The Fratellis are beyond infectious.

If Louden Up Now was the sound of !!! trying to integrate their fusion of conflicting ideas and failing admirably, Myth Takes is the band not giving a damn and succeeding improbably at something even more interesting.

While they’ve enlarged their presence on record, they’ve also peopled their songs with themes and accusations more resonant than Funeral’s mournfulness.

A showcase of a band who have learned lessons and improved upon them, quietly getting better and better until something really special emerges.

There is a contingent of hip-hop fans who have been impatiently waiting at least since Madvillainy for a record rooted in tradition that offers something just a bit more skewed and challenging. Abandoned Language is that album.

For an album about all the bad things that can happen to us, it sounds pretty damn good.

[Levi] has an impeccable ear for a hook and packs his album full of them.

Like Trans Am’s late-90s material, this album is enjoyable without being astonishing.

So sure, yet another band of bombast, largesse, room-sound gone cathedral, but either way the Besnard Lakes have mastered their songcraft with this psychedelic oddity, which fits all too well with other wintry early-year indie releases.

Few albums made in recent memory sound this harrowing or this painful, yet even fewer have such a true sense of catharsis.

Most of it... feels as weighty and emotive as Sleater Kinney, or as seductive as Mary Timony in the mid-90s: fully-formed, feminine indie rock.

Those disappointed with Velocity’s, raw, live sound, will see this album as a return to form. Those that dug its easily digestible garage rock will, in turn, view New Magnetic Wonder as a step forward.

With Phantom Punch Sondre Lerche finally makes good on the promise of his talent; he’s mastered and polished his intuitive gift for melody and arrangement and rightly applied it to his most natural musical inclinations.

So when you see Infinity On High getting praised, don’t bother scoffing. This deserves to get praised. There's a lot on here that's great and pretty much nothing that's bad.

Writer’s Block has announced the renaissance of both pop music and love.

Perhaps it’s too easy to blame Fridmann for these new distractions, but I can’t imagine Ounsworth and the band leaping ahead this way without him. Here’s to hoping that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah move backward more lithely than they progress.

While the music remains modest, there are a few moments of gratifying lyrical incision and indecision befitting this being Jones’ first album bereft of covers.

With the impressive level of control, it’s understandable when it starts feeling like Adams is holding on a little too tightly.

Cryptograms is by no means a flawless record, but taking the time to speak its language, tap into the dueling forces that make it tick, is an intriguing reward.

By peppering in just enough new tricks to keep things interesting and stepping up the songwriting this time out, Visitations succeeds where Winchester Cathedral failed.

Here are nine really communicative almost-pop songs, subdued but no less ambitious follow-ups to similar tendencies on 2005’s The Runners Four.

It is a funereal album whose spark and anger is obscured like the smoldering foundations of a burnt out city.

What really makes Wincing the Night Away succeed is how the Shins’ moneymaker templates evolve into more complex tapestries. In a manner similar to the New Pornos, the third album becomes the most successful due to an implied heft that comes from a concerted effort to sound like a band rather than a singer-songwriter vehicle.

Hissing Fauna is severely front-loaded, not necessarily because the closing songs are duds, but more because the album’s first half is nearly flawless.

There are subtle shifts at work with the band, and most allow their shady songcraft to emerge from overt experimentalism--perhaps too aware of its own inventiveness--into the realms of "art-pop."

Transparent Things, then, sounds less the work of three programmers and more like a band that plays together and stays together—like Hot Chip holding it a little closer to the vest, maybe.

So what if there are bits of Soft Bulletin and Dusk at Cubist Castle all over the record? At least they managed to choose the bits that fit together well.

In Stormy Nights is by no means the first time Ghost have plugged in and upped the volume, but it is easily their most unhinged, aggressive record; they make a show of steamrolling their subtler instincts.