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The pitiless logic of the music biz goes something like this: Your first album is the one you put all the work into, and if it becomes a hit, you spend the next two years touring, so your next one is almost bound to suck or fizzle quietly. And Jet are nothing if not logical.

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Eleven songs recorded in 11 hours by an 11-person pickup band (featuring members of …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead and My Morning Jacket), The Longest Meow could've been a hipster train wreck. But Bobby Bare Jr. is no ordinary hipster.

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"TV Destroy," the best song on the solo debut of Air's Jean-Benoit Dunckel, is a near-perfect confluence of early-'90s indie guitar noise, Daft Punk-style disco, and French-chick-who-can't-say-her-r's vocals, and its three minutes go by way too quickly. But the rest of Darkel is so aceless that it'll make you hanker for Dirty Vegas deep cuts.

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Occasionally beautiful and often brain-meltingly boring, the solo debut of Metric's Emily Haines is mostly frustrating. Songs such as "The Maid Needs a Maid" boast clever wordplay and Haines' girlish contralto, but the spare instrumentation (usually just piano) and samey melodies wear you down.

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Okay, uncle. I give. After Robert Pollard broke up Guided by Voices, of which he was the only real member, I thought I'd finally have time to work through some of the 1,000-plus songs the band had released during its 21-year run.

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She's been a bad, bad girl. Six years ago, it seemed like Fiona Apple was out of our hair forever -- the doe-eyed ingenue delivered a sophomore album with a 90-word title, had a meltdown onstage in New York, and publicly railed against MTV and eating turkey at Thanksgiving dinner. Turkey!