Languis crowds a lot of great stuff into a small, enclosed space here — a steady bass-drum beat; a jumpy bouncing-ball bass line; a muscled, shoegazing Wall of Sound; doubled vocals encased in a vapor trail of echo. Then the group ups the ante, slipping in disco guitars to give…

“Apocalyptic” probably felt like a pretty sweet jam when Mountain Con was in the studio, and within an anything-goes context, it works. Exposed to the open air, though, it’s just plain embarrassing. DJ scratches, barnyard sound elements, funk, and sad white-boi rhymes (that one would expect Anthony Kiedis and Beck…

A key measure of a hip-hop album’s effectiveness is the level of envy it evokes. At the least, listeners should come away impressed by the rapper’s dexterity and moxie behind the microphone; at the most, they should wish for even a fraction of his or her lyrical skills. Spank Rock…

While microscopic tonal twinkles charge tinnily at a zillion bpm, phantoms stir and coo along to new-age fanfare. As the volume eases north; creaking, eerie violins come out to play; and thin snips mushroom into assaultive clacks, “Velocity of the Yoke” sheds its skin to reveal a screaming ghost bullet…

She seizes your attention with hardscrabble, gritty guitar riffs and then holds forth on the title theme in aggro, anguished fashion, like the bastard spawn of Eddie Vedder and Alanis Morissette. Sure, no one’s really heard of Carol Bui yet, but that could and should change, provided she kicks the…

Critical disdain for the Fiery Furnaces reached its apex last year, when the NYC-based brother-sister pair recorded and released Rehearsing My Choir, a twisty time’s-outta-joint album — conceived with their grandmother — that rewards patience. The year prior, Blueberry Boat was assailed as unfocused, indigestible garbage. And now comes a…

The Tampa-based lo-fi gophers of Home are all about volume and nookie this go-round. Pavement has always had a place on Home’s influences list, but “Push” moves beyond loose homage into adept imitation — a huffing, puffing, uphill-shove, Wowee Zowee-style pocket of fried, squealing guitars served at a relatively sexy…

A brief perusal of the Essex Green’s photo on the Merge Website reveals the band has no business writing a should-be pop hit as 1985-centered as this one — no Vidal Sassoon damage, no heavy makeup masks, no keytars anywhere. Nonetheless out come the choppy skinny-tie guitars, entry-level synth figures,…

This tinfoil-helmeted indie ditty telegraphs its paranoia through subject matter and structure alike. Jittery, nervous guitars constrict and snap in harried rhythm while birds are revealed as spybots and “The footage is beamed back to central headquarters/Where all of the agents know their orders.” Who says police-state horror has to…

Nearly three years after their semibreakthrough into the MTV2/VH1 cultural consciousness, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs return with a lead single celebrating the previous decade’s FM hegemony. To wit: Karen O genuflects before Courtney Love’s gritted-teeth yowl and Polly Jean Harvey’s wordless yet expressive yelp while the rest of the band…

Props are due Anti-Flag for not merely chucking to its Warped Tour mall-rat constituents some three-chord poli-sci punk they can shout along to, but also for writing liners chock full of thoughtful essays and links to provoke further research of U.S. capitalism’s ills. It doesn’t hurt that this “ef Bushco”…

One way or another, our worst fears demand confrontation. Dawson faces her mother’s illness armed with a precociously childlike, I-can-stare-down-death sing-song, fumbling at an acoustic guitar as bells chime like comforting pixies, screwing up her courage and holding tears in check. “There’s something in her blood/And there’s something in her…

When this ex-Television member tries to test the limits of his limited singing voice, the results suggest an unfortunately overambitious Lou Reed. On “Documentary” the manic-depressive, seesawing melody — low-slung, swampy blues shot through intermittently with engaging bursts of sunshine buoyancy — compensates for Verlaine’s inelegant warble and penchant for…

Who’d have thought an improv klatch between Four Tet’s resident knob-twiddler and a storied jazz drummer could yield something so aurally stunning, so open-ended and trippy? And yet here the players’ styles collide and mesh nicely, a crowded but comfortable sprawl of steel-drum patter and undulating, wailing electronics goaded into…

Prior to Stereolab taking off, hipster siren/chanteuse Laetitia Sadier made her living as an au pair. With its advancing and receding brass sweeps, rose-color kaleidoscopic organ carousels, burrowing keyboard weevils, and Sadier’s own twisting vocal glide, “Plastic Mile” evokes a slow, sweet cable-car ride across a theme park of unspeakably…

This German quartet traffics in traditionally Canadian maneuvers, tunneling Godspeed You Black Emperor!-style poli-sci post-rockout. “Warmachine” tumbles the standard-issue dominoes via cement-mixer bass rumble spiced with sinister movie dialogue, phantasmic guitar slime, and anxious drumming building in foreshadowed intensity — the balls-out, full-bore amps-to-eleven money shot elongated — with an…

The funky, closely stitched guitar flow underlining “Black Biscuit” isn’t the only thing this truncated wonder has going for it — Kauffman spoons in gyrating tambourines, chock-chock cowbells, and exultant, soulful heys — but the über-groovy, precision rhythmic riffing is what sticks to the mental ribs, invites stabs at the…

According to the liner notes, one member of this quintet handles “drone machine” duties. Good luck identifying her contributions in this plodding, molten, proto-Black Rebel Motorcycle Club sludge: flat drums; the same lurching, off-phrase riffs lumbered out ad infinitum; singer Alex Maas’s desperately urging someone to “Wake up!” like a…

Ben Vida is great at keeping out of his own way. Talk-singing softly in enjoined, run-on couplets more impressionistic than cerebral, he leaves plenty of space for swooping, mewling keyboard brushstrokes, hints of sloping violin, and brittle acoustic strum, all eventually usurped by a fascinatingly intricate mélange of tight, tribal…

With the assistance of space-rockers Landing, indie superproducer/collaborative gadabout Adam Forkner’s latest nom de plume nestles and sighs in a pile of Neu!-ly fluffed down. Mildly psychedelic and divertingly mellow the way a lava lamp can be under the proper conditions — dig those fluttering rabbit-hole guitars; in-a-trance one-note keyboard…

It doesn’t matter whom Pete Doherty is sleepily lashing out at here — former soul mate/fellow Libertine Carl Barat; on-again, off-again model squeeze Kate Moss; a rude skag dealer — fact is, he needs them more than anyone needs him or his perfectly named new band. As much an interminable…

Light years removed from her early harsh-whisper-to-raw-scream dynamic, this revered indie queen is all about Memphis-spawned, pure-as-honey pools like “The Moon.” It is a luminous lunar ode consisting of a single recycling full-bodied guitar motif, reverb-haloed and orbited by Marshall’s spectral, just-this-side-of-hoarse queries: “When they put me six feet underground/Will…