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.

While This is Goodbye does suffer, like Last Exit, from being a little too consistent (there’s very little variation in tempo or arrangement, or theme for that matter), it's as cohesive a listening experience as almost any album I’ve heard this year.

It holds together better [than 'Echoes'] as a complete document, it contains at least seven potential singles, and sounds like a crack band at the top of their game.

While it’s nowhere near Thriller or Purple Rain, it does manage a healthy attempt at a reinterpretation of both.

A wane in consistency in its latter half keeps I Am Not from achieving the heights of Yo La Tengo’s best work, but it will unquestionably satiate their rabid fanbase awaiting a return to eclecticism while re-establishing Ira Kaplan’s status as an early fifty-something guitar god.

Magic Potion never really manages to distinguish itself as an album; there are a number of excellent songs, but even with quite a few listens I never get the idea of the thing working as a collective whole.

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.

The Air Force has a lot of good songs on it.

Increasingly abstract or not, Richard Buckner’s a great songwriter.

Most of the songs show the band in top form.

The full-band songs rarely manage the sort of charismatic country-rock crunchiness that made What Comes After the Blues so endearing on repeated listen. On the other hand, the solo tracks can’t really match up to the almost uniformly excellent offerings on Let Me Go.

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.

Los Lobos sound fresher, more invigorated, and weirder than they have in years.

All of its tracks are kila kila killer.

Beyoncé’s an artist who’s not sure how to sell her full personality and craft in lieu of selling what she thinks we want.

The melodies are entrancing, made even more intriguing by their submergence within the reverb, together resulting in an album whose scope and sound are impossible to ignore.

Modern Times is a record of both giddy songwriting peaks and overall uniformity, a record whose music ultimately delivers and enriches its well-bred messages of realism and religion, work and devotion, the certitude of decay and the decay of certitude.

Game Theory’s highs never quite reach those of Do You Want More?!!!??! or Illadeph Halflife (1996), and those albums, even with those highs, are still inconsistent affairs. Which means that the Roots are back on track, but the track itself was never something we praised wholeheartedly in the first place.

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.

Pretty dull.

It's nice that Primal Scream attacks these tunes with gusto, but the passionate performance doesn't hide the fact that this album is utterly inessential, little more than a sampler for what amounts to a really swell wedding band.

Cursive aspires for greater things, and Kasher’s aims are marred by over-production, a Nickelback whoosh here, a digitized cascade there.

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

Though the tracks are lengthy, they’re not indulgent but patient, moving at the pace of Frank Sinatra’s September of My Years (1965) rather than the National’s Alligator (2005).

Get Lonely is a record that requires multiple listens (itself a first) but which absolutely forbids them -- I've been unable to listen to it in one sitting after a month. Not out of its weakness or my boredom, but in its relentless despair and my weakness.

It’s a cohesive, well-produced, well-written set of songs that coheres as an album.

It’s downright exciting for a band like the Thermals to emerge with something so simple and unflustered, so bereft of unnecessary baggage, a shining light of a record that delivers on its early promise.

He’s made a honed, handsome piece of work, never too arresting and never too fickle.

The Shining is not a masterpiece, obviously, and nobody ought claim it as such, but it does show the producer striking out in a moderately novel direction and finding consistently satisfying results.

Her multitudinous influences, free from the collagen that an omnipresent production team offered, have dissolved and separated out of their former matrix, the subsequent runny blotches of genre-hashing burbling up to fill Kelis Was Here with rubbish that has no discernible order.

Beautiful, thematic, meticulous, revelatory, and challenging.

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.

This is the Strokes’ first record without its adherence to formula and form, with better guitars and bigger chords. And, you know, more fun.

There are, of course, a few missteps.... More often, though, the sparse arrangements highlight a resurgent songwriting force.

Ultimately, Avatar’s change in direction is hardly an unpleasant one, partially because it’s really fun to lip synch “Let it burn / Let it bleed!” while playing the air guitar on your knees, but mostly because it still rocks frighteningly hard.

This is as fully realized an example of the Friedberger vision that exists, which is why it’s so frustrating that Winter Women never really gets off the ground, or that Holy Ghost wallows in its creator’s own pique.

Made In Brooklyn’s not as bold or striking or collected as No Said Date, but the sophomore effort’s a fine follow-up, nonetheless, and almost certainly doomed to the same neglect.

Bloated on the rotting corpses of hackneyed scratching, hackneyed drums, hackneyed sampling technique and hackneyed key work (all that in hackneyed combinations), Feedback makes it difficult to differentiate the acceptable from the tired.

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.

These are good songs, catchy enough to claim a place in your head while grounded by enough passion to put them close to your heart. It’s just that the Long Winters have proven themselves capable of even better than that.

The band has a noticeably meaner, more muscular sound than on previous records.

On Silent Shout, The Knife have shaken off their more tangential musical inclinations and produced an intensely cohesive album, a monochrome rainbow that has emerged from the unfocused torrential rainstorm of before.

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.

The French Kicks have become too smooth and repetitive; they have been polished featureless and barely resemble four distinct personalities contributing to one idea.

Cansei de Ser Sexy is a catchy, brief, and sweaty romp, but nothing that will wow, nothing that’ll smart, nothing that’ll leave a phone number next to the dildo on the bedside table the morning after.

Unfortunately, it seems the group is more interested in refining, rather than re-defining, their craft, whose torpid mechanics bear no mystery, no guts behind all that glamour.

Happy New Year is fresh and adventurous and, most important, it is consistently so.

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

The Eraser is not Radiohead good.

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.

It’s a pleasant collection, comfortably consolidated and comfortably nice, despite the lack of anything earth-shattering.

His delivery's certainly interesting, but lacking the nuances of and empathy of, say, Mike Skinner, it's best deployed when not framed by anachronistic loops.

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

Brightblack Morning Light is a chambered catacomb of meticulous design, a long-player so calm and unassuming that genre modifiers flock to its veneer, are swallowed into its depths, and murdered.

News and Tributes does lack the visceral immediacy of its predecessor, and is a significant if subtle departure for the band, so it would be hard for anyone who fell in love with their debut to embrace it immediately. But, given time, the record gets under your skin in slow and somewhat surprising ways, eventually coming off sounding like a very good transitional album by a group with a whole lot more staying power than most would have credited them with two years ago.

In the end, Hot Chip leave us frustrated, which makes sense since this is an album about frustration.

El-P doesn’t ruin Mo’ Mega -- the title track’s beat is a colossus -- but those moments free of his fingerprints are also the album’s strongest.

Half of The Sun Awakens is vigorous and wonderful; half is abhorrent and stultifying.

A quietly brilliant album.

The album's substance is obscured by the distracting presence of its production.

Son strikes me as even more experimental than Tres Cosas, and as such it’s less interested than that record on really opening itself up to the listener. That may be a good thing, admirable even, but it doesn’t stop the whole thing from feeling a little cold at first listen.

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.

This is more than a diary set to music; it’s an interactive map. It is a scrapbook of love gone wrong, including ripped photos, amateur pencil sketches, tear-stained poems, and ticket stubs.

An entirely pleasant, listenable little soundtrack.

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

Nearly everything about Citrus is so accomplished, refined, and downright transcendent that it could very well stand alongside Loveless as a modernized shoegaze staple.

A Vintage Burden’s embrace is still emotional, still heartbreaking, still sad, and at times still chilling, but somehow, it’s less of an exercise to wrap your arms around it.

Inch by inch -- concept, production, groove -- Scale will measure your desires and dole out exactly what you want: depth, politics, creativity, or club-ready curios.

Those who lovingly caress their copies of Tilt have probably already jumped in its trenches, liking what there is to like, and there is much to like about this album, even if it doesn’t maintain the consistency of that masterpiece; those who find his voice annoying have already set up sniper posts across the field; everybody else is standing in the middle wondering what the fuss is about. The Drift won’t change that.

They’ve managed to produce the best American rock record of the year so far.

This is the sort of record you’re gonna put on when the sun’s shining and you just need some good old pop-rock.

To Find Me Gone shows a band as adept at bucking trends as they are at invoking tradition.

Nothing is really very exciting here, or very interesting.

This record is the “hardest” thing the Twilight Singers have released, but is situated squarely within the realm of anthemic arena rock, not the more straightforward stuff of Whigs nostalgics. Most of the time this works beautifully.

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.

If Pink’s more evolution than revolution, it still stomps all over most of its close genre surroundings, leaving maybe Tiger Bear Wolf and The Woods as far as 2005 goes.

Sexsmith’s got a knack for melody, and Froom’s got a knack for bringing it out.

It all adds up to blatantly catchy, deceptively simple wannabe-clever, can’t-help-but-be-cheeky art-punk.

It is often silly, occasionally ridiculous, always catchy as hell, and as loose as an album with this kind of production credit can be. What more could we ask from a pop record?

Young's best record since at least Mirror Ball and probably Ragged Glory.

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

The eleven tracks here are the most concise, effortless, and melodically conspicuous songs to come out of the band’s camp.

So to those bored to tears by Sumday, take notice: though it fails to break any new ground, Just Like the Fambly Cat is as good a parting shot from these guys as we could have expected.

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.

Even though it strictly operates in one gear, Last Secrets navigates all the richness the high road has to offer.

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.

For anyone who legitimately enjoyed Blood Sugar, and think that they might actually want to purchase this thing, Stadium is unquestionably Red Hot Chili Peppers’ finest release since.

So, yes: this is cuddly, warm and intimate, just like all your favorite blogs have said.

Serena Maneesh injects the Warhols' toothy, cocksure swagger [into] the lush, narcotic insularity of My Bloody Valentine and Ride.

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.

And while it most certainly does fill this grunge kid with nostalgia for a simpler time, it’s the first latter day Pearl Jam album that is plenty good enough to stand on its own.

Neither funny nor thought-provoking, the band strains for touchstones beyond the technicality of prog-metal and rarely achieves them.

The sobering after-party to Wolf Parade’s debut.

File The Rakes under "serviceable art pop."

The Secret Machines are still super tight, Josh Garza’s still got restrained guitar awe on his side, every song’s arrangement is still an ebb and re-ebb of soaking synth and organ drone, and the lyrics still battle with neo-adult ennui. Is it any wonder, then, that there comes a time when this can just get dull?

It’s a shame to see the character of Mike Skinner become so stale and hackneyed, especially when the beats are stronger than they’ve ever been before.

It’s wild music, and it’s wildly musical, and, yeah, it’s probably the most wonderfully raw production Springsteen’s talent has ever been channeled through.

In making these songs more personal and more intimate, they’ve managed to make them more poignant, and even if the quality of the overall album doesn’t match the brilliance of the four or five phenomenal songs here, nothing is so cantankerous as to really offend.