The masks only serve to augment a record whose textural complexities and depths sink in further, quietly addictive, play after play.

Other posses succeeded because all members contributed to a central sensibility and ethos that made the whole greater that the sum of its parts. G.O.O.D. Music just obscures the greatness already there.

For those interested in a group that still finds ways to take Krautrock down several roads, Circles more than succeeds.

You can come for the psychedelic pyrotechnics, and you can stay for the hooks: this debut is endlessly replayable.

For those who never liked That Guy Who Plays Acoustic Guitar At The Party, Babel's gonna sound like the dentist's drill. For others, this still may be the point at which you put down your makeshift tambourine, get up from the half-circle and find a better room in the party house.

For every standout near the beginning of the album-most notably the catchy girl group-aping "All Kinds of Guns"-there's a sorta-tedious ballad near the end.

Corin Tucker went back to her roots on Kill My Blues and shows why her brand of lo-fi indie punk had such a strong following in the first place.

About seven tracks in, 119 settles into a series of mid-tempo jogs that fail to really go anywhere.

Unfortunately the album as a whole, modulo a few bright sections, fails to come to life.

Taken as a whole, Moms outreaches and outpaces any of Menomena's previous works.

Runner [is] an exceptional Sea and Cake record, and if it's not their best since their classic album, Nassau, it is at least the most surprising since then.

Naturally there some moments where having too producers and visions hurts them, but for the most part, the band sticks to the formula that's worked in the past.

That their kitchen-sink approach yielded as many wins as it did on Strapped bodes very well for The Soft Pack, oddly enough presenting a band that has proven it's more than its record collection, and possesses a heretofore unseen amount of creative restlessness.

End of Daze sounds like a short segment of Dum Dum Girls' future greatest hits collection.

This is another hyper-energized, beautifully crafted album by the Mountain Goats.

California Wives' music is soft and pleasant and fully formed and vague. Their lyrics are ciphers.

While Fantasm Planes aims to capture the ante-versions of Iradelphic songs as drifting minimalist collages, it's a tough sell after such a fully realized album.

Meat & Bone is proof positive that music needn't be so reverent to its past.

Self-Entitled [is] the most energetic NOFX record in a while, but one that still ends up a bit uneven.

Knowing the story behind Piramida's recording process does not ruin the horror movie or give away the ending. It does, however, adds a plotline to the wordless emotions the tracks evoke.

This is an album that proves that Stars are fully themselves, confident in their genre experimentation and fearless in the emotions they express.

Unfortunately, instead of being an ambitious failure, and despite all of the fantastic moments, I Bet On Sky makes the potentially more damaging fault of being "just alright."

The album, sweet as it sounds, is so polite that to keep from offending listeners it stops short of saying anything to them.

You can see every angle and every side of the shape they've made. And the unimpeachable logic of each song, added to their odd tunefulness of the songs, makes them exciting to listen to.

[There] are only the few standouts on an album otherwise comprised of facile dance tunes with overwritten lyrics.

Like OMNI, this record seems a bit trite.

Besides a cyclical feeling that veers the album into the direction of repetition at several points, Bend Beyond is a solid listen.

Conservative, instead, describes Shields: Veckatimest authorized it to be far bolder. You yearn for what could've been.