New Moon feels a little bit long; though only twelve songs, they are all pretty substantial (especially the eight-minute “Supermoon”), and things lag a little between “The Brass” and “I See No One.”

This album creates that space, where both that source of fear and joy are simultaneous, inevitable, and sublime.

The cryptic, empty songs of Rain on Lens and wandering, upbeat folk-tunes of Supper have been usurped by a renewed focus and direction.

What’s happening with Similes is that it’s doing everything ambient music is supposed to do but is finding a very forward and fresh manner of going about it.

Loving Body Talk means finding pleasure in the perfect execution of pop conventions; it means recognizing the click.

The title Attack & Release implies the best aspects of the Black Keys’ music, all sweat and hurt and sweat and ecstasy, but the album neither gives nor takes, neither emotional nor sweaty but still clammy-handed.

This band simply isn’t the same without a little darkness to balance the overwhelming light, and rarely do the songs pick up the slack.

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.

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

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.

She etches out a style that is as feeble as it is vicious. And she owns it, her voice only an assurance of just how cool she really is.

After all, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart never promised reinvention, and Belong is another solid soundtrack to summer afternoons lounging on bedspreads, making collages, flashing back to one's own days as a teenage outcast-however far in the past they may be.

Fulton’s beat-making is stellar, but devoting attention to it also necessitates suffering the consistently insufferable Kanamori, and stylistic schizophrenia that’s as jarring as it is unique.

The Loon is nothing short of an incredibly focused song suite, minus all the extraneous frivolities that you’ve gotten too used to hearing from an "incredibly focused song suite."

Clearly, this record is boring. Whether or not that’s a good thing remains up to your discretion.

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.

Let Us Never Speak of it Again is bor-ing.

The record is no departure, but when the form is this strong one isn’t needed.

This isn’t a bad release, and chances are, if you liked Cross, you could like this just as much. But it’s not going to contain any new revelations, and the extra reverb and applause are not enough to justify the release of a live album.

It's a solid, un-embarrassing, simple-minded record that will do nothing to My Morning Jacket's reputation as one of the greatest American rock bands every American can, and will, get behind. Here's to riskier futures.

It makes for a workmanlike listen. For all the frills of doom and cadences of industry firing on all greasy pistons, the dynamics at hand are simple, rounded up summarily when the album presents its glaring contradictions as a matter of fact

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.

Howl of the Lonely Crowd is a strong, seasoned indie-pop record that'll sustain the cult while opening up yet another avenue for the curious to stumble across one of the more tragically ignored bands of their time.

I’m Going Away is a good record, it just doesn’t really sound like the Fiery Furnaces. Though for some, I’m sure, that’ll be very welcome news indeed.

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.

They are a talented, enthusiastic and timely band; I feared that it’s ageist of me to suggest that their debut album isn’t great because they’re too young.

These songs are great expanses, sprawling and glorious.

Faith in the Future disappoints in its lackluster melodies and overall vibe. The highlights here are the more ambitious songs.