Neither funny nor thought-provoking, the band strains for touchstones beyond the technicality of prog-metal and rarely achieves them.

The melodies and production are top-notch, even if, lyrically, the album’s motifs barely move from sullen dismay to cheery dismay.

For all the positive aspects of Creaturesque--most importantly, it really is a consistently interesting and fun listen, which is rare for a record like this--there is one real weakness: Reitherman’s lyrics.

The latest Dashboard Confessional album is extremely front-loaded, it should have been an EP, etc.

As with that last Aphex Twin full-length, The Only She Chapters plays to no one's expectations; gutted and reassembled, it will still unfurl like a disassociated string of insular oddities.

[The title track's] the only track on Disc Two, said to have been influenced by hip-hop mixtapes, and it serves as a microcosm for Working for a Nuclear Free City in general: overstuffed with ideas and ADD to a fault, but never, ever boring.

This is exactly the subjective realm that MAYA taps into: it puts its listeners in a position where opinions are formed in large part by predetermined prejudices. Of course, this is true for most music in general, but what makes MAYA tacitly brilliant is that it forces us to engage with those prejudices in a way that pop music typically does not.

The second album has the more obvious and combustible singles. But there’s nothing on the second album that comes close to the 1-2-3 punch of 'California Goth,' 'Wavves,' and 'Lover.'

It is a step forward for an artist with a wealth of potential and a tremendously moving voice. Should he cease his overzealous grab for stylistic and thematic conventions--or perhaps if he simply learns to cover more ground--there’s a good chance Handsome Furs will reach a level of maturity and sophistication at which their current offering merely hints.

While Mythomania doesn’t necessarily punch its way out of that paper bag, the album does feel more immediate, its melodies are more memorable, and the songs do occasionally allow themselves to become more ragged.

Nurses are a psychedelic freak-folk trio from Portland with ridiculous facial hair. But Apple’s Acre is also very, very good.

For all its flaws and excesses, Cruel Summer is an order of magnitude above the dreck of 808s and Heartbreak (2008), and if it doesn't outshine any of Ye's other solo works, I'd argue that it's a deeper and bolder album than last year's Watch the Throne.

Yes, there could be more new ground broken in this material, but this does not necessarily equate to artistic diffidence.

Throughout Crime Pays Cam wobbles between comfort and rote, often landing on the correct side of that division, but illuminating in the process that the gap between laziness and his brand of lazy brilliance is both a crack in the sidewalk and a yawning canyon.

They’re still far and away the best bet for impeccably produced, beach-ready power-pop, and way better than your shitty sounding power-pop band, so excuse them if they seem to harbor no interest in doing anything else.

Substance-free, without a whit of melody or lyricism or artistry but flouncing about in a post-production fantasia, the album made sounds that sounded like music for people who wanted to like music and have music playing near them but make no investment in the enjoyment of such stuff.

The songs themselves are broad, indifferent things, no relation to the Thing that is this album.

Theater of the Mind is a disappointment and more--snickering through both high-minded social consciousness and insipid cash cows, the album, so flat and fucking boring, serves absolutely no one but Ludacris himself.

For an album so brazenly loud it leaves little impression; as a record supposedly about statements, it makes very few intelligibly. Most inexcusably, it lacks imagination.

Despite somber interludes like the Shatner-only confession of his third wife’s death, “What Have You Done?” or the subtly rich “Together,” Has Been does little to rescue the Priceline spokesman from the novelty bin.

The Most Serene Republic demonstrate plenty of talent in frustratingly short bursts on their debut.

Utilitarian sensibilities typically create better, catchier results, but Little Boots’s producers can’t help flaunting their knob-twiddling abilities, justifying their paychecks while counterintuitively making Hesketh’s music sound all the more amateurish.

A fantastically pedicured amalgam of every side and thing Busdriver thinks he can effectively be.

DeLaughter needs to be more personal; already having a dozen people yelling at you distances the ideas they express, but emptying those ideas of any meaning isn’t the answer.

While not a live album at all, PB & J does indeed live with its own throbbing, messy scariness that demands that the volume be turned all the way up to 11, threatening to eat your brain if you dare leave it lower.

What it lacks is Agaetis’ singularity of purpose, as well as its understanding that atmosphere should be an aesthetic by-product of songcraft and not the other way around.

Eat Skull can be really charming when they want to be, but just as often they seem content to putter around, resulting in enough slack to overwhelm such a short record.

It’s not easy listening; it may in fact be a case in which one needs to add hundred-degree heat before there’s even a chance of excavating something.