OOIOO transforms what could be mush into wonderful, brilliant songs that fold and mutate the ideas they’re based on into moving and coherent narratives.

It's not the sort of thing one pins their organic, folksy dreams upon, though you get the sense it was born out of that interest and perhaps lost its way over time.

There’s something to be said for rewarding repeated listens, for golden nuggets in every song, never buried but never hollering.

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.

The Dreamer is a very traditional record, straight-up pop with a tinge of alt-country. It's easy company, a warm and thoroughly enjoyable summer listen.

It’s his most focused album in over a decade, and ought to absolutely kill onstage.

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.

If straightforward pop songs are what they seek, tightening up the rhythm section is absolutely essential, though here they’ve overstepped the line between “tightening” and “dumbing down completely.”

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.

Sleeker but no less cartoony than her debut, it mixes freestyle house into her signature sound and comes off richer than anything she’s done before.

Sequenced as the record is, with each personality dominating certain stretches of runtime, Paper Trail feels almost vaudevillian.

Most of Cookies proceeds in similar fashion, with crunchy, showy riffs supporting clever hooks in the name of two-and-a-half minute pop nuggets that the late John Peel would have likely appreciated.

While production values throughout the record consistently exceed those on Long Live, the real step forward is where it counts: with the songs themselves.

There’s a lot to be impressed with here, but it’s the emotional intimacy that the songs establish even at their most grandiose that makes the album great.

It's this aura of creepiness that makes The Grand Theatre one of the band's best albums to date.

Volume II: High and Inside picks up exactly where its revelatory predecessor left off, but this time welcoming a few more indie-world guest stars, having a few more stories to tell, and reveling in slightly more robust production.

No amount of production dross can obscure the fact that Clockwork Angels still constitutes the strongest collection of Rush songs since the mid-'90s.

What is clear, though, is that this is a finely drawn, funny, animated, and gumdrop authentic record, never less than fascinating in its endless and disburdening involutions.

Quit +/Or Fight is in a select catalog of records able to build songs out of studio arrangements that never seem contrived or overdone.

Over five years and around an international filming schedule, Riz MC has managed to use his credentials to mount a dazzling attack on what he sees going on in Farringdon Road, and has emerged with the kind of crossover masterstroke that could outshine the National Curriculum.

To the un-jaded, yes, boring, but to these well-worn ears, Lower Plenty drop some serious knowledge.

The Cookbook leaves the exact same impression on its listener as every Missy album since Supa Dupa Fly. She may have changed the recipe, but the dish tastes the same.

Foals are a tight band with hook-laden grooves. Not worth the hype, but definitely worth keeping an eye on.

The Golden Archipelago falls somewhere in that tenuous space, never able to live up to the power of its initial impression. It’s more the kind of thing that should be fully absorbed over the course of a few attentive, complete listens, then allowed to dissipate into the realm of a beautiful idea.

The Brutalist Bricks, for its moments of torrential fury, sags when Leo occasionally writes outside of an exhausted but all-encompassing formula.

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.

My frustration is simple: not only does the record’s production drag down what could have (probably) been good songs, the band deliberately downplays its two best players, and everything suffers as a consequence.

The core of his sadness may still be a mystery to me, but his monument to it, in all its eccentricity, is by far the hardest thing to ignore that he's done yet.