The beats aren't as strong here as they were on his debut, so Skinner lives and dies by his delivery. It's a clear sign of his ability that even in the album opener, when the tempo is strange and the backing track is kind of dull, you feel compelled to listen because you want to know what he's saying.

Overall, the album is more centered and collaborative and celebratory than anything Banhart has done before.

Sung Tongs resembles the freakiest of '60s psyche, the outward fringes of Elephant Six-dom, the craziest excesses of Tom Ze -- yet it is a warm, deeply human work that winds its way into your heart.

Power is only a slight variation on its predecessors, yet sounds more vibrant and alive than almost anything in the band's canon.

It is, like all the best pop music, silly, pointless and thoroughly lacking in high-level intellectual discourse. Thank heaven.

Those of you who choose to get in on the ground floor of this superlative venture they call Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By will not be disappointed.

Like Tindersticks without the strings, and with a better sense of vocal clarity, L'Altra is the kind of band whose releases would be best sold with some cheap red wine and a carton of cigarettes for those long, lonely nights in.

If you've heard the group's last few albums, Milk Man won't seem like a notable refinement or a grand statement of purpose; they're just breaking the pop song mold, over and over again, and doing consistently inventive things with the fragments.

It's quite a treat to hear the duo create such refreshingly original music with rock's "standard" instruments.

Blending the real and the imagined, live performance and tape manipulation, traditional instruments and skewed found sounds, Akron/Family carves an eccentrically lovely niche for itself in the ever-expanding psych-folk landscape.

The New Year's sound is fraught with contradictions, soft melodies and pretty strumming stretched over tricky rhythms and acerbic lyrics.

It's definitely nothing like the laid-back experience of listening to him live, but it's his best album yet.

All of these songs sound like her -- from any era or any album of her career. Her presence is too recognizable to be disguised by production or gimmickry.

Thankfully, the band's most endearing facets remain firmly intact -- namely, their timeless nature and complete disregard for the current musical zeitgeist.

Seldom has "laptop" music been more magical or more joyful.

Mercury Rev's unique talent lies in their ability to take a page from nearly every book and mold it into their own nuanced brand of music.

At nearly two hours long, Church Gone Wild/Chirpin Hard is anything but a precise masterstroke. It is, however, a flawed, majestic account of what can happen when a band splits down the middle to compose on their own terms, with no artistic differences and no coalescing of ideals.

A dance record for people who never leave their apartments, a rock record for the rave set, Less Than Human is the sound of people high on energy and sweat.

Magic is liberally scattered throughout the album.

While not as thrillingly consistent as its predecessor, Man Mountain is another beautiful synthesis of man-made ingenuity and machine-generated textures.

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.

Despite his gray hairs, Moz's approach to You Are the Quarry is youthful and energetic -- perhaps even punk.

Our Endless Numbered Days won't knock you off your seat with ribald lyrics or rambunctious riffs, but its confident, measured chords and precise tones will hold your attention long after they've grabbed it.

While Point may be less viscerally invasive than any of its recorded counterparts, it remains a beautifully orchestrated exercise in modern pop construction.

Rarely has the indulgence of rock ‘n roll dreams sounded this concise.

The album certainly isn't a waste of your money if you aren't already a fan. This is one band that clearly doesn't save their lesser material for obscure release. Lost Marbles and Exploding Evidence functions very, very well as a weird little LP.

Picaresque is dense and complicated, but only rarely threatens to tip under its own weight.

At first listen, it's thrilling, but not quite the statement we were made to believe would shift the world's axis by its very existence. The best thing to do is clear your mind of hype and expectations, and listen to this record -- this fun, addictive, thoroughly entertaining record -- again and again.