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.

[Espinoza] takes the predictably disappointing low road through fanboyville with cruise-controlled caricatures of one of indie rock’s most deified stars.

All said, the album’s capably produced by Tony Doogan, Secret Machines aspirations and all, and it’s a debut wrapped in sophomore expansion, a third of a universe away from anything deservedly cosmic and anything appropriately full.

What follows are a series of maybe-serious experiments that aren't much fun.

It's a safe album, almost exactly what you'd expect from Chao. The artist continues to be the best (perhaps only) provider out there of Clash-inspired polylingual punk rock, but for a musician who built his solo reputation on quirkiness and innovation, the disc feels a bit flat.

An album that does the exact same thing as their previous records, only not as well.

It just simply seems that Stuart Murdoch isn’t a very portable songwriter: he may be able to write Stuart Murdoch songs for Stuart Murdoch, but translated to anything but his music frequently exhibits its participants’ weaknesses, and the end result is unsettling and unfulfilling like few Belle and Sebastian products are.

Return is largely bereft of the chintzy, minimal Zaytoven beats dominating previous Gucci releases, and in their stead exists the dense ominousness Luger peddles so brilliantly.

For their first lengthy introduction, they seem to have lost some verve. It’s a frustrating representation of what a tightrope their sort of exorcism music is.

Ross seems to lack any sort of awareness of his shortcomings, dutifully plowing through middling, obvious shit-talking.

There’s no question that Oxford Collapse, like an awkward teenager, hasn’t figured out exactly what they are, and the added pressures of a larger label release have caught them slightly off guard.

Liars is all about that Liars blueprint, and in that sense the album can get redundant.

While this technically is enjoyable alt-country circa a half-album before Summerteeth, genre-standard romance and arrangements muffle the otherwise "astonishing narratives."

Their experiments have only caused them to stumble off the path they’ve tread, finally tripping to one side of the thin line between smash and schmaltz.

Despite the fact that it’s an obvious misstep from a band that seemed bulletproof... it's still a strong album with a lot more charm than, say, the Bravery or the Killers.

Careful consideration shows that Transference really is exactly the record that Spoon intend it to be. It's just not a record that anyone really needs, one from which our feelings will all-too-easily transfer the next time that Spoon put out a record that inevitably reminds us of Spoon.

The record is neither a failure, nor can I imagine is it a pisstake. No, this is Tom Jenkinson letting out his inner rock star, letting his guard down from the laptops a little bit more, and having sloppy fun.

In a nutshell, Neptune is a bit like Grace Slick fronting the Bad Seeds but not as good as it sounds.

Really, everything is utterly in its right place on The Eternal, which is also its most glaring flaw, and its this lack of the new that makes it kind of a bummer, though, at the least, a pleasant one.

While this album is far from The Hour of Bewilderbeast part two, it does represent a return to Gough's more stripped-down formula of simple, ramshackle pop songs built on electronic and symphonic detritus.

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.

It’s an intermittently interesting and somewhat forward looking work-in-process, but at the moment Hebden sounds like an underground hip-hop producer with a few ideas but no MC.

There’s wit and meticulous posturing in the hills: we’ll be waiting right here for tomorrow. After all, there are enough immediately delectable grooves in his eleven tracks today.

As it stands, 'To Clean' and 'Rain On' deserve their place late on your sweetheart mixtapes, and they’ll be charming in their small doses, but they’re much too rare here, nestled between puzzling decisions and bedroom leftovers.

This album maintains youth and vigor through dirty language and clean production, but eventually settles for something very middle-of-the-road.

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.

Fulton’s beat-making is stellar, but devoting attention to it also necessitates suffering the consistently insufferable Kanamori, and stylistic schizophrenia that’s as jarring as it is unique.

The libretto/story/concept of the album is of absolutely no interest to me, and it won't be to you either.