This is drone ambiance for your buds, and Buds. Meaning: Crocodiles did good!

Bachelorette is not as immediate or inviting as My Electric Family, but I'm hesitant to condemn it for this. It's simply a different listening experience, one which creates a different mood.

Despite being quite well-realized and able to sustain a single mood for so long, the album sounds increasingly like a missed opportunity as it progresses, with the two songwriters' work almost never achieving a real sense of cohesion.

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

It is as "original" as this band is going to get, and for that we should be contented.

A few duds aside, the album succeeds as an ecstasy pop update on the Blood Brothers’ delirious chaos and nobody who purports to miss that band should ignore it.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's third album might not set the world on fire, but it's a great little record in its own right.

Magic Potion never really manages to distinguish itself as an album; there are a number of excellent songs, but even with quite a few listens I never get the idea of the thing working as a collective whole.

Loney, Dear hasn't changed much, and that's what makes this inimitable album such great company.

We do get a consistent, theatrical dose of glamorous rockabilly out of Bobby Dee.

The album’s hyper awareness of its own mortar disrupts a bouncy pace that would otherwise fit Rhys’s suntanned pop to a tee.

It’s good, and I don’t mean just because it reminds me of Mass Effect‘s soundtrack but on the terms of a record: it ingratiates and ebbs and even exasperates, at a stretch, before rewarding in the end.

The tracks are at their most compelling--which is to say: very compelling--when they're listened to in isolation from one another or liberated from the album's initial lineup. The greatest favor you can do as a listener is to allow the same open air and breathing room the songs allow themselves.

The songs generally hold up, but the production job remains confounding. Keith Uddin’s meaty fists have ruined this album.

Sure, Banhart executes the truncated verse spectacularly, but he doesn't give his listeners enough time to love him.

Alpine Static unquestionably contains enough rock fireworks to warrant repeated listens.

Be Brave doesn’t live up to the rambunctious energy and junkyard swagger of the band’s debut LP, And Girls Club, but instead offers more subdued moments that allow Sambol’s frontman personality to transcend the clatter.

Sleep Forever will likely hold minimal appeal for anyone not already on the bandwagon built by Crocodiles' high-profile forebears, but I'm guessing Crocodiles wouldn't have it any other way.

Give Mobile time, and it will fasten itself, embed its patterns, and stay with you longer than you could have imagined a solo percussion album ever could.

The destination is certain in the screamer’s mind: he asks his band to draw up the new maps, and they do. On this level, 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons may be the most satisfying record the Silver Mt. Zion project has yet done.

The more Book of Bad Breaks plays, the more it clings and forces you to concede to its charms; it’s an admirable album, if not quite a great one.

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

Sun Bleached Greek Gods is a perfectly serviceable introduction to the latest hot-off-the-grill, young, immortal, unemployed, nearly insufferable bedroom pop outfit.

Bitter Tea has a bevy or unexplained items - crazy cranes, bloodthirsty in-laws, traitors lying in grass, osmanthus blossoms, card cheats and the only pewter pocket watch that belong to Joseph Smith's Great-Great Uncle's brother in law. It's outlandish stuff, and requires suitably outlandish music, from its weird melodies to jarring segues to an ocean of sounds marking a transition from one verse to the next.

Nearly everything else on Old Growth consists of middling blues-rock with impressive soloing but negligible heft.

Like all AC/DC records, this is a troubling one to love.

[Disc 1] is fantastic and worth the price of admission in and of itself.... Sadly, the results [on disc 2] sound more like the soundtrack to a bad '80s cop movie than appropriate or even interesting re-takes of some of the best pop songs ever penned.

They've struck a balance, similar to Terrible Two, that's instantly accessible, consistently surprising, and extremely satisfying.