It's like Bright Eyes -- urgent, personal, pent-up -- but better; less focused on the individual ego of the "creative genius," more about the group dynamics.

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.

What really puts the album over the top is the way Edan manages to twist the DNA of two distinctly throwback styles, '60s psych-rock and '80s golden-age hip-hop, into a 2005 mutant plaid platypus.

This is The Decemberists' strongest release to date, and proves that the group's unique thesaurus-rock has a bright future.

Let Us Never is the latest sophomore album to make its creator's (actually really good) debut sound kinda paltry.

A sombre, sorrowful collection.

Akron/Family merge shifting, sometimes impressionistic arrangements with limpid lyricism. The result is an elusive -- but strong and deeply fascinating -- debut.

They play slow, but it's slow in the way that Low once did, a sort of punk-rock rebellion against speed and belligerence.

If you're a fan of tuneful, American-influenced pop-punk, Ash are waiting to burn a hole through your heart.

Suggests a progression and a retreat at the same time.

Ultimately, Woman King promises remarkable things to come for Iron and Wine, especially if Beam continues to expand his musical palette.

His guffawing voice makes him sound like every rhyme he delivers is a punchline.

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.

It's a classic case of debut album as faux anthology of musical influences, but it's also a successful collection with a marked sense of individuality, massively helped by Murphy's dry sense of humor, which demonstrates a willingness to embrace the contradiction at the heart of his musical personality.

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

It's a sound that doesn't loudly proclaim itself, but nevertheless insinuates its way in, until it feels quietly indispensable.

Todd... smartly allows her soaring, angelic voice to take the lead, leaving the sparse arrangement of strings and keys to take a delicate backseat. This also means her lyricism, poignant and wry, stands out.

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.

As whole, the record is hardly notable for its special guests; the beauty of Antony's singing, the ferociousness of his delivery, the profundity of his songs, and the unflinching nature make the disc truly transcend such.

Combining brute force with melody, Worlds Apart is a stunning showcase for AYWKUBTTOD's mature sound, full of unexpected subtleties, musical wild-cards and detours.

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

Not as consistent as its de facto partner, Digital Ash still contains several euphoric highs.

Though this new political bent shows a heightened sense of maturity and substance, two of Morning's best tracks are poignant, unabashed love songs.

They still retain a unique identity even as they plunder and explore more generic alt-rock themes, and their particular skill is in making this transformation seem logical and welcome.

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.

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

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

A gorgeous and moving collection of love songs.

This is simply some of the best guitar-driven rock I've heard all year.

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

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.

She selects songs that are somehow special, and presents them with great playing and singing, in a way that clearly means something to her. My bet is that they'll mean something to you, too.

It's well produced and mixed, but lacks the edge to make it really interesting.

Brings together the best parts of metal, hardcore punk-rock and dance-y post-punk for a sound that would be otherwise useless if it weren't for one thing: The boys got "it."

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.

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.

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

Crimes is nothing but poetry, poetry in that way that song lyrics never are, profound both on page and in song.

Sturdier production and straightforward songwriting make a strong backbone for someone once lauded for his mysticism.

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

While the dizzying mix of musical styles and absurdist lyrics is still there, Camper are a much more skilled, mature band.

Combining dramatic, ethereal pop vocals with moody guitar and piano theatrics, Summer in Abaddon recalls a tighter, smoothed-out Built to Spill, or maybe a Dismemberment Plan reunion.

The disc is basically a more straight electro-pop variation on the Gold Chains angle.

Overall, it is clear that Hitchcock is having fun creating music with Welch and Rawlings, and that joy comes through in the listening.

By corralling five hungry producers with a flair for the earthy funk and slippery samples that guided some of De La's best albums, the veteran trio have recorded the true successor to 1996's Stakes Is High.

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

The magic of the album lies in the way Wilson's complex, challenging sonic vision can evoke the optimism, hope, and wonder that gave birth to this album decades ago.

A set doing less of the poker-faced electro revivalism and more of the palette-diversifying pop-song penning.

It's easily the least convincing album from the three Banhart's offered thus far.

Zedek is still shrouded in her aesthetic darkness, is still hungry, still driven; her music is still driven by the same ghosts that've haunted her throughout her career.

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.

It's a disc in which Dizzee diz, lyrical wiz, is more forthright as lyricist, using the blank canvas of an "album" to sketch together a thoughtful, carefully-sequenced set in which his voice, and its elastic accent, ring clear.

The band doesn't quite manage to reconcile its mannered appropriation of a distanced, underground frigidity with its boisterous forays into abrasive, psych-tinged garage rock, but this is probably a good thing, because it's this resistance to homogeneity that gives them the sort of edge they'd otherwise lack.

It's basically more of the same sort of wistful, sometimes hard-charging melodic rock of the group's first and better release, Up the Bracket.

This disc may have a wilder sense of love-and-adventure about it, and may offer the thrills of an unpredictable ride, but, in its capriciousness and incongruousness, the thing Medulla rarely feels like is an album.

Utterly modern and utterly compelling.

Too much of Half Smiles of the Decomposed, however, does not rock.

A strong return to form.

Basic but gorgeously textured pop-rock with a country tinge, Rilo Kiley's music is led by vocals that'll stop you in your tracks.

Donelly shows a grace on this disc that a lot of people her age aren't capable of.

A collection of slow, sad, stately songs whose obvious studio smarts are dwarfed by a big bleeding folkie's heart.

Their inventive, experimental-leaning music dances through history, passing from blues to rock 'n' roll to pop to experimental to something uniquely theirs.

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.

Transcendent and well-turned, Soft Commands is another exceptional recording from a talented, aware artist.

Out of the Shadow is a meandering musical path, but one well worth taking.

This is intense, serious music for serious times, and writing off Sparta as the "other," less interesting half of their previous group would be a major mistake.

If Foxtrot's songs were fractured pop, then Ghost is just plain fracture, a soft and brutal self-examination that pulls no punches even as it manages to remain carefully elliptical.

So while not breaking new ground -- a near impossible expectation given the amount of ground The Fall has already broken -- The Real New Fall LP is a strong indication that Mark E. Smith is nowhere near finished.

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.

The most amazing power-pop album I've heard all year.

Once you get acclimatized to the torturous messages and the dynamic, diverse musical accompaniment shifts from song to song, it becomes obvious that Uh Huh Her is one of Harvey's most rewarding albums.

Seemingly taking its cue from Congleton's willfully bizarre screaming, the band favors atonalism and discordance in its cobbled-together brand of mighty-uptighty protest rock.

A funkdafied smart-bomb that's one part Brooklyn, one part Madchester, guitar-meets-echo-chamber, a little Kompakt but still a little sprawling.

Immersed in beautiful, stirring string arrangements, heartfelt melodies and an all-around warm and welcoming down-home folk feel, the new album is sincerely soothing.

By the time the longplayer finishes playing, you realize, whilst the acoustic guitars and harmonized vocals and that awesome table-tennis-ball-bouncing-beat may've made you think this was some easy-to-love pop platter, it actually hasn't stumbled all the way towards getting-it-together.

They combine the angular dread of Joy Division with the slow burn of the Velvet Underground (circa the third album), underpinned with some sinuous rock dynamics and topped off with laconic, sometimes languid vocals.

It's big but it's also clever.

Even the grand indulgence in artistic artifice on A Grand Don't Come For Free -- its self-contained narrative -- seems like it's forsaking a long shelf-life, the downside of the story's "mystery" being that, once you've heard the yarn once, it's a little like you've heard it all, and all it has to offer.

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

The marked contrast between the deadpan vocals and the lightness of the music mostly works, although because of the limitations of Merritt's vocal range, he is not always able to project the same depth of feeling detailed in the songs' lyrics.

With this album, French Kicks have taken a sizeable leap forward, taking the right bits and pieces from half a century of rock 'n' roll to make something new and, yes, unique.

Her songbird's voice has never sounded more beautiful than it does here.

The combination of timeless songs, superb production and Banhart's often mesmerizing performance make for a very strong album.

Heroes to Zeros, in spite of a few uneven tracks, makes the cut.

Trampin' has her sounding revitalized, her contagious energy striking sparks off her longtime musical collaborators.

She sounds as distant as much of the Anthology of American Folk Music, and yet there is an intimacy to her songs. This is a singer/poet who really feels things. And this is the new, weird America, and Holland is singing its woes with a wisdom far beyond her age.

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.

Rocks like Bad Company and Thin Lizzy and vintage Springsteen. Look out.

They don't always sound consistent on this debut, occasionally misfiring with underworked material, but overall the strengths overshadow any weaknesses, and when they truly hit their stride they're devastatingly effective.

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

While the album is not as cohesive a vision, many of its songs are more focused.

Their newfound versatility detracts somewhat from their own identity.

The beauty and richness of our seemingly mundane lives can be found here, in the bossa-nova of minor catastrophes, the pseudo-jazz of strippers, and the easy lilt of coffee cups.

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.

While Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes is far from a perfect offering, this album provides a plethora of outstanding moments reminiscent of the musical exploration the band's heroes The Pixies exhibited on their debut longplayer, Surfer Rosa.

Whilst Bejar's songs are blessed with mucho rhythm and melody, you should still be made aware that there's no real beat, no real bass, and little that sounds organic. Yet there's still something quite regal and symphonic about it all, the synthesized strings and horns and piano stirring up a romanticism that goes with Bejar's fancy-pants lyricism.

Superior to its predecessor in just about every respect.

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.