it’s a testament to both Prudhomme’s versatility and Lopatin’s curation that Remembrance is a perfect fit for the typically hi-def, post-internet sounds of Software.

If there is a compliment to be paid to Hurley, it is that the band refrains from delving into the sort of WTF territory they've explored of late.

The production is slick and striking, even when it fades to black (“Xanny Family”) or gets tangled up in layered hi-hats (“Program”)--these tracks sound equally as engaged and provocative as anything on last year’s masterful DS2.

Another album to blow up the cemetery to.