Hard Times… unfortunately spends most of its running time inadvertently showcasing the delicate difference between stylistic variation and tonal inconsistency.

The conceit of The Dirtbombs covering dance music is genius.

With Not Yet, Monotonix delivers a tight half hour of intensely likable scuzz rock that gives a solid kick to the lizard part of the brain.

As a stand-alone collection though, it's vexingly stunted, and padded out with a few unnecessary additions to fill out its barely 30-minute run time.

Yes, believe it or not, The Get Up Kids have produced the first truly surprising album of 2011.

Even for Deerhoof, this is a tricky album to work your way through. But even if you never quite figure it out, it's unlikely you'll get tired of trying any time soon.

If there's ever been an advertisement for allowing bands to develop before they blow up, Native Speaker is it. You'll probably listen to more immediate albums this year, but few will have the down-the-rabbit-hole quality that marks Native Speaker for success.

Cape Dory is not the kind of album that heralds the emergence of some great new talent, necessarily. It just does what it set out to do, and it does so perfectly.

Instead of complaining about the soullessness of life under the major-label umbrella, naysayers ought to be examining the band's true aesthetic motivations for taking an earthier, more straightforward approach on The King Is Dead.

Give Outside a listen, then maybe invite these guys in again.

Ghostface can rest easy in the fact that Apollo Kids shows that the drop in quality on Wizard of Poetry was just temporary, and amongst rappers who are 40-years-old or older, he's the definite champ. There aren't even many graying rockers making art as vital as Apollo Kids, radio play or not.

Until he learns to translate the raw, confessional edge of his music to his work in the genre, the results will always be as unsatisfying as III/IV.

No Mercy is a valley, not a peak, in a career that has seen plenty of both.

In others' hands, this could be maudlin or self-indulgent, but Hauschka's attention to detail is his strongest characteristic.

An Introduction to Elliott Smith [is] a compilation that maybe would have made some sense in 1998 but has no place in 2010.

Although Steeple is not entirely groundbreaking, it's not entirely safe either, as its fidgety temperament is remarkable enough to make anyone feel at home.

Body Talk concludes a triptych of highly enjoyable pop albums. Let's hope we don't have to wait another five years for the next batch.

Swanlights may not be the best of his works, but it is a welcome excursion along the path of his career.

Just a hair less than 40 minutes of energetic music. Which is a welcome change by today's standards -- to simply appreciate some music by itself.

On one hand, the enormity of said soundtrack can be appreciated by those with a palate for the peculiar, while others might yearn for a more streamlined recording.

Listening to New Chain, there's no reason now to think that Small Black can't put that fine touch to making an album with a tight balance between their drowsier sensibilities and their hookier, head-nodding ones.

Love Remains shows that Krell is definitely adept at delivering feelings, but there's more than a couple of tracks that could use a little more personality.

In 2010, when oversharing is the norm, Pinkerton can seem almost quaint for its willingness to hold back. All told, it's roughly 10 percent as confessional as the average overheated Tumblr post or Gareth Campesino! lyric sheet. Maybe that's why, to this day, "El Scorcho" is still the sort of song that lonely teenage boys vigorously lip-synch to when they think that nobody's looking. Its lyrics can be vague enough ("I'm a lot like you...") to fit all sorts of specific yearning.

Pink Friday lives or dies on Minaj's ability to fully embody all of the various personas she toys with, the singer, the rapper, the lover, the fighter, the tomboy, the girly girl, the big sister, the bitch. But she isn't always engaging, and she doesn't always sound at home with this material.

As a group of former heartthrobs with something to prove, Duran Duran are both a product of its time and a band with its eye on the future -- and they've finally managed to capture the titular sense of Now.

They tend to stay in their most comfortable wheelhouse -- bluesy roots rock -- but, as before, their incredible vocal harmonies carry the day.

Novak and company are capable of writing great hooks and snotty lyrics, which prevents this album from being a total waste. This time around, it just seems like they got a little too tied up with exemplifying some sort of glam-rock, don't-care-about-anything attitude.

Cotton Jones is comfortable, but that comfort can be tiresome.

Authenticity is a concise, cohesive effort that finds The Foreign Exchange again successfully pushing the boundaries of R&B, soul, electronic music, and hip-hop.

Undercard is a solid listen all the way through, and proof that Darnielle and Bruno have a chemistry that can last through 10 years of dormancy, and that Darnielle can still surprise with a song, even when we think we know what to expect from him.

Opticks is also more mature than her previous outing, which at times can seem like the happenstance work of an adorable child. It's clear that Silje Nes is coming into her own as an artist here.

Pilot Talk II is brilliant because it builds on its excellent predecessor, but finds just a touch more focus.

In its essence, Death To False Metal is competently put together, and adequately celebratory in its own way (as the album title might suggest), but there is very little to latch on to as far as a reason for existence.

As an album The Lady Killer achieves everything it purports to be. Its music is familiar enough to attract broad attention.

Dark Twisted Fantasy is an album full off melodic ideas, copious guest features, winding songs, unexpected twists, and improbable pairings.

In a career full of successful fusions of metal, psych, crusty punk and indie rock, Spiral Shadow is another triumph.

Small Craft probably wouldn't make it as an art installation. It gets too diverse and obstreperous to make good musical wallpaper.

As a funk or electro album, As U Were is fun to listen to. A little cheesy, maybe, but it gets the proverbial party started, which is always a clear sign that something's going well. It's when Lyrics Born tries to hang on too tightly to his old roots that things start to get messy.

In the end, The Fool's success comes in not cutting corners. No moment here settles for the cheap thrill, and in building these songs -- carefully,and each with its own distinct materials -- Warpaint comes off as an awfully confident band, one you should be listening to more often.

Whether or not you think antipathy and self-destruction are legitimate themes for music, or you feel that even the pretty remote handling of rap that Salem has done as three white kids is too much, you can't dismiss what started all this hub-bub in the first place: the fact that the trio has crafted a sound that still doesn't really sound like anything else. Whatever else it does, King Night stays true to that.

Songs for Singles sees the Miami band continuing to experiment with upbeat, accessible metal songs, and while not fully pop yet, the addition of a more advanced rhythm section helps offset their perpetual need to drone their guitars out. The album inches the band further to reaching a goal of good pop metal that, while seemingly impossible in 2010, is a fight worth fighting.

It's part of the final duality that makes The Way Out a success: learning how it was constructed is fascinating, but it's equally enthralling to go into it completely ignorant.

It's all there in those opening lines: Your familiar arms, I remember.

Each pass cements that Stevens has done the impossible yet again: He's released another album that's both genre-defining and genre-defying.

For most of I Am Not a Human Being, it seems like Wayne has forgotten how to write a verse. He's all about couplets now.

With this album, Marnie Stern has proved once again that there are several effective ways to emotionally recontextualize her craft. Or, to put it simply, she's managed to produce one of the most fun albums of the year.

As they've made it to their fourth album, they've quickly become one of indie's most reliable bands, each new album bringing the promise of some of the year's best music.

Public Strain improves on Women in every way, which is no small feat. It's 13 minutes long than its predecessor, but Women doesn't use the extra time to spread out. The band keeps the tension up by building the various lean sounds of that record into new, more muscular variations.

Ring is an ambitious and impressive statement, and one that should help Glasser avoid that one-off attention to become a lasting artist. Its highlights are unique and mesmerizing, and the few lesser (and by lesser, I mean not flat-out fantastic) moments leave room for her to grow from here.

But for at least 10 tracks, Gucci is able to sustain a hell of a run, forming perhaps commercial rap's best dispatch this year. There have been, and probably will be, better rap albums this year. But none will be more fun.

As great as these songs are, how much you love them will rest on how long a leash you're willing to give Young and Lanois with the all ringing, sometimes overbearing, noise they wrap them in.

Aloe Blacc's Good Things is a mature, well-crafted, and distinctive take on the basic blueprint of the neo-soul sound, the quasi-revival movement that embraced classic soul and funk tropes that had been abandoned by much of the R&B establishment.

The Roots are about to get flooded with production offers, since if they can lend John Legend serious street cred and make him more thrilling than he has ever been, they ought to be able to do this for everyone.

Instead of tossing off interstitial, between-album scraps, Ellison has done what most artists should do with the extended-play format: create a mini-album. Every song has its place and works together to form a tangible flow.

On this album she proves herself as something more (way more, in fact) than an eternal scenester and competent drummer.

As an album, Epic is disjointed in places, but as a collection of songs it's strong enough.

It's an album that marries the buzzsaw abrasion of past Swans' albums with the country-cum-death-blues feel of his work with Angels of Light. That's an easy way to explain it, anyway.

Root for Ruin doesn't have the ecstatic heights of Let's Stay Friends, but it's more level-headed in a way.

Penny Sparkle is a welcome addition to the group's carefully curated discography. Longtime fans should be challenged to hear the band's growth, while new listeners are implored to seek out past works for comparison.

Business Casual will probably slay people at parties, on Urban Outfitters sales floors and as part of the pre-concert entertainment over the P.A. But it'll probably have the same seven-month shelf life as Fancy Footwork did.

Lisbon is another great record in an admirably consistent discography. It's got a drive and precision to it we didn't see on the last record and it reminds us that, for all their intricacy and texture, The Walkmen are one of the great rock bands going.

As False Priest beds down in its second half, the album still has a sonic charge, but the frenetic sense of discovery from the first half drifts away.

Majesty Shredding is one of the finest rock records of 2010.

Heretofore lurches well beyond the confines of the breathtaking rustic songcraft they're known for, but every experiment is drenched in gorgeous melodies and inventive instrumentation. In short, it's Megafaun's most effortless, assured work to date.

Album of the Year stands as one of 2010's most innovative and adventurous albums of any stripe, incorporating traces of African jazz, latin music, psych, metal, and more in its relentless attack. It bangs hard from start to finish, and it's guaranteed to send producers scrambling to rerecord their drums in its wake.

Wilderness Heart is tight but never overly controlled, and it varies in all the ways you could possibly want it to. It's a Black Mountain record through and through, that's for sure.

Now that Cuomo is older and singing about things like fame and the alienation of age, it's become harder to empathize.

Screaming Females are too talented for Castle Talk to be anything but a solid album. But "solid" is a word I never wanted to use for Screaming Females.

Phosphene Dream's real achievement is that it takes the band's earlier murderous attitude and makes it impossibly bland. It might be the first time you fall asleep during an album with copious references to toxic gas, hauntings, death, blood, and killing.

McKee's voice may sound exactly like it did 20 years ago (the fate of most twee-pop ladies, it seems), but The Vaselines' trademark noise has only grown deeper, richer. Listening to this record just feels good on a purely physical level.

He'll probably still be relegated to afternoon festival slots and in hard to find reaches of your local record store, but Pop Negro is another delightful record that pushes the boundaries between music and countries.

If this isn't an instant classic, it's only because it takes some time (and ears) to appreciate.

Skit I Allt reminds you to wipe your brow and lean back as the heroic guitar returns. Sing along, the hooks are so strong! But keep the headphones on lest you actually hear your own voice.

Bilal and McKie place emphasis on the craft of each song and the arrangement of each instrument. Bilal's voice is treated as one of these parts, so there is a flat quality to the sound. This may frustrate fans of Bilal's voice or those expecting a conventional star-centric album that places the spotlight on a voice or an instrument. Instead, Bilal's feelings are the centerpiece here. That alone makes Airtight's Revenge a welcome return for a needed voice.

All too often Shadow Temple falls short and is flat out boring when it should be actively engaging. It took Rama 14 years to rise to the throne and bring peace and harmony. The band members need to do more than this if they want to if they want to outperform their namesake.

There isn't a song here that truly rises above the rest, and nothing here is as offensive as anything you'd hear at a stop on the Warped Tour.

Where they used to sound like the crackling of a subway car rounding a bend or the seediest alleys of New York in the pre-dawn hours, here they sound like alt-rock renderings of what moody post-punk is supposed to sound like.

Robyn could've put together a single album filled with all-knockout jams, but it's better than she got to exercise her brain trying to fit in everything she wanted.

What Uhlhorn has done on Fin Eaves is reconcile those influences into something unique to him; this is homage or pastiche, rather than imitation. Rather than playing different influences to different effect, Fin Eaves is a whole work, the first of the band's career.

While the frequent use of echo and the isolation of each instrument lend the record a spare quality, Strange Weather, Isn't It? is hardly akin to Bowie and Eno's emotionally stark Berlin Trilogy. Instead, the album sounds like a band trying to regain its footing by returning to its fundamentals.

The Orchard is the sound of Ra Ra Riot hitting for the middle, delivering 10 tracks of deliberate orchestral-tinged indie-pop that'll hit you in your 2007-era blog-rock pleasure center.

They manage to make the grandest songs imaginable seem like they were composed with only you in mind.

Carey has made a debut record that is both solid in its own right and hints at the promise of great things to come.

It's unfair to saddle Dead Confederate with the burden of the entire Athens tradition, or look for it to be anything other than a band making a record. But Sugar would have been much more interesting if these guys had focused on that instead of trying to be five or six bands at once.

A case could be made that this is a newfound maturity, and without a doubt Rivers is no second-hand attempt. However, sans even a single convulsive whirlwind, Rivers is more musical wallpaper than a masterpiece.

The fact remains, however, that Cloak and Cipher is an impressive piece of work, and inevitably that idea of novelty up there is just a cultural standard, determined by every other album ever released. It's an interesting thing to consider if you're trying to articulate the context around a piece of work, but it's not too much more than that.

They've got the hooks, they've got the personality, and (at their best) they've got the songs. Their low fidelity is a choice for the album, not a way to plug into a movement. And while Past Time might not realize their sound as well as it could, when its working this is a sound that has no expiration date.

It's more or less a corporate-rock distillation of nu-rave, three years too late.

Black City is his thesis on how he's capable of delivering a dark, lustful album just as easy as he can mine more bubbly, melodic sounds. Beyond this, he's delivered one of the more cohesive and thematically sound albums of the year so far.

The album's lyrical shortcomings are easy to overlook, especially when most of its best parts occur when the words drop away entirely and the crisp handclaps come in. It's that sort of giddy, emotional, inarticulate pop that Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin does best, and Walla does his part in bringing that side of them out.

On their third full-length album, Alive As You Are, the members of Darker My Love drop the whole neo-shoegaze, Jesus And Mary Chain worship of their first two albums and instead engage in a sampling of different '60s sounds.

The bass can get lost in the mix as well beneath all the moving parts. With the kinds of rhythms The Budos Band lay down, you need the bass up front and center. These qualms are minor compared with the overall delight the album conveys.

Like a good mixtape, the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack works less as a primetime rock album and more as an entry point to some great work that those on the margin may have missed. And for what it's worth, it's the best soundtrack Cera has ever been associated with.

For all the over-arching themes, The Suburbs is the most rocking Arcade Fire album yet.

The album's about being depressed, smoking weed, having fun, not understanding girls. You know, the moments that define any summer.

The album may have its bumps, but the unassuming charm these guys have always brought to their records comes through more often than not.

It's the kind of release that will keep longtime fans happy, and acts as a welcoming primer to new ears, inviting them to join El-P on his side of the line before exposing them to his harsher, more eye-opening material.

His mixtapes still might be better (especially Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik), but Str8 Killa is the first step toward Gibbs regaining the label contract that is so rightfully his.