Though it's not the emotionally draining follow-up many were expecting, Seven's Travels succeeds. Its saving grace is the fact that Slug and Ant remain ignorant of, or choose to completely ignore, the hip-hop conventions that have handcuffed similar artists for almost a decade.

It's filthy, low-budget fun that's still plenty fucked up, whether you're a first-timer or a hardcore Peaches fanatic.

Bazooka Tooth not only gets better as the disc goes on -- the beats get thicker, the songs come together more fully and Rock stops proselytizing long enough to let your head bob and relax -- but it actually improves with repeated listens.

It pulls from a grab bag of influences, from Bob Dylan to Broadway, The Who to honky-tonk, and tosses them around with apparent abandon. In spite of this (or maybe because of it), The FFs spin all of this into a sound that's consistent, yet almost magically unique.

The melodies are hauntingly memorable; the band is smart enough to add just enough supporting touches to augment and support, without ever threatening to overwhelm.

Where Stellastarr's debut hits the jackpot is in their gutsy decision to wipe the slate clean by declaring the years 1981 to 1996 a single era, synthesizing the sounds of that fifteen year stretch by playing every band on the soundtrack to a mid-eighties John Hughes gem with the knowledge of the nineties college rock boom.

The passion that once seeped from the group now appears manufactured.

I can respect the need to innovate in hip-hop, but variety here comes at a cost -- there's no coherent or consistent melodic through-line.

Unlike Leona Naess the musician, Leona Naess the album is nearly forgettable, such is the perfection of its production and cardboard cut-out lyrical and musical themes.

Team Boo is Mates of State's best album to date.

They won't matter in a year, or even six-months...but for the time being, Ima Robot are an utterly entrancing and joyously frivolous antidote to those pre-winter blues.

At their best, Some Girls can sound like the Stones fronted by Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies -- a contradictory mix of rough passionate instrumentals and vocals that are airy and unconcerned.

Aside from being a strikingly orchestrated affair that ranks among Quasi's best work, Hot Shit! is the fully-realized version of Quasi that Coomes has envisioned since the beginning.

Seal IV... finds him retreading old ground and misguidedly attempting to claim new territory.

The Decline of British Sea Power is a record you'll probably tell your friends about, but it won't make you into a fervent, foamy-mouthed convert -- at least, not unless you're in a suitably receptive mood and play the record at its optimum volume...which, in case you wondered, means as loud as possible.

His vision appears to be his own, and just happens to coincide with both the director's and the author's visions also, resulting in one of the best soundtracks -- and albums -- I've heard in a long time.

For a band only three albums into their career, they're showing inordinate amounts of brilliance.

Their fizzy confections still bristle with the same unfettered enthusiasm for retro kitsch, only now they come wrapped in a timeless pop sheen and confetti-sprinkled sharpness that's as inscrutable as it is enchanting.

Indolent, perturbed and volatile, Amazing Grace finds Pierce checking his wide-screen Spectorian visions at the studio door; he has opted, instead, for a coarse mix of electrified Southern gospel and somnabulent balladeering that has produced the most urgent Spiritualized album since Electric Mainline.

No one else is making literate, story-based pop this good.

Yoko is a much, much darker record than anything else in Beulah's canon.

This is not a happy album, but it might be a great one, taking the Western swagger of Dog in the Sand into bleak and stunning territory.

These are neither wimpy pop songs nor iron-fisted punk songs, but a shimmying amalgamation of DIY attitude and velvety songcraft, not altogether dissimilar to Learning to Crawl-era Pretenders.

The Wrens experiment with sounds and textures you don't normally hear in so-called "rock" records, but unlike many groups, they manage to do this in a way that attracts attention without upstaging the actual music. And the songwriting just keeps getting better; there isn't a lackluster track in the bunch.

It's certainly a lot more wide-ranging and engaging than its predecessor.

Heart is an exceptional sophomore effort, bursting at the seams with pop content, but the prism through which it travels bends it, taints it and humanizes it in ways that are at once soul-clenching and unpretentious.

As wonderfully crafted an album as Reconstruction Site is, some listeners will be put off by its perceived highbrow attitude; it's too scholarly for the masses, too pop-smart for the avant garde set.

This is the album that should put Dressy Bessy on the big map.