As a whole, An Empty Bliss is a remarkably cohesive listen and one that achieves its goals, but whether or not it, in and of itself, is an entirely creative work is another question entirely.

Instead of being doomed to tread a certain set of glossy, shoegaze-littered paths, and in that doom come off desperate to change, they search within their well-worn sound for a collection of songs with no aspirations to be anything more than the best at what they are. Now that's some progress.

What damns them is how they frequently grasp at Grizzly Bear’s familiar brand of prettiness, rarely capturing the effortlessness that would keep a better record afloat.

Love Letter is more like a respite, a detour from the beaten path we should just be glad exists, and something to cling to when the next porridge of jizz and tears, The Return of 12 Play: Night of the Living Dead, drops wetly on our heads.

This is exactly the subjective realm that MAYA taps into: it puts its listeners in a position where opinions are formed in large part by predetermined prejudices. Of course, this is true for most music in general, but what makes MAYA tacitly brilliant is that it forces us to engage with those prejudices in a way that pop music typically does not.

The Winter of Mixed Drinks is a minor disappointment, then, in that in wake (and perhaps as a result) of his heart’s subsequent rehab Hutchison’s songs can’t really sustain the weight-loss of their ego.

Transgender Dysphoria Blues isn’t a perfect record, but goddamn if it isn’t an important one, and more worthy of your time than ninety-percent of the more fashionable sounds coming out of whatever Bushwick loft party the Times scopes this weekend.

For the most part, it works.

Where he used be be so proficient at letting us hear the sound of his sad, sad heart, the directionless elliptical clutter that defines The Age of Adz just sounds to me like he's manufacturing an idea of what a sad heart might sound like. What's worse, it sounds self-indulgent.

As far as drone or ambient records go, Black Mesa is accessible and melodious.

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.

In this way, A Chorus of Storytellers resembles the Flaming Lips’ Embryonic (2009) in that it’s a characteristic and maybe even obvious album that stuffs a band’s commercial instincts under a protective layer of feints and refusals

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.

Deeply individualistic, dark and woebegotten, one can’t help but root for his continued presence seemingly regardless of his efforts.

I’d suggest that it’s a grower, but that doesn’t seem apt, as there’s very little depth to let grow here. What it is, however, is a winner, an album that seems loathable at first but tenaciously refuses to quit grinning.

Personal Record doesn’t always have the focus and sense of place that made Last Summer great, but it’s pop music on a grander scale, both in sound and theme.

Hynes expands his melancholy pop palette just slightly enough on Cupid Deluxe to create an album at once slickly cohesive and subtly textured.

Not so much a change of pace as a consolidation and careful re-allotment of her powers.

Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, and WU LYF in general, are a band handicapped, seeming less like an actual group and more of an experiment. In what? In determining how much vocal pain listeners are willing to endure if the underlying music is actually pretty good.

It's the songs that are swollen, and Rogue Wave will likely remain a moderately successful act whose new album is slept on because its floral solidity isn’t enough to hold up the heft of its length.

King Animal bucks the trend by being reasonably good. It is unquestionably a Soundgarden album, and far better than anyone had a right to expect.

Baffling production questions aside, In The Dark is still another solid entry into what's becoming a pretty spotless discography for a band with seemingly little aspirations to do anything but be a predictable answer to what a band called "the Whigs" would sound like.

Mostly, though, Flowers just feels like a breather album after the last two, a typical Joan of Arc album wholly trapped in the moment of creation.

This album is a textbook grower, not just because it demands repeated listens, but also because the pieces all start similarly and take their sweet time to reveal the individually entrancing things they are.

There's no doubt that I Bet on Sky is a very good record. But at this point, the second honeymoon is over, and there's a barely perceptible distance growing.

For all its flaws and excesses, Cruel Summer is an order of magnitude above the dreck of 808s and Heartbreak (2008), and if it doesn't outshine any of Ye's other solo works, I'd argue that it's a deeper and bolder album than last year's Watch the Throne.

That’s a comparison that could be made between Burner and Bip’s Blue Eyed in the Red Room (2005): similar, but a little better.

It sounds exactly like Eluvium, only with an organ and not a guitar, and with more overt classical aspirations than before.