[The] drums generally sound weaker and lazier than anything [he's] done before, [the] songs lack strong structure and hooks, [and his] topical matter’s a bit one-tracked.

Flight of the Conchords ultimately succeeds apart from its parent television show because it’s a modest comedy album.

Tromatic Reflexxions is a roaring success for both parties, blowing the fresh air of invention through an increasingly tribalist scene.

With II, the Psychic Paramount have created an record both gratifying in its dense magnitude and equally rewarding in the fragility of the elements that the album is composed of.

All of this should read like the ingredients of a truly brilliant album. And perhaps on vinyl it is, but the mastering of Wavering Radiant‘s digital format is atrocious, as heavily brickwalled and distorted as Metallica’s criminal "Death Magnetic" (2008).

A much more mediocre, boring, phoned-in, lyrically tripe-y batch of tip-toeing Brit-pop snooze-o-rama-fests.

Out of the Shadow remains one of the most promisingly straight-forward indie-rock/pop debuts since Oh, Inverted World.

As an amalgam of mind-warping melodies and high-minded concepts, Alegranza! is more than deserving of our praise. Then again, El Guincho could have avoided the album’s key missteps by cutting down on the obvious Afrobeat tropes and experimenting more with traditional song-oriented vocals.

It is a more mature record.

With Broken Arm, Marnie Stern has delivered a frenetic and ridiculously entertaining debut.

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.

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.

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.

The imprint scores its hat-trick with Ouliposaliva: the entree of Angil and the Hiddentracks, one of the most bizarre/bankable records to air outside of its creators’ Parisian side-streets.

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

Sheff is he orchestrator, but through all the manipulating elements, all the new band members, Sheff seems to be more at odds with his art than ever before.

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.

But far from ruffled or startling, Hold Time simply fills the quota Ward’s assigned himself and, (im)properly slaked, poofs off, contrails the last reminder that, yes, Jason Lytle’s still alive.

Waits is still an impassioned and awe-inspiring performer; here we can still hear, as invigorated as he was before I was born--or so I can guess.

No matter how smartly sequenced these parts are in Desire’s segmented flow, they remain varying nascent coups without one distinct rallying cry to organize the din.

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

If this album is less immediately impressive than its predecessor it’s because apart from tightening their arrangements the sound is still exactly what you expect.

4 comes off like a minor work by a band of unfuckwithable talent. Which I guess is another way of saying the law of diminishing returns applies here, but you can only expect the band would ride a plateau before moving forward again.

We have Father, Son, Holy Ghost: honest, occasionally crushing, often stunning, and all the better for the fact that Owens seems to be incapable of being anyone but himself.

Sheâ??s funky, confident and fun, and thatâ??s just on the first song.

At the end of the day, this still isn’t a great album. It lacks continuity, much of a sense of rhythm, and the character that Banhart’s 2004 releases took on.

This feels, to me, like the sort of rap record we rap nerds lament a dearth of: sprawling and smart, bursting with production that ebbs symphonically but never cluttered over five-minute tracks, a long, warm-hearted record whose length is justified by long, genial verses that build on one another via sharp delivery and three assured mic presences (and one outrageous guest).

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.