Stuart Berman

The band rarely sacrifices the rock'n'roll fun-- they no doubt deliver that elusive black-and-blue, but it's a hit that feels like a kiss.

The really amazing thing about the album is how anthemic and affirming it feels despite the near total absence of proper sing-along choruses.

Arabia Mountain's chiseled production and considerably tighter songcraft provides a better forum for showcasing the band's subversive sense of humor.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor/Thee Silver Mt. Zionist's solo debut recalls John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

Nine Types of Light shows how TV on the Radio's transmissions can be just as effective and affecting when delivered free of static and noise.

Even in smaller doses, they rarely relent in their pedal-through-the-metal ballast.

Hopefully, Rolling Blackouts marks the moment in the Go! Team's career where the idea of moving forward becomes less of a literal concept and more an artistic one.

As the Drums' recent appearance on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross suggests, frontman Jonathan Pierce is not a man who is concerned with looking cool. Bearing a passing resemblance to Ralph Macchio's Karate Kid nemesis William Zabka, Pierce prances and preens through a performance of recent single "Best Friend" in a series of stilted robot dance moves, sweeping game-show-host hand gestures, and bug-eyed facial expressions, while delivering the arch, Morrissey-worthy lyrics ("You were my best friend/ But then you died") in a hammy, lounge-singer baritone. But then, given Pierce's track record, it's not surprising he has a healthy appreciation for the absurd; this is a man, after all, who called his old band Goat Explosion.

The Live at Reading CD/DVD provides formidable evidence of perhaps the last rock'n'roll band to transform the monoculture in its own image.

In a shocking turn, the Flaming Lips offer their most audacious undertaking since Zaireeka, an unrelentingly paranoid, static-soaked acid-rock epic.

Between My Head and the Sky becomes a bit of a muddle in the middle, with Plastic Ono Band's free-form approach yielding less satisfying results ... [it] simmers down considerably in its closing third, shifting away from boisterous band jams toward meditative tone poems and piano pieces. 

UK quartet follows 2008's fidgety, impulsive baroque-rock debut, Limbo, Panto, with an album that refashions them as a steely art-funk outfit.

King of Jeans successfully consolidates these two strengths, harnessing the earlier record's sometimes directionless fire-extinguisher splatter into shake-appealing rock action, and cohering Korvette's ramblings into a more complete picture of wage-slave misanthropy and alpha-male inadequacy.

Pretty much every city in North America has an FM radio station boasting a slogan along the lines of "Where Classic Rock Lives!" But really, these are the places where classic rock goes to die, fossilized onto playlists that haven't been updated since the second Black Crowes album. You think it's hard getting attention for your psych-folk-disco-shitgaze collective? Try being an up-and-coming meat-and-potatoes blues-rock band, who are shut out from both hipster-blog discourse and the sort of mainstream media channels that theoretically should be nurturing them. Most people laughed at the Blueshammer scene in Ghost World; me, I just felt sorry for those dudes-- because once they leave that bar, there's really nowhere else for them to go.

Twenty years since its first public mention, Archives-- covering 1963-72-- finally arrives as a 10-disc multimedia set available on DVD or Blu-ray.

The Horrors' shoegazer makeover aside, the real story here is Badwan's growing confidence as a singer, and his willingness to sound more scared than scary. Primary Colours loses its radiance when he reverts back to bogeyman type.

For now we're stuck with Dig Out Your Soul, which like every Oasis album from 1997's Be Here Now onward, makes cursory gestures toward making the band's mod-rock more modernist, before reverting back to the same ol', same ol'.