Ultimately, this is nothing more than workaday feel good bar music, technically well executed with the peaks and troughs in all the right places.

As a whole, it's not consistently buoyant enough to be a good pop record, and the politics that weigh down its middle section aren't sharp enough to make it into anything more than a middle section weighed down by some obvious politics.

If Chris Adams descended into his cozy lair to try his hand at glitch and rid his fingers of Hood’s snoozy bleating, he found a safe median, driving his ideas years behind the curve, distinguishing himself from his previous band by tinier and tinier increments as the tracklist exhausts.

So, no, this isn’t groundbreaking sound art, just really good dream-pop, as pleasant as this music can get without being--don’t deny the thought you indelibly harbored--cloying; that’s a space that we need bands to fill.

It is rewarding that the album should end showing his passion displayed as a performer and shining through as a song-writer. The only problem is, with the rest of the album being so slight, it’s may be too easy for most to stop listening before they get to it.

It wavers back and forth between showcasing the band’s strengths and having fun in the moment, more like a live show than a unified statement.

While it at least confesses that there’s a reason for the band to state it’s on your side—an admission of bad things in the face of a strong insistence that art not harsh anyone’s mellow—the album acts as a sort of side step to those bad things rather than a head-on address. Music this consistently gorgeous deserves a little better.

This is serious sound art, and it evokes a now near-mythical pre-Recession time when experimental artists didn't feel the need to obliquely reference the outside world.

One of the most immediate records of the year so far, Here We Go Magic materialize as if they’ve always been here. Which, it turns out, may be right where they deserve to be.

It's a realization in retrospect that occurs too often throughout In Heaven. And in those moments one can't help but be disappointed, hearing Twin Sister such a cut below what they were doing just one short year ago.

At least 45 of X&Y’s 63 minutes finds Coldplay overdosing on pointless synthesizers in the name of “expanding their sound” while forgetting to write anything reflecting a decent hook.

This is an album made for car trips by a band best suited for noisy bars; you’re going to want to play it loud.

Deft, flawed, entertaining, thrilling, and disappointing, often at the same time.

There are hits on Good Girl Gone Bad, big clubfisted ones, but they're wedged in with facsimiles and reductions.

Rather than anticipating something new, Small Craft on a Milk Sea ultimately feels like one of the final surges of a style and format that Eno himself is outgrowing.

Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is actually pretty good, and sometimes it’s great, but it is quiet, sounding very much like it sprung from the Internet ether to politely ask for thirty minutes of your attention.

So, um, good? Yeah, but in the same way grilled cheese sandwiches are.

This is the sort of record you’re gonna put on when the sun’s shining and you just need some good old pop-rock.

Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams is as silly, day-glo, eccentric, and all over the place as its title.

Saturday Night Wrist continues the Deftones’ sad trend, another album of scattered transcendent moments in a field of attention-getting parlour tricks, still eagerly tugging at the listener’s sleeve to say, "Listen to this sound we created!"

A lock for most promising debut of '08.

Every song, for better or worse, is constructed with its own identity in mind, and if nothing else, Mondanile commits to each and every one of these attempts at distinction.

Though, technically, the production is much “improved” here, meaning that the album is louder and clearer, it’s still not a very enjoyable listen when the listener can’t shake the idea that something’s amiss.

It's not his best record by any stretch of the imagination, but it's one I'll reach for more casually and consistently than his recent stuff.

The problem here being that the clean production values are themselves another veil masking Williams' fundamental badness--and so this album becomes, like its predecessors, an exercise in misdirection and deceit.

The vast majority of the new Roots album lacks what has made their earlier albums so exciting: spontaneity, originality, musical chops, and a sense of purpose.

Strictly speaking not much has changed since this Japanese trio’s debut EP Neji/Tori washed up on North American shores, but somehow that previous effort had so much charming belligerence and ferocity and Destination Tokyo sounds bored and meandering.

Enemy Mine is altogether more defined in its varying forms, food groups falling out a cornucopia rather than coming together like the stew that bubbled in the "Beast Moans" cauldron.