It’s a shame to see the character of Mike Skinner become so stale and hackneyed, especially when the beats are stronger than they’ve ever been before.

After a decade of contrarian, even petulant repudiations of the music that made the Magnetic Fields famous, Realism is capitulation, contrition, and celebration at once. It’s back to basics in the best way.

Siouxsie has always seemed fearless and unstoppable; while this is refreshing, it is unnerving to see her shatter the persona she has so slavishly created for herself.

While MGMT may no longer peddle the kind of instant-pleasure-point melodic textures that propelled the band's most well-known songs into so many playlists, they're up to something far more interesting: releasing a major, mainstream objet d'art without for a minute fooling themselves that it "matters."

That BlackenedWhite doesn't really bother with the kind of extreme lyrical content Bastard and Earl traded in is what makes it an infinitely more enjoyable listening experience on just the most basic level.

The Rural Alberta Advantage are an excellent Toronto band that before this year nobody outside of Toronto cared much at all about; here’s hoping their follow-up manages to capitalize on what’s good here to make something really memorable.

Though I'd hardly go as far to call it their best album, which I guess makes U2 irrelevant by Bono's logic, its best songs can credibly stand alongside their classics, and how many bands can maintain this level of vitality 30 years into their career? I give.

This isn’t progress, it’s pleasant, capable, effortless stagnation; the dream’s already finished and we can’t, for the love of everything, recall what it was about.

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.

Relistening, the porousness and vapidity of the material makes it pretty obvious that rapper Jeezy’s personality is one note, gruff and brash, forever and ever. But in the album’s waning moments, 'My President' erases any genuine qualms, sporting the record’s best Toomp impression.

Littering their album with frail songwriting and all but killing off the aggression of their percussion, the band inexplicably jump into ill-advised stylistic misfires---with a few too many missed falsetto notes.

It practically goes without saying that fans of guitar heavy psychedelia and mind-altering substances will find plenty to enjoy here.

It’s conceivable that she can be marketed as a hipper Michelle Branch (the string arrangements get a little schmaltzy), but at her most accessible she’s still too resolutely quirky.

this is nothing amazing but after the understandably sombre "Margerine Eclipse" (2004), the studious "Fab Four Suture" (2006), and Laetitia’s cerebral study into duality of the self on "Monstre Cosmic" (2008), it is refreshing to feel the joy.

There’s just something about it --- I like Pixel Revolt, and I like it a lot.

The album's best moments are when Drew's fundamental pop becomes unhinged and thrashes passionately about its aesthetic playground, planetoids seeming at odds in their mad swing through space but connected by some invisible force.

Beautiful, thematic, meticulous, revelatory, and challenging.

Make no mistake, this is a slight record, but nonetheless one with more than a few enjoyable moments.

Tussle have sharpened their edges, sawed excess fats and driftwood from their bloated frame, and end up sluicing waters--at least some of the time. It’s the most cohesive decision they’ve made yet, but one wonders what Cream Cuts would have sounded like had it been unbound rather than streamlined.

Pros: Farina is an excellent drummer and singer, and MacKaye hasn’t lost any of his righteous anger. Cons: with only two people you just can’t be viciously loud.

His constant assurances across Goblin that he doesn't really mean any of the hateful shit that he continues to say, including this disclaimer's attempt to dissuade listeners from actually doing anything Tyler raps about and the title track's assertion that because Goblin is a work of "fiction" Tyler himself shouldn't be blamed for anything bad that results, undermines any of the resonance Goblin might have otherwise had as a, well, purer document of depravity and, at his most extreme, a certain kind of madness.

Visitations is cold.

Ditherer is a far-flying leap above and beyond anything that Fog’s done before, but not a shocking leap because it’s still very clear that this is Fog.

Essentially, Blood Bank is one pretty song--the titular, opening track settling somewhere close to what Damien Jurado’s doing these days--and two similarly pretty experiments in stretching Bon Iver’s sound.

There’s a lot of filler here, even for Ryan.

They now play with a heads-down resolve that is thrilling.

While A Brief History of Love isn’t quite capable of recapturing the rush upon hearing “Bittersweet Symphony” or “This is Music” for the first time, the Big Pink’s reverence towards those songs and their era and everything they represented is extremely well executed. And greatly appreciated.

I want to stress one last time, post-catch, that these aren’t terrible songs, nor do they add up to a terrible album. But the net effect is nevertheless one of tedium and disappointment, a partial reminder of "War Elephant's" potential instead of an attempt to realize it.