Here is a great band putting out a just pretty good EP whose existence is really only justified by its brilliant title track.

I can identify the album’s merits and appreciate the craftsmanship but, to employ my second cliché in too short a span of time, the magic is gone.

It’s refreshing to hear Herren at least trying after the wash that was Preparations (2007) but this new sprawl of a record is one that’s much easier to appreciate and respect than it is to feel.

Go, then, is strangely underdeveloped for how overdeveloped it feels; by no means a trifle, it's as hard to outright hate on as it is to be trampled by, just another lovely 40 minutes from a guy with easily another 40 up his frilly sleeve.

For just over seven minutes, Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust may be the most wonderful, jubilant listen you’ve had yet this year, and, within those two songs, Sigur Rós’s fifth proper album plants the most exciting, empirical stipe of artistic direction the band has forged in over six years or so. The elation doesn’t last.

On Talk to La Bomb, the main elements of the Brazilian Girls debut are still in place, but both vocal and instrumental elements head toward the middle, leaving us with a more polished and ultimately less satisfying listen.

The band seems unsure of what instincts to follow to get more intimate, streamlined rock; their attempts produce a hodgepodge of style that in turns prevents the kind of gut reaction that normally attracts listeners to rock in the first place.

Jim White’s latest collection of songs has a humanity about it that is too multifaceted to categorize in broad terminology or flowery descriptors and is quite possibly beyond adequate summation; overthink or undersell as much as you please.

There’s a wealth of great material buried within The Avalanche, if you don’t mind digging.

The problem with Stay Positive is that all the great songs subtly exhibit a kind of fin-de-siècle exhaustion, while the obvious attempts to break out of the old ways fall flat.

Six Demon Bag’s a romp, short but sprawling, careful but passionate.

Dead Man’s Bones is about death, right, and about love, testing where one touches the other, flirting with sensations similar and enduring the inability to confront or frankly deal with that intimacy. Had this record a thicker dramatic arc or something less confining than a spreadsheet of rules, then maybe the songs wouldn’t so inevitably miss their obvious marks.

Half of the fun with Dumile has always been the unexpected, ridiculous sampling and the storyline he develops around it. MMâ?¦Food seems unable to capture this element. Doom manages to drop a few great songs, but as an album, MMâ?¦Food falls flat.

It's a well-constructed and performed album that sounds great on the stereo.

A disappointingly safe album of reasonably enjoyable pop songs by interesting musicians masquerading as average ones.

So, Ludacris is still a distance from a definitive, unmatched hip hop statement, but I’m content with his glaciered pace and middling “a-a-a-a-b-b-b-b-etc” frame. It’s just too much damn fun to pass up.

The most interesting thing about Loud Planes Fly Low is the way it uses that rift, confronting the inherent tension and wringing it out. It may not be Howard and Crisp's best work to date, but it's perhaps their darkest, sincerest, and least expected.

Like singer Zooey Deschanel, Volume One is endearing and unpretentious.

It suffers both in comparison to Black’s other solo material and on its own decidedly alt-country terms.

Rick Ross would like you to know he has sodomized women in Acapulco. Lord knows we all aspire to such Olympian heights, but in that admission lies the crux of the impotence of Rawse's extensive discography: this is all pretty unnecessary.

For this and a couple other of IRM‘s electronic-heavy songs, Gainsbourg sounds like she’s doing her best Trish Keenan, though the songs lack the warmth and haunting tension a band like Broadcast can create from similar soundscapes.

Infinite Love is a prickly, antiseptic listen. Surprising and interesting, to be sure, but hostile to expectations and ultimately as unsentimental about itself as it would be of any cultural artifact.

What The Tale Tells employs stock language to present stock characters going through stock conflicts.

No matter how good these songs are (and many of them are quite good), the finished product is underwhelming, and I can only hope that I don't have to wait another half-decade to hear where they go next.

While it may not match his most impressive work, he continues to challenge himself.

For Golden Smog, this is another fine album; fine, fun, but never great enough to make you forget that these guys are in other bands.

'Superstar' boasts a sanguine hook and a sophisticated mess of rhymes about fame and backlash and fandom and such. Unfortunately much of the rest of the record lacks this clarity, and while the first part of that “sophisticated mess” description remains valid the second part becomes dominant.

Life Sux is no King of the Beach; if anything it's a minor diversion on which Williams seems to be toying with the idea of slowly toeing into maturity.

Caught In The Trees covers familiar ground, simultaneously bare and flourished, effortless and meticulous, but where Jurado’s lyrics have grown more abstract, still loaded with death, exhaustion, and horse metaphors but, in rarefied form, not really tied to any specific situation or memory, he’s correspondingly spread out his tools.

Born Ruffians are as eloquent in their summation of today’s indie rock style as any other likeminded band; in that sense Red, Yellow & Blue is as literate and aware as its title’s reference to primary colors implies. But knowingly limiting one’s scope to temporary fun predictably keeps the band from turning out something with lasting power.

All in all, Jarvis a mixed bag. It feels like the sort of thing that Cocker would do just to expunge his notebooks before moving on.

Noble Beast overcomplicates what should be a simpler formula; the meat is in Bird’s performances, the virtuoso skills at his disposal, not the antiseptic display of distorted guitar tones that the album’s best song unfortunately resorts to in its final section.

This is undoubtedly the way the songs should be heard, and the set certainly doesn't feel cheap or rushed.

Nightcrawler is the remedy to the collective uncertainty cast by Day I Forgot’s giant shadow of mediocrity: it’s a “solid record” that highlights Yorn’s potential as a songwriter and craftsman, underplays many of his weaknesses, and firmly situates him within the category of Rock Troubadours Who Are Still Worth Paying Attention To.

Although flawed, Rockferry holds a startling amount of promise.

Special Moves illuminates the band's act for what it is.

If Stamey had chosen to go one way or the other — straight covers or an all-out album full of originals--- A Question of Temperature would be a much more interesting album. As is it stands, nothing here really captures the imagination.

Deft, flawed, entertaining, thrilling, and disappointing, often at the same time.

Built as they are on rock 'n' roll clichés, these songs hold the listener at a distance. It's a bit of fun, but nothing more. Unlike their influences, something about this band doesn't really stick.

I was surprised that it holds up well to close scrutiny--in spite of my reservations, the album is well performed and crafted, with a surprisingly mordant thematic unity touching on mortality and the soured promises of childhood--but I’m still bothered by its anonymity.

For either Reid or Hebden completists, Live at the South Bank is a useful and worthwhile artifact. For someone seeking entry to the catalogues of two vital artists, this is a thorny and difficult listen.

Keeley & Zaire’s Ridin High has absolutely nothing to offer its listener or hip-hop at large except for a fat pile of old rap comfort food and, tucked evenly away from the beginning and end of the record’s runtime, two absolute fucking bangers in 'Addicts for Real' and 'We Made It.'

Arrivals is just about a palatable enough affair; a minor stretch at sixty-two minutes but with enough peaks to be eaten in three sittings or so.

Load Blown is damaged as a whole, even despite its overwhelming internal coherence that makes for few surprises along the way.

It's the first truly inessential album he's made.

The problem is that Vanderslice’s lyrical scope remains too broad to enable a cohesive or definitive conceptual statement, and his music too tightly defined and predictable to be considered a departure.

Sun Bleached Greek Gods is a perfectly serviceable introduction to the latest hot-off-the-grill, young, immortal, unemployed, nearly insufferable bedroom pop outfit.

As a summer stopgap for their new full-length this fall, Friends. works fine. The title track is quality, plus their fanbase eats this shit up.

So Sagara sounds necessarily and unavoidably at odds with itself, a not wholly successful balancing act that lands its objects within sight and some distance from where its artist intended, but the effort is commendable and important.

Yes, there could be more new ground broken in this material, but this does not necessarily equate to artistic diffidence.

As a breakup narrative, it’s successful. As pop music, it’s either too insular or simply unable to turn Silberman’s own experience into something one would desire to revisit.

A little more effort at the end would have been appreciated, but so long as you’re content with paying full price for what’s essentially twenty-eight minutes of listenable music, Backspacer works as a fun little rock n’roll record.

The results are occasionally--surprisingly, even--very nice.

Forth is a decent reminder of what makes the Verve great.

The Brave and the Bold is an awkward, lumbering affair, of passing interest to fans of the artists’ work and no one else.

To Coldplay's credit, amidst the over-production they still manage to reach their quota of flag-waving festival rock songs, some of which could be considered career highlights.

Visitations is cold.

If this is your thing, you'll be happy (sad?) to hear that Eisold has done it again, and offers us yet another beautifully written and comprehensively detailed chapter in the endless book of self.

Another wildly uneven affair.

In the end, Fuckbook is a disappointing Yo La Tengo album, but the band’s made it clear that it doesn’t want it to be that, instead just a pretty good Condo Fucks record.

Instead of just latching on to the sonic palette of The Beta Band (a group they seem intent on emulating), they could embrace the Beta mindset: the creativity, playfulness, and refusal to ever bore the audience that made that band so frustratingly brilliant.

AlunaGeorge can still be both pop and provocative, they just haven't hit on a reason to be so quite yet.

It sounds like a Manic Street Preachers album, which alone renders it still better than all of the similar arena rock you can name.

Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams is as silly, day-glo, eccentric, and all over the place as its title.

Holland seems confident placing herself inside a mythology much older than her years. It’s this fact, along with her penchant for lyrics about crazy dreams and old-fashioned moonshine, that make many of her songs, though originals, sound borrowed from another era.

Too bad, then, that I Love You is underdeveloped.

Well, here’s a disappointment so mild I can barely taste it. I think I’m disappointed, maybe, but I’m not sure how much or wherefore.

Wayne's ebullience is too curdled to be all that interesting on its own –- not to mention that he can do so much better.

On Pl3dge, Killer Mike is often captivating, but his politics are just noise.

My problem with the rest of Memphis, then, is simple: it too often falls into retreading thoroughly explored pop without truly making it their own.

Sequenced as the record is, with each personality dominating certain stretches of runtime, Paper Trail feels almost vaudevillian.

I want to stress one last time, post-catch, that these aren’t terrible songs, nor do they add up to a terrible album. But the net effect is nevertheless one of tedium and disappointment, a partial reminder of "War Elephant's" potential instead of an attempt to realize it.

It still is either very sincere or very sarcastic, or both, though these are two qualities which have always been both a justification for liking them and just as easily a reason why not, meanwhile not offering any amnesty or middle ground.

A sturdy if frustrating effort that exceeds and disappoints expectations all at once.

Although a respectable, yet fickle bid at club fodder, schmaltzy ballads, and trend riding one offs, something about it just doesn’t fit.

Essentially, Blood Bank is one pretty song--the titular, opening track settling somewhere close to what Damien Jurado’s doing these days--and two similarly pretty experiments in stretching Bon Iver’s sound.

I’m happy to hear Prodigy sounding engaged and excited again, even if the quality of his lyricism doesn’t match his newfound enthusiasm.

Some of these songs are excellent, in an unfinished but inspired way. But many of the album's tracks evidence a band that's bursting at the seams with talent, only to stumble on unfocused, scattershot song-writing.

The songs get by on college rock atmospherics that linger for far too long and for the most part, lack the dynamism and character of even the weakest Decemberists song.

While their particular brand of retro goth garage is obviously built on an extremely derivative foundation of 60s garage, the Cramps, and the Damned, they're infinitely more interesting in practice than the majority of beige-rock being pushed by the UK music press.

Destroyer of the Void isn’t a bad album, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect well upon Blitzen Trapper’s changes as a band.

No single frontman in indie quite possesses Falkous’s unique blend of obnoxious charisma, and that fact alone makes Travels a sometimes engaging listen, but he’s still made an album that steers dangerously close to emulating the bros he’s spent his entire career railing against.

It's not the sort of thing one pins their organic, folksy dreams upon, though you get the sense it was born out of that interest and perhaps lost its way over time.

Powers definitely has the compositional wherewithal to make something special--he just has to put more of himself into it.

It feels like vital parts are gone, missed somewhere in Radiohead’s search through their own oeuvre for something more and more facilely universal, something that draws lines within lines of song types and not the larger methodology, something that can be "important" without being challenging.

The Citizens have a clear knack for arranging and a commendable ability to tackle a series of genres and combine them into an enjoyable full-length. The only real problem here being that the actual songs aren't nearly as good as their talent might hint at.

Price’s work behind the boards, while often commanding, is hardly ambitious; running the tracks together to try and give Madge the "album" sound is noteworthy, but he’s picked the wrong pop-star to prod.

While it feels a little sheepish to rag on a band for being a little too competent at what they do, the best you can really say about this, their fourth LP, is that it’s simply a good product that’s easily recognizable as a Doves album.

Take Finn’s vocals out of the equation and you have a fun and even innovative garage band steeped in the brand of classic rock to which indie has never properly paid its due. With Finn, they’re monotonous, even annoying.

Those already on the Charlatans bandwagon will likely enjoy enough of Simpatico to warrant its purchase, but there's no questioning that's its one of their weaker efforts.

With a span of almost three-quarters of an hour, the eight components of III are on the fat side of five minutes per head, though each imbued with sufficient ingenuity to stave off the threat of bloating.

But beyond these select numbers ['Empty Bottles,' 'Taste' and 'Bad Dream/Hartford’s Beat Suite'] we essentially get several takes on the same fuzz, inflating a Stooges balloon with Patti Smith’s intonation and hoping that shit don’t pop.

The blame for this tedium, as far as I’m concerned, sits squarely with Johnson, whose vocals are an acquired taste to begin with, but here assert themselves even more obnoxiously than before.

Despite being quite well-realized and able to sustain a single mood for so long, the album sounds increasingly like a missed opportunity as it progresses, with the two songwriters' work almost never achieving a real sense of cohesion.

Which isn’t to say that the rest of the album isn’t impressive at certain points, though the law of diminishing returns weighs heavily here.

Of Montreal will always appeal to anyone looking for a world to get lost in. Is it too much to ask for him to visit ours once in a while?

Sky Blue Sky’s only ambition is to capture the warm tones of the early '70s rock FM they grew up on and clearly love. The execution is flawless. One can’t help but ask, however, “What’s the point?”

Though it's fun, pretty, well-constructed, and hits the buttons, those very facets are in danger, in the absence of Cox's beautiful vulnerability, of becoming what this sound is all about.