It is unsettling, starkly beautiful, intricate and minimalist all at once, and if it lacks the immediate impact of Fugazi, its aura lingers long after it's over.

It's the stuff that a thousand indie rock records are made of, basted, breaded and cooked to perfection.

His most diverse collection of songs to date.

Painstakingly crafted, casually baroque music for people who get off a little bit on feeling blue.

The Ladybug Transistor's relative lack of instrumental bravado suggests renewed confidence; the group doesn't make an obvious attempt to hook us with atmosphere or instrumental stunts, because the album already has enough going on to keep us listening.

Winds Take No Shape's compositions are not as varied as their debut, but it's a more atmospheric, cohesive and significant work because of it.

Before the Poison is a wonderful disc, the sound of a well-established artist continuing to grow and explore.

Apologies to the Queen Mary is almost an hour long, and there are certainly portions of it that aren't essential... but it's difficult to see where any fat could have been cut, as each track has its own fractured beauty.

While The Secret of Elena's Tomb is over in less than 20 minutes, it's more impressive than what most bands do in an hour.

This time out, Moby manages to establish himself not only as a talented multi-instrumentalist and genre-jumper, but as someone who can write interesting songs in a variety of genres -- a point he's missed in the past.

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.

If your tastes favor frenzied, rabid or berserk rock, grab yourself a copy of Black Eyes and tie it up tight.

While the band's sound isn't exactly the most original noise out there, they deliver with such impassioned conviction that you'll be more than willing to forget a few "sound alike" misgivings.

For all the divergent styles and blatant hero-worshipping to be found on High Society, the group never sounds derivative or misguided -- a rare feat, proving that despite numerous comparisons, Enon have indeed carved out their own fractured and unique musical identity.

An excellent and memorable album.

Stephen Malkmus' solo debut is as mature, focused, and charming as it is rambunctious.

This time around, the man actually sounds excited to be making music.

An album riddled with unbreathable energy and high-strung despair.

It is (Smog)'s most colorful, vigorous, and alive album to date.

A charged and melodic album full of anthemic choruses, hummable verses, and passionate rock.

A vibrant, engrossing album by a seasoned band whose best years are still ahead of them.

Devoid of obvious weak points, Lost In Space sounds sad without ever becoming schmaltzy.

AmAnSet gives us dance music that's perfect to sit down and listen to, opening an imaginary club in our heads.

Radian boasts a sound far deeper and richer than most of their push-button contemporaries.

Key ultimately demands direct attention; while some songs seem to call out for the openness of a long car ride, this is a headphone masterpiece.

A cracked masterpiece.... it rewards your attention with dreamy, surreal vistas, skewed poetry and flights of unadulterated musical madness.

The beauty in all this melancholy is that, interspersed among the reverberating guitars and mournful keyboards, you'll find an assortment of cheerful instruments, such as the accordion, that help to create an underlying tone of optimism.

As with anything, some listeners will already have sickened of seeing the words "dance" and "punk" next to one another -- but for the rest of us, this is an excellent new chapter in one of the young century's most interesting musical trends.

The album sounds mature, weathered, tired and occasionally almost weary, but is far to dynamic to ever seem truly lethargic.

Their most musically adventurous yet artistically grounded record to date.

It's a perfect summer record.

Underneath all those shiny, shiny flourishes and moddish overtones, though, is some seriously smart, witty music, for the most part.

It's probably a bolder, more daring record than it will ever be given credit for, as it's rare that an artist recognizes that she does some things very well, and then does them.

Most of Loewenstein's work here simply puts a happier spin on Sub Pop's raw, rough-edged rock formula -- the sort of thing Kurt Cobain might have written if Prozac was free.

Although much of the album sounds amateurish, and sometimes painfully so, the Unicorns regularly remind us that it's all shtick.

Admittedly, not all of Cloud's most ambitious tracks work ou.... But in the end, it's Garnier's ambition, combined with his talent and professionalism, that make this an album worth seeking out.

If you take your pleasure from the sheer palpability of the music -- the way it walks icy fingers up and down your spine, and paints pictures in the air, so real you could step into them -- Blacklisted will enjoy a long, happy stay in your CD player.

Les Savy Fav is quite conscious of what you want, and they keenly deliver the goods on their latest batch of solid tunes.

It took ages to arrive, but LCD Soundsystem isn't the album you've been waiting for -- it's far, far better.

Though it's fair to question their sense of tradition, they succeed where other blues-aping artists, like Gomez and Arnold, have failed, because they're not wholly indebted to the customs of the blues. They've merely co-opted its grisly spirit and transformed it into something unique.

The result is so refreshing original, it not only cements Gold Chains' position as one of today's best and brightest indie-tech gurus; it also says, coolly and effortlessly, that genre boundaries are "no big thang".

Like Hot Hot Heat with a less annoying singer, The Fever offer a glimpse of everything that's good about dance-punk.

With a musical attack this meticulous and charged, I know I'd enjoy The Ex even if I was their target...

These songs are reminders of a time when death wasn't a distant bogeyman but a mundane reality of everyday life. Alasdair Roberts's versions are somewhat modernized, but utterly immediate.

Using inventive sounds and solid structures, he has created a damn fine album.

A short but vibrant live album... Tigers captures the boisterous good cheer of Case's live show, proving once and for all that there's more to her music than dead bodies, wounded relationships and creepy, palpable stillness.

Mitchell is a skilled producer, weaving a tangle of complex melodies and countermelodies, rhythms and accents, into a vibrant tapestry; there's a lot more going on in these songs than you can pick up in one pass.

While devoid of the manic energy and double-time rhythms that were almost the group's trademark, songs like "Sweet Marie" and "Tu-Whitt Tu-Whoo" maintain a fiercely rocking edge via slowly evolving song structures and explosive, crunch guitar-driven choruses.

While they don't quite have the cross-gender appeal of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the pouty disagreeability of the Strokes or the urbane refinement of the Walkmen, they heedlessly summon the spirits of post-punk monoliths like PiL, A Certain Ratio and the Pop Group without forsaking their gritty New Yawk-ian roots.

Heart Like A River is a full-throated and diverse expression of the songwriting talents of Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell, though bassist Karla Schickele's two contributions are nothing to sneeze at, either.

Other People has a serene, thoughtful loveliness that builds with every listen.

She Loves You's real triumph is the fact that it sounds like a Twilight Singers record first and a covers collection second.

In short, this may not be an album you'll want to listen to every day, but its disproportionate number of "Holy shit!" moments should earn it a spot close to your stereo.

The resultant songs encapsulate the pop-rock aesthetic that made The Strokes' debut so much fun; every tune is tailor-made for dancing.

This is a disc that springs to life under closer inspection but also serves quite capably as background music -- the kind that draws in casual listeners and gets them asking questions.

It's a dense, matte-black monoblock of furious sonic energy -- ultra-compressed riffs, barely controlled bursts of feedback, and lyrics more urgent and angry than anything Wire have done in the last twenty-odd years.

Überzone's constant changeups in style and tempo breathe fresh life into a stale genre.

It's also pleasing to see that Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner want to expand their sound beyond the clicks, pops, squelches, hisses and squiggles that have become their trademark.

Flashes of the energy and precision JOA exhibit in the live forum are, arguably for the first time, perfectly realized here.

Combining the acoustic and electronic worlds of pop, Faux Mouvement plays like a moody soundtrack for film noir.

Though the group largely downplays their skull-splitting excesses, their songs resonate with a fury that a lifetime worth of broken power-chords couldn't match.

A meticulously crafted pop album that's as well suited for curling up on a bleak winter night as it is for driving with the top down on a bright summer day.

Fans who still have a great deal of admiration for eighties Wire will probably be most pleasantly surprised by Read and Burn 02.

Let Us Never Speak of It Again is the sticky, panting, sexually deviant album Louden Up Now should have been.

If you can't quite muster truly fervid enthusiasm for Send, it's probably due, in some part, to the matter-of-factness of its presentation. There is much here to be excited about, but carefully cultivated detachment seems to be Wire's preferred modus operandi.

These minimalist songs are surprisingly and undeniably funky.

Listening to Funeral takes a bit of patience. With most of the songs, the payoff doesn't come right away; in some cases, it sneaks up on you after several spins.

One of the major differences between this and other Grandaddy releases is that Lytle finally seems comfortable in his role as production auteur.

The Emotional Rescue LP asserts the fact that the band not only has exceptional songwriting talent, but has finally concocted a potent mixture of poppy melodies to complement their core of tranquil notes and minimalist orchestrations.

To their considerable credit, TVoTR don't run out of innovation before they run out of songs, so even "Wear You Out"'s final minutes, during which a flute, a sax and various oscillating tones bang away at each other, are inventive and enticing.

Compelling listening.