Pitchfork

The laborious title to Marnie Stern's new album weirdly suits her-- like her and her music, it's obsessive, playful, and choppy, and it captures the single-mindedness of this self-taught guitar virtuoso. On her second album, she also displays a new sense of self-assuredness, channeling her energy and learning to relax and record in a real studio without sacrificing the full-bodied qualities of her music.

After a brief hiatus Grizzly Bear's Daniel Rossen has revived the Department of Eagles project, enlisted some of his bandmates, and created a sprawling pop record (complete with guitars, piano, horns, banjo, and more) that evokes Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Sung Tongs, Van Dyke Parks, and Gene Clark. Ambitious and complex, it's stuffed with cocooning harmonies and shimmering, sunlight-smacking-the-Pacific melodies.

Vivian Girls, an all-women trio who've become overnight sensations among critics and underground rock fans, deliver a lively, lovable debut album that taps fashionable aesthetic wellsprings from Phil Spector to C86 to Nuggets and, without risking pastiche, turns them into an armful of kick-ass songs.

TV on the Radio's follow-up to 2006's Return to Cookie Mountain-- a dense and textural album with an optimistic core-- Dear Science is catchier, but thornier. Musically, it's shit-hot but also brainy and ambivalent, and more engaging for it. TV on the Radio remain a true Event Band, and the sign o' the times they capture here isn't audacious hope, or fierce revolution: it's confusion. They're the house band for a country that has no idea what'll hit it next, and Dear Science is a jagged landscape of self-doubt, Bush-hate, and future-fear.