This is nothing even remotely new, but very rarely does it come off so obnoxiously, indelibly built to not be taken seriously when that’s the very action that could save these assholes from their own doom.

Nothing is really very exciting here, or very interesting.

E... rearranges his work, often to brilliant results, by first embellishing his lesser known songs and then subverting his already sparse collection of pseudo-hits.

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

When I say “melancholy masterpiece” I mean “beautiful, melodic progressive pop bombast with realistically contemplative lyrics," not “Damien Rice."

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.

As formulaic and boring a rock album as you’re likely to hear in 2005.

The result would be encyclopedia-thumbing pastiche if it weren’t all so carefully curated, and if the production wasn’t so intricately, lavishly produced that as each track stretches into the fifth or sixth or eighth minute it was not still revealing permutations, secrets, strange little surprises.

An Argument with Myself seems like more of an attempt at an encapsulation of Lekman's talent--to use the smallest things as gateways into work more ponderous but still relatable, achingly pretty but still occasionally biting, adventurous but familiar--than a showcase of new directions.

Provider, though lovely, and featuring two outstanding acoustic songs in "Asa" and "Rivers of Gold," is not nearly the radical, aesthetic departure described in some initial reviews.

Morrissey has managed to assemble a record that feels like a genuine Morrissey record while not being insufferably self-important and brooding.

Frank Black doing a perfectly fine job producing totally average Art Brut material can’t help but inspire a resounding “meh,” a minor pleasantry worth neither cheers nor jeers but maybe a little shoulder-shrug and a smile.

+/- have abandoned their bipolarity, which I was willing to call “complexity” or “potential” until just now, for a straightforward record that yields none of the possible benefits of a straightforward record.

It’s not often that music truly sounds effortless.

While there's nothing wrong with the production displayed on When Fish Ride Bicycles, Inglish laid down the blueprint for supporting this duo so well that the oft busier and more varied work on this outing feels like too much to digest and too much for them to wade through.

Traditional folk-rock outings that reek of Workingman’s Dead (1970) and the musk of Jerry Garcia’s beard.

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.

High Places is an indie dance album about rhythm rather than dancing, that’s danceable without pandering.

Its winning, all-pleasing debut, quiet as it may be in a scene overcrowded with showiness and incessant bids to polarize, is perhaps a mere pebble dropped in a sea-but with will and wit enough to ripple as far as a boulder.

File The Rakes under "serviceable art pop."

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.

They may not yet have a strong enough aesthetic to make a great album, but they've made a unique, highly promising one that might soon create something which can bring Gonzalez's academics into the realm of something softer. In the way his best songs and covers were, and still could be.

Despite the inessential nature of some songs, and perhaps the inessential nature of the album as a whole, for sympathetic ears it serves as a kind of skeleton key to White Denim's bewildering powers, as much as any collection of demos or rehersal tapes.

It is explorative, enchanting, wide-reaching, and so hopeful it ignites a tender pain all its own.

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.

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.

Phantom Punch is a good album, but not a great one, and certainly not the Career Record that Duper Sessions almost was.

It is true that many may balk at the lack of outright pop or that some of the songs are too sparse or that Steve Albini’s production is bottom-heavy, muddy, and lo-fi but there’s just too much to love on this album for any of that to get in the way.