Ultimately, Arthur & Yu’s singing (the moniker adopted from cutesy childhood nicknames) becomes the simple reason to bend over, submit, and love the album, even when whimsy threatens an otherwise wry batch of dirty lyrics.

Two thirds of a great album.

The majority of Carousel just plain sounds the same. It might as well be the same pace, might as well be in the same key, might as well be the same vocal melody over and over; it's a carousel if there’s ever been one.

The cacophony raised by this album is not so much the kind that unsettles us in important and challenging ways, but is the commercial noise of a spectacle without a center, of emotion so generic we are instantly desensitized to it.

The Most Serene Republic demonstrate plenty of talent in frustratingly short bursts on their debut.

II is a lovely little record, but many of its charms are scripted; even charming people get old when you are forced to spend too much time with them.

When they’re trying, as they do especially on the first half of the album, Cannibal Sea can be quite enjoyable.

It's not that Several Shades doesn't showcase Mascis's talents. It just denies us his flashiest ones.

While not any real cause for concern amongst Boom Bip fans, Blue Eyed in the Red Room is not the masterpiece that they might be hoping for.

One could dwell on the poetics of Vermont’s lyrics if they were more understandable; despite a high-flying voice, she enunciates with a marble-mouth worthy of Michael Stipe. Even Bejar isn’t invulnerable here, tacking on guitar solos to cover holes in the songwriting walls.

This turns out to be an interesting but ultimately disappointing experiment, and the reason for its failure is telling: unlike the posturing shitgaze set who lean on lo-fi as a superficial crutch, How to Dress Well never treated lo-fi as a simple affectation, and as a result he can't walk away from it so easily.

These songs, especially in the album’s first half, are uniformly gorgeous—the melodies are often quite good, and this record is all about finding ways to showcase melodies—but they suffer from sameness.

It works as an introduction of sorts to this young band, who have a surplus of great ideas (and, hey, it's a free download). But it's little more than a starting point, a segway, an ice-breaker, to the much meatier discussion that Ashes provokes.

Take Care, like all of the EITS albums, still has quite a lot going for it: its bombastic gestures are still appropriately dramatic, its production still crackles and shines exquisitely, its conventional undulations are still paced for maximum emotional effect. But there is no surprise or wonder to be found here, no chances or risks taken.

The nearly impossible thematic scope attempted and deftly handled here is a tribute to Will Sheff's dexterity and range as a songwriter (if not a vocalist), and the band's chops for being able to keep pace.

None of the really experimental stuff is so egregious to mar the album; it’s just fairly disposable after one keen listen. On the other hand, the good, funky stuff isn’t quite as good or funky as it has been in the past.

Better to think of this one as a purposefully delineated double A-side.

It’s not [her] strongest performance so far, and that comes basically down to song choice and production.

It’s 1980, honey. It’s always 1980 in here. Enjoy yourself; let yourself go.

Not the first single (“Rockin’ That Shit”) or the second (“My Love”) but hopefully the third, the title track of Love vs. Money is the sole moment where The-Dream’s artistry is actualized through, how else, an epiphany of self-loathing and regret.

Odditorium has at least a handful of solid tracks.

On the Water is too uncompromising, too disinterested in being for anyone outside of its circle of two.

The People's Key is not a bad album. In fact, boil the meat off these tracks, and you'd probably have the skeleton of a quite good album.

Pocket Symphony is pleasant but not striking.

There’s some really wicked ideas buried in the mud here, but between some humdrum instrumental passages and a lot of nu-metal lite-style singing and the general mess of sonics trying to pull them out is like forcing yourself to listen to Joe Satriani for the cool parts.

If anything, that’s the trick here: each time the listener pegs it with one of Albarn’s past sounds, the track subverts and confounds the expectation.

Reintegration Time‘s alright, but it’s no substitute for seeing these guys perform.

If Chris Adams descended into his cozy lair to try his hand at glitch and rid his fingers of Hood’s snoozy bleating, he found a safe median, driving his ideas years behind the curve, distinguishing himself from his previous band by tinier and tinier increments as the tracklist exhausts.

The album's aesthetic conceit may read better on paper than it plays on record, but it's hard not to be impressed by Oneida's continued dedication to experimenting with what is now perceived as their core sound.

Matmos have created something dense, complex, puzzling and potentially meaningless to anyone but themselves and those who listen to music with their head instead of their gut, their hips or their feet.

The lowdown: it sounds pretty much the same as "Bang Bang," but not as good. It's not that the record is "bad"--it isn't--but that it, like its title suggests, is less brash, less fuck-all incautious about its rocking.

This album is a misstep, certainly, but an exciting one nonetheless; I can only hope that eight months from now this band bangs out another shorter record superior to this one in every way.

The more Book of Bad Breaks plays, the more it clings and forces you to concede to its charms; it’s an admirable album, if not quite a great one.

Devotion is a delicate, often gorgeous listen that flows remarkably well, though I can’t help but attribute its coherence to the utter lack of variation among its eleven songs.

While it's a coalition of fantastic talents, Themselves submit to the expectations of a pussy glitch-pop crowd, and the Notwist mistakenly assume that hip-hop fans don't want songs with dynamism or structure.

I err on the side of good rap, something Unexpected Guest is full of.

It reaffirms the band as is, is a portrait of four musicians celebrating their existence rather than the question of self.

With El Camino, the Black Keys have essentially twenty minutes of worthwhile music, at least as far as partying is concerned.

Engaging yet generally dull.

Newcomers to Earlimart will surely be lured in by Mentor Tormentor's seductive and, yes, absolutely frickin' beautiful sound, while longtime fans, depending on their expectations, will either passively embrace the familiarity or pine for some new ideas.

In the end Love Is Simple is less than the sum of its parts. Its balls-out rock is fun but hopelessly overloaded (like, how many vocal tracks do these songs really need?) while its softer sections sound like brief intermissions before the guitars pick up again, making them relatively limp.

Underwhelming.

Said new record is what one would expect: wholly similar to their first three records in that it’s got three possible hit singles, a useless Side B, and is proudly derivative of at least six other bands. They are amusingly impervious to trends. So long as you can get your head around the fact that it’s, y’know, Stone Temple Pilots, this, their self-titled sixth full-length, is far better than any pointless reunion album needs to be.

What this band needs is a microphone maestro on the order of, say, an Albini, instead of the deep-fried Southern crunch that leaves these eleven songs sounding thin and brittle, ultimately highlighting their clear melodic and structural similarities until what could have been a gut-punching EP becomes a substantial-but-marred LP.

This time, the album’s a one-trick pony.

Interestingly, the very qualities that make this a subpar Radiohead album are what make it their most experimental record yet. But this is also Radiohead elliptically circling back on themselves in dramatic form.

Yes, the album drags. Yes, the tracks bleed into each other. It is, ultimately, a tiring listen from a band whose sole aim seems to be to innervate every neurone in your body.

Rather than the simple three-part-appeal that marked earlier albums (vocals, drums, and keys), the production here makes them sound like they are fronting a bona fide rock and roll band. This is a bad thing: this new complexity undermines their giddy, naïve appeal, and it drowns the vocals.

Even reduced to a proper ten songs, Revolution is still a bit front-loaded, if only because the band will never be as adept at slow atmosphere as they are upbeat rock.

While their debut showed a lot of promise, Beach Fossils still haven't really set themselves apart from every other band practicing the same pleasant murmurs of personality.

The Spell cannot break free of the band’s successful formula without something a lot more challenging than this.

Thrills is technical to a “T” and plenty competent, but its lack of stylistic push or spread marks its void of hunger or ambition, a space that the mechanized heart of Berlinette nearly pumped blood into.

Moderat never combines as effortlessly and endlessly as that still-breathless collaboration between Apparat and Ellen Allien, Orchestra of Bubbles (2006), but it is alternately as enjoyable as seeing these two collaborate should be and a roundabout disappointment.

Two of Drake's favorite topics on Thank Me Later are I'm young and I'm rich stated with precisely that level of eloquence and imagination; should we start calling him the Justin Bieber of rap?

Björk’s biggest drawback, then, is that while “Holographic Entrypoint” is an enlightening rarity, most of Björk’s fans will find it boring. Very, very boring.

Crush is cold and hard and calculated. I mean, it's clear it's supposed to sound like that, but I have a hard time getting into it.

Someone needs to tell them that just sounding important doesn’t mean they actually are important.

Xuca keeps the listener at a chasmic distance from anything resembling intensity or urgency.

What Infra is, is perfectly pretty, atmospheric, rainy day music.

There’s not much to be said about an album that exists exactly as it should, satisfied by its own completion and purpose and really looking to nothing else for motivation or worth or whatever.

The Else is good, surprisingly and simply so. It’s also frustratingly focused.

It is true, this album does have songs and nearly all of them suffer the same fate: a few great ideas ruined by the need for everything to be so overblown and melodramatic.

Unfortunately, First Impressions of Earth takes a steep drop in quality after “Ask Me Anything” and never finds its way again.

Thankfully, these are just two misfires, album-cripplingly sandwiched around a triple whammy of floor fillers.

Chairlift are perfectly capable of producing a really good album; Something just isn't it.

When these songs sound like El Perro del Mar fronting the saddest, slowest disco band in the world, they work out best, but too much of this “mini-album” doesn’t quite get there.

Albums like Kiss Each Other Clean and The Age of Adz are so giddy with compacting layers and counter layers into the already mapped-out confines of their pre-existing aesthetics that they come across like snowflakes: each one is beautiful and unique, except that the detail is too small to see and anyways there's about a billion of them shits and you have to shovel the walkway and hope public transit isn't delayed. It's distracting, basically, because nothing gets a chance to breath.

The harrowing track list of Electro-Shock just wears too thin here.

Classics can testify just like Ratatat (2004) did, and there’s no shirking of moral duty to melody, but the “growth” between the two albums leaves the sophomore effort a bit of a chore.

Despite some engaging song-craft, however, the album overall feels lacking in real substance and its fixations leave me blase.

It is rewarding that the album should end showing his passion displayed as a performer and shining through as a song-writer. The only problem is, with the rest of the album being so slight, it’s may be too easy for most to stop listening before they get to it.

Where Live From Rome really falls off, though, is the production.

When the Deer Wore Blue feels like a safe record. As they play this record too close to the chest songs blend together, needless repetition pervades, and most of the record's latter half is undistinguished.

Many of the songs lose their indelible glow being snail baited and cleared up like this.

Unfocused, haphazard, and a bit homogenous.

Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters is an album with a sum worse than its parts.... Still, there’s a lot of promise here.

The new versions aren’t bad, but the Vertex-era fan might quickly become the unwitting recipient of a $20 coaster.

Belle & Sebastian are in transition, as they were in the early 2000s, and I can only hope that we don't have to wait another four years for the likely superior follow-up.

It’d be nice to hear something a little more rousing (album closer “Musee D’Nougat” drags on a sleeping synth-string progression for 14 unnecessary minutes), but like its vastly underrated predecessor, Earth is worth getting to know.

It is a step in the right direction and, despite its failings, a potential sign of good things to come. As far as community art projects go, I'm inclined to say that this one still has legs, even if it doesn't prove that Portlanders can get people to use theirs.

Littering their album with frail songwriting and all but killing off the aggression of their percussion, the band inexplicably jump into ill-advised stylistic misfires---with a few too many missed falsetto notes.

[Espinoza] takes the predictably disappointing low road through fanboyville with cruise-controlled caricatures of one of indie rock’s most deified stars.

All said, the album’s capably produced by Tony Doogan, Secret Machines aspirations and all, and it’s a debut wrapped in sophomore expansion, a third of a universe away from anything deservedly cosmic and anything appropriately full.

What follows are a series of maybe-serious experiments that aren't much fun.

It's a safe album, almost exactly what you'd expect from Chao. The artist continues to be the best (perhaps only) provider out there of Clash-inspired polylingual punk rock, but for a musician who built his solo reputation on quirkiness and innovation, the disc feels a bit flat.

An album that does the exact same thing as their previous records, only not as well.

It just simply seems that Stuart Murdoch isn’t a very portable songwriter: he may be able to write Stuart Murdoch songs for Stuart Murdoch, but translated to anything but his music frequently exhibits its participants’ weaknesses, and the end result is unsettling and unfulfilling like few Belle and Sebastian products are.

Return is largely bereft of the chintzy, minimal Zaytoven beats dominating previous Gucci releases, and in their stead exists the dense ominousness Luger peddles so brilliantly.

For their first lengthy introduction, they seem to have lost some verve. It’s a frustrating representation of what a tightrope their sort of exorcism music is.

Ross seems to lack any sort of awareness of his shortcomings, dutifully plowing through middling, obvious shit-talking.

There’s no question that Oxford Collapse, like an awkward teenager, hasn’t figured out exactly what they are, and the added pressures of a larger label release have caught them slightly off guard.

Liars is all about that Liars blueprint, and in that sense the album can get redundant.

While this technically is enjoyable alt-country circa a half-album before Summerteeth, genre-standard romance and arrangements muffle the otherwise "astonishing narratives."

Their experiments have only caused them to stumble off the path they’ve tread, finally tripping to one side of the thin line between smash and schmaltz.

Despite the fact that it’s an obvious misstep from a band that seemed bulletproof... it's still a strong album with a lot more charm than, say, the Bravery or the Killers.

Careful consideration shows that Transference really is exactly the record that Spoon intend it to be. It's just not a record that anyone really needs, one from which our feelings will all-too-easily transfer the next time that Spoon put out a record that inevitably reminds us of Spoon.

The record is neither a failure, nor can I imagine is it a pisstake. No, this is Tom Jenkinson letting out his inner rock star, letting his guard down from the laptops a little bit more, and having sloppy fun.

In a nutshell, Neptune is a bit like Grace Slick fronting the Bad Seeds but not as good as it sounds.