The songs aren't always as good as one might hope, especially in comparison to The Mekons' peak period.

Once you fall for "Yellow," the rest of the album will kick in, and fast.

Pixel Revolt feels, at the end, like two EPs packaged together and passed off as a full-length. The justification could be made that the fierce, angry and frustrated responses to international armed conflict and girlfriends leaving are very much the same, though that would seem to be kind of a stretch.

An eclectic, highly promising debut.

It's simultaneously refreshing and amusing. And it rocks hard.

Their newfound versatility detracts somewhat from their own identity.

There are no real shocks or surprises on this album; instead a number of more understated delights come through.

Melding big, weary Fleetwood Mac-esque emotion to stretched-out arrangements, both electronic and folk, the Canadian singer/songwriter's power lies in his dedication to his own individuality.

In the midst of its 14 tracks, there are a couple that, if taken on their own, would qualify as throwaways. But the way the album should be heard, as a whole, each piece works with the others.

They do a good job of mixing humor and fun with their politics...

The Photo Album is evidence of a band that's maturing, slowing down and trying new things.

A slow-burn knockout.

As far as songs go, Barlow hasn't been this good in years.

Like so many great singles of the past, this is the sound of a good band getting great. Don't miss the moment.

If you thought Mooney Suzuki's Estrus debut, People Get Ready, rocked, Electric Sweat will blow you away.

While a nine-track, 30-minute-long album rarely begs for editing, what Timms has assembled here might have made better sense as an EP.

The songs on his latest, often about political ambivalence and soul-searching alienation, are still catchy as V.D. But they lack the fiery complexity of past efforts.

Research has led me to conclude that the correct, and possibly only, way to fully appreciate this album is at extremely high volume on a decent hi-fi whilst massively stoned out of your gourd.

His sound, gender-neutral swooning folk dressed in quirky analog jazz keyboards, would fit nicely on a mix tape alongside The Smiths and Nick Drake.

A strong return to form.

Despite dozens of listens, much of Whatever People Say congeals together like so much spent gravy, with only the clever couplets sticking out.

It doesn't have the edginess of the Kid's previous recordings, and cloaks its eclectic sense of play in tasteful, textured layers, but in so doing achieves a consistency that has previously been lacking.

Hot Hot Heat's compelling energy, original hooks and rhythms, and quirky, sometimes indiscernible lyrics combine to make Make Up the Breakdown one of the most energetic and enjoyable listens of the year.

Really, there are few surprises here, but there is a crucial one, which is that Continental gradually reveals itself to be a solidly constructed and rather strong collection.

When they play, they sound confident and sloppy. When they sing, they sound sincere and sarcastic. They crunch and slash like early punk, toy with country like The Mekons, and use chiming melodies like indie rock. And all fastened together by a combination of mockery and carelessness, they come out with something that could easily stand up against any of the favorite rock 'n' roll records you turn to for a good time.

All those instrumental colorings are clearer, and the individual qualities of the voices in their choir shine through even when they're all belting it out together.

Suggests a progression and a retreat at the same time.

It's not far from the sound that Yo La Tengo have made their own, especially in their more contemplative, less psychedelic moments...

Somewhere in the mess of feedback and sonic sluggishness is something that strikes a nerve, makes you want to hear it again.

Maryland Mansions wants to be a great record, but it's simply a good one.

True, only "60 Miles an Hour" sounds like a candidate for New Order's pantheon of hallowed singles; still, Get Ready might be the group's most consistent album from top to bottom.

For the first time, Milk Man finds such a sound seeming not like the product of a collective caprice, but a formula that they're following, with the few songs where they get lost in total tonal abstraction seeming like didactic decisions to ditch the rock instruments and remind everyone they were once filed under difficult listening.

And flaws there are, with many of the tracks sinking into a midtempo morass with decidedly underdeveloped melodies and daft instrumentation.

Like early arcade-game programmers, Ratatat are working with a greatly reduced palette, and the synth reductionism means they're never going to escape cute.

Aside from Riches' rich language, there's not much traditionalism on the album, it being more concerned with stumbling in melancholy fashion through murmured countryish balladry.

Overall, the album lacks the cohesion that would make it a keeper.

The New Danger is overambitious and undercooked, adventurous and bland all at once.

Take[s] their haunted-house shtick to frightening extremes.

For those who had grown used to Boredoms' percussion-orgy period -- from Super Ar through to Vision Creation Newsun, with OOIOO's Feather Float in the middle -- such intermittence will give the album a broken feel, making it feel like its indulgences in improvisation and its ad-hoc demeanor are acts lacking discipline.

Much of this dreary lyricism will be seen as English-as-a-second-language charm by so many -- and the album's lyric sheets, which put forth all the spelling-mistake-riddled broken English with pride, seem to be of the same belief. But loving that about this disc is like so much faint praise at best, and a pernicious kind of cultural condescension at worst.

The spell is broken, however, by pieces like "Tears From the Compound" and "Oscar See Through Red Eye," which get lost in the marshes of their own hypnotic rhythms, sugar-sweet synths and lo-fi, breathy drones.

Tortoise have, in the past, asked more from their listeners. This time they let us off a little too easy.

Where their prettiness was once cloaked in a shroud of bashful melancholy, with [producer Joshua] Eustis on hand things get a little more grandstanding.

The tracks fail to hang together in a convincing way -- often giving the impression that they were more or less strung together on a whim.

The album succeeds in creating a dreamy mood that is both soothing and slightly unsettling. And yet this mood is relentless, and, ultimately, all the songs begin to sound the same.

All too often, this new material fails to leave much of an impression.

While the album is pleasant, it takes awhile to open up. And once opened up, it's nice, but hardly revolutionary.

An album that, despite all its misty melancholy, is filled less with lyrics of heartache, and more with words of warmth and romance.

Often, it's all too much -- too many synths, too many drums, too much reverb; it's as if every subtlety of that first record was magnified in the production process, its once lithe and supple frame vulgarly pumped with steroids.

Lacking both the musical and counter-cultural thrill of the Brion recordings, this album turns away from a certain artistic "rawness" in the original recordings, razing away counter-melodies and acoustic decay for a well-polished delivery that presents the photogenic songstress in a more "flattering" light.

For all it lacks in the pop-song department, it's not a bad pop record.

They're sure punching with more punch than they did when resuscitating the stand-and-deliver sexlessness of analog-electro past with blank face and vacant stare.

Their record runs through a range of instrumentalist archetypes and quietly surprising turns-for-the-worse, from electrified screech to tape-op minimalism, through pastoralism and soundscapery, to numbers where they knock out all manner of feigned sturm und drang.

Hypnotic Underworld is, paradoxically, actually the least hypnotic and least underground album Ghost have made thus far.

This final record is neither focused nor infallible, instead a rarer glimpse at a man whose creative doorways, once the source of so much hope and inspiration, had become outnumbered by his demons.

In stripping things back Mercury Rev suggest that in their case more actually was more, that bereft of the digressions and expansions they're just another band with a nasal, naïve-sounding singer, a way with a hook and a penchant for using the studio as an instrument.

The disc essentially finds the now-quartet cleaning up and living right and letting the world see them as they are; their tracks are marked by much clean-fingered guitar playing (the added guitar meaning there's six-stringing back-and-forth) and only a recreational use and abuse of wah.

There is nothing here that thrills with its audacity, beauty, beat or lyrics. Instead, we are given a solid batch of songs that for any other artist would be a crowning achievement, but for Beck is just mediocre.

A set of tunes blessed with melody but hardly immediately memorable.

It is, at one time or another, twee reggae, hipster rock-ism, synth-pop balladry, post-Interpol gothickry. It's an inconsistency that's both noble and annoying.

Love. Angel. Music. Baby. has been acclaimed as a bright-and-shiny pop-music tour-de-force, but once the initial thrilling rush of the stylistic sheen and artistic conception has abated, the album seems too fragmented to be anointed as such.

Spending much of its time suspended in hollowed-out tones smudged only by desolate beats, Aaltopiiri is probably Pan sonic's most intense listening experience.

Nick Cave, no mistake about it, is still a major talent, and Nocturama isn't nearly as bad a mid-career flop as Lou Reed's Mistrial or David Bowie's Never Let Me Down.... But nevertheless, this is also far from essential Nick Cave, as most longtime fans will immediately discern.

As an EP, the premise of Lovage would flourish.

No one who bought Vegas will be disappointed by Tweekend, unless they're looking for some statement of artist growth. That's the only area where this album falters. It is otherwise a solid collection of thundering Big Beat grooves.

While appreciating Yoshimi for its merits poses little problem, actually enjoying it is more difficult.

Rainer Maria have never been more skillful in their playing or stronger in their singing than on the slickly recorded A Better Version of Me -- which some may see as a problem.

It seems distinct from the discography that came before it (in both a good and a bad way), with intermittent moments definitely treading foreign waters, for both the band and its devoted followers.

The spirit of Syd Barrett seems to loom over this record more than either of the previous Radiohead longplayers, and that's not a bad thing at all.

Overall, Loose Fur is kinda interesting, especially as a historical document, but it's not much more than that.

What's particularly exciting about this release is the second compact disc, which features an animation by Katsura Moshino, adding a bizarre visual narrative to Takemura's rich audio playground.

In the midst of all this Neptunian mastery, there are two absolutely unlistenable "rock" songs that no fan of modern productionist fervor could possibly stand listening to.

Easily the band's most consistent, tonally tight disc thus far.

Rather than letting one in on the game, Lafata's lyrics keep things at comic/ironic distances, where they're shrouded in the mystique of embodying pop-cultural critique.

All you can really do is sit back and politely applaud.

A work of thematic and dramatic constancy.

This is giddy pop-rock in Technicolor.

The only real problem with Hearts of Oak is that the band still can't make their less immediately compelling tracks sound as electric and urgent on record as they do when the Pharmacists tear up the stage.

One-upping their previous masterwork, 1997's The Dandy Warhols Come Down, Thirteen Tales... will trip you out, especially when listened to on headphones in the post-midnight hours.

A solid album, turgid and at times stormy.

While the orchestration and production are impeccable and finely crafted, it's not hard to pick out influences from the 1980s, ranging from brooding rock to pulsing synthetic pop.

Sprawling, overwrought, unkempt rock music.

Seems to be the culmination and synthesis of a solid musical progression from good, yet uncertain and unchallenging, pop music to better, more confident, but still unchallenging, pop music.

The tunes are tepid, but that's not to say they aren't enjoyable to listen to -- in fact, the songs aren't bad at all, but they're not exactly great either.

For those devoted to this rock band's increasingly artistic gear, Gibbard's a bard spinning pop-song sonnets that cause such constituents of fandom to reel real deep in some crooning-along swooning induced by the lithe lyrics.

Buried at the 11th track on the compact disc, "Satisfaction" makes everything else on this album seem better by its presence. It's the one true standout cut, giving the album a jewel in the glittering, if ersatz, moving-outta-the-ghetto hip-hop-princess crown that Eve places on her own "bombshell" brow.

Unwinds slowly, slipping between ghosted noise-and-field-recording passages and the sustained explosions of big, bombastic caterwaul that have become Godspeed's signature sound.

Atmosphere are clearly at the top of the emo-rap game; it's just not necessarily a game true schoolers will want to play.

She remains utterly, excessively self-involved.

It's spontaneous and weird and, while its initial thumping may turn off those liking their trip-hop controlled, those who are ready to sweat a little will be rewarded by this unique duo's evolving imagination.

Mind you, Kelly Jones' voice is an acquired taste. If you warm to it, however, you'll then enjoy a wealth of simple country-tinged pop songs.

One of the most original-sounding albums in a long while.

The set works like a spun-up set of carefully collated cuts, sequenced with stuck-tape-over-the-tabs-in-the-corners mix-tape affection that makes the whole seem like a sticky-sentimented sentimental love letter to the boys' record collections.

Where Maxinquaye was both engaging and coherent, working up to a kind of weird gestalt by way of good songs and dark sounds, Blowback is hit-and-miss.

The strength Moorer has shown from first album to second album and finally to this genre-leaping experiment in self-recreation is enough to not only merit a listen, but to make sure we pay attention to the fourth album when it arrives.

Group Sounds may not be astonishingly great, but it mostly rocks with the raw, excellent sound RFTC has come to own.

It is, in such, truly great, or truly arrogant, or truly conceited, or truly preposterous, or truly confused, or truly bemused, or truly profound, or truly magnificent. Or maybe all of these things. At once. Or at times.

Yanqui U.X.O. is the work of a band that has finally become confident in its popularity and influence.