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Kicell’s first full-length album was titled Yume, which means “dream” in Japanese. And it was an appropriate word to describe the brother duo’s ethereal music.

Kicell’s third album, Mado ni Chikyuu (“window to the earth”), could also have been titled Okiru, which means “to wake up”.

The lush but sparse sound Kicell crafted on its first two albums give way to more concerte songwriting.

It’s also the band’ strongest album to date.

In the past, Kicell would take a lot of different timbres but meticulously arrange the music so the texture would remain open. This time, the brothers are willing to lay it all out.

“Yume no Tegami” uses a real backbeat during its chorus. “Yawaraka na Oka” feels grandiose without actually having to get too cluttered or too loud. And while “Umi Neko to Teishokuya” may include harp, toy piano and strings, the song focuses on the brothers’ dual guitar work.

The songs on Mado ni Chikyuu are faster as well. Kicell loves to write in a slow or medium tempo, often at the expense of momentum.

“Tokage Hashiru”, “Enola Gay” and “Kagi no Kai” offer a boost to the album which previous works overlooked.

It’s on these faster tracks that the brothers hold back on texture — “Enola Gay” is the closest thing Kicell has to a genuine rock song, the errant flute and trombone notwithstanding.

The tighter arrangements, coupled with more varied songs, makes Mado ni Chikyuu Kicell’s most accessbile album.

The haziness of the band’s past work clears up on this album, but it never totally dissipates.

Eclecticism has always been an important component to Quruli’s sound, but it’s often gotten in the way of the band’s songwriting as it has helped it.

On Team Rock and Zukan, the band veered between four-on-the-floor beats and rocking guitars. Perhaps the most unwieldy exercise of eclecticism can be found on 2002’s The World Is Mine.

Although dark and experimental, the almost ambient album was ultimately inaccessible.

With Antenna, Quruli has gone the other extreme and focused entirely on songcraft — and it’s succeeded.

Antenna is the most coherent album Quruli has recorded yet. Instead of leaping from quirk to quirk, the band instead hammers out one solid guitar-driven song after another.

If anything, there’s a decidedly Celtic feel to most of the songs. “Race” cleverly manages to find a common ground between lilting Celtic rhtyhms and the pentatonic contours of Japanese melodies.

“Morning Paper” veers between drone-like chords and a rock backbeat.

Other times, the band goes for some blues-styled grit without quite indulging in the blues itself. “Home Town” is pretty rugged, while the marching rhythm of “Hana no Mizudeppou” feels distantly folky.

In fact, a lot of cultural cross-pollenation happens on Antenna — it’s never too clear whether you’re listening to something inherently Japanese or European or American.

“Bandwagon”, though, is pretty blatant about being a folk-rock song.

While Antenna may Quruli’s most clever album, it unfortunately lacks something its previous albums didn’t neglect — strong singles.

“Rock ‘n’ Roll” is pretty much the only real single on the album, although the alternate take of “How to Go” sounds far better than the single version released in 2003.

But don’t expect anything on Antenna to rival “Tokyo”, “Wandervogel” or “World’s End Supernova”.

Still, Antenna is Quruli’s strongest album to date. It may not be the catchiest, but it’s definitely the most focused.

Electronica doesn’t require much as far as raw materials are concerned. A hook, a beat, some rhythm — that’s about all that’s required.

For its 2000 album Futurama, Supercar kept that aesthetic in mind, keeping its songwriting barebones but arranging the hell out of the album to make it seem larger than it was.

It’s been four years and two more albums since that first foray into electronica, and now the proverbial pendulum is swinging back.

Before Supercar took an influence from the Chemical Brothers to heart, the Hokkaido-based band played guitar rock in the vein of Ride and Jesus and Mary Chain. On Answer, the band’s seventh studio album and third to use electronica, Supercar has gone back to writing rock music.

“Last Scene” is probably most indicative of this creative shift. The live drums, the piano and the ethereal guitars are decidedly scaled back compared to such earlier works as “Fairway” or “Aoharu Youth”.

It’s also one of the band’s most appealing singles.

The eight-minute “Siren” stretches for as long as it does, not because its driven by a house beat, but because the band actually jams a bit.

The overtly electronica influence isn’t totally gone. “BGM” is robotic but catchy. “Recreation” is driven by guitars, but the feel is totally minimalistic.

But where the band could have used drum machines and walls of synthesizers to achieve the strange effects of “Justice Black” and “Wonder Word”, it instead relies on live playing.

“Sunshine Fairyland” could have been done entirely on synthesizers, but the live bass, guitar and drums are more than serviceable.

Answer also contains actual songs as well — not just a series of motifs set on repeat. “Dischord” and “Harmony” may fall back on repetition, but “Freehand” and “The World Is Naked” contain some actual choruses and bridges.

This album is perhaps Supercar’s most successful balance between rock complexity and electronica simplicity. It’s not as epic as Futurama, but it’s certainly a lot more substantial than 2002’s Highvision.

If anything, it’s the perfect answer to the question of whether rock and electronica really can get along.

There’s a lot of symmetry happening on the eight tracks of Home, Vol. 5, part of a series released by Austin, Texas, label Post Parlo.

Andrew Kenny, formerly of the American Analog Set, and Ben Gibbard, from Death Cab for Cutie, divide the EP in half, four songs from each, with one singing a song of the other. They don’t sing together on any of the tracks.

Kenny and Gibbard could also be considered flip sides of the same vocal coin — both have distinct, soothing voices. Songwriting-wise, Gibbard writes more extrovertedly than Kenny.

The only thing threading Home together is the instrumentation — guitar and voice, maybe a drum kit here and there.

This disc could almost be considered something of the Battle Between the Golden-Voiced Indie Singer-Songwriters.

In one corner, Kenny scrapes his way over the fret board, barely rising above a whisper. In the other corner, Gibbard practically belts by comparrison, sticking to the usual chords.

In reality, they’re not opposites so much as refractions of the same aesthetic.

But if a winner had to be chosen, it goes to Kenny, as evidenced by Gibbard’s reading of Kenny’s “Choir Vandals”. The track stands out among Gibbard’s own songs, and Gibbard sounds great singing the song. When Kenny tackles Gibbard’s “Line of Best Fit”, he slows it down and makes it conform to his own pace.

Home, Vol. 5 is a nice diversion, and it would probably faltered under its own weight were it expanded to something bigger. It may feel somewhat incidental, but that’s the trick about EPs — they have to make their points quicker than full length albums.

Some things look better on paper.

On their own, Benjamin Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello produce some really good music.

Gibbard is the singer and main songwriter of Death Cab for Cutie, while Tamborello crafts alien electronic timbres under the moniker Dntel.

The idea of Gibbard singing music written — or programmed, as it were — by Tamborello is fascinating in its own right, but the actual results seem rather, well, quaint.

Maybe not on the level of Chris Cornell singing with the guys in Rage Against the Machine, but there’s some parallel.

That doesn’t stop the Postal Service, as Gibbard and Tamborello call themselves, from being at the very least pleasant.

The duo’s debut album, Give Up, reveals the odd couple nature of the group isn’t very far-fetched — Gibbard and his sensitive croon, Tamborello with his analog chirps and squeaks.

It doesn’t matter whether Gibbard is fronting the guitars of Death Cab for Cutie or a polka band, for that matter — he still comes across the observant everyman with heart on sleeve.

“Clark Gable”, in which the protagonist imagines romance as a movie script, shares a lot thematically with “Title and Registration” from Death Cab’s Transatlanticism.

On “Sleeping In”, Gibbard dreams of a world of certainty that’s far better than the uncertainty of a waking state. His picturesque verses paint a vivid world, but it’s a simple chorus — “Don’t wake me, I plan on sleeping in” — that captures his sentiment succinctly.

It’s not much different from what he usually does.

Rather, the Postal Service is Tamborello’s show. He’s done far more daring work, but when forced into the strictures of the standard rock song, he handles himself incredibly well.

Tamborello gets to show off his true form on “Natural Anthem”, but everything else — from the college radio-friendly “Such Great Heights” to the moody “This Place is a Prison” — pretty much shores up Gibbard.

And it’s still far more interesing than other bands pillaging from the glory days of the Yamaha DX-7.

As a first effort, Give Up is an appealing work, melodic and textured, sythethic but possessing heart. It’s the work of two artists from opposite spectrums exploring the patch of middle ground between them.

Let’s hope the next time out, they’re willing to see how they can fit together the parts that aren’t common.

It’s easy to see why Death Cab for Cutie would be labeled with the pejorative title of “wimp rockers”.

Ben Gibbard has a pixie of a voice, and his lyrics can strike people as either profound or precious.

I bought a used copy of The Photo Album without much prior knowledge of the band — aside from the perception that a lot of people buy its albums — and liked what I heard. But not enough to be affected too deeply.

(Maybe if I were in high school …)

Transatlanticism is a different story.

Thematically, Gibbard pretty much sticks to the usual M.O. — songs about everday events triggering wistfulness.

On “Title and Registration”, he lobbies for an effort to rename the glove compartment since nobody puts gloves in there anyway. Of course, he makes this observation after running across photos of an ex-lover in said compartment.

But musically, the album contains a lot of subtle touches that make it feel larger than it is.

The main technique that conveys this feeling is the bleeding of tracks from one to another. The first three songs of the album meld with nary a pause between them.

“Tiny Vessels” leads directly into the title track, and if left on repeat, “A Lack of Color” finishes the album with the same white noise that opens it, creating a seamless loop.

Taking the pauses out of an album can only work if the songs fit well enough to allow it, and the ones on Transatlanticism do. Even the tracks that stand on their own (the ones with the pauses) have a snug fit.

It also helps that the band plays the hell out of these songs. By comparrison, The Photo Album is genteel next to some of the crescendos Gibbard and company hammer out on Transatlanticism.

The only thing that makes the album stumble is the 8-minute title track. The long-winded drama of “Transatlanticism”, the song, makes it feel like it’s building momentum to a grand finale. But it’s placed smack near the middle of the album.

As a result, Transatlanticism, the album, feels like it should have finished a lot sooner than it does.

Getting over that hump may take a bit of work, but repeated listening of the album produces greater rewards. After a while, it becomes apparent — there’s a lot of good writing on this disc.

The first time I listened to Explosion in the Sky, I scoffed, “Hmmph. A second-rate mono.”

That’s because Explosions in the Sky sits closer to the tonal end of the instrumental rock spectrum, where mono occupies the dissonant end.

Dissonance appeals to my inner-composer, so it was easy to dismiss Explosion in the Sky.

Until I got to know The Earth Is Not a Cold, Dead Place.

Even though the five-track album clocks in at 45 minutes — an average of 9 minutes per track — it’s not a length of time squandared by randomness.

The pieces on The Earth Is Not a Cold, Dead Place (they’re too fucking long to be called “songs”) have all the deliberate architecture of chamber music. There’s a momentum to these works, a greater sense of structure at play where paying close attention provides many rewards.

This album would definitely fail Musicwhore.org’s Music for Airports test.

That said, it’s pointless to distinguish stand-out tracks. The negative adjective would be “homogenous”, which the album certainly is. But it’s the kind of homogeniety that feels cohesive.

It’s not symphonic, though, because the album isn’t that complex.

But it is quite beautiful.

The guitar parts interweave in way that’s almost canonical, and that goes a long way in keeping a listener interested.

In fact, it’s almost easy to hear The Earth Is Not a Cold, Dead Place orchestrated, or at the very least, arranged from amplified string quartet.

That said, The Earth Is Not a Cold, Dead Place is less an album and more an orchestral work, performed without an orchestra.