jj n° 2 proves itself to be inexplicable in its origins and quite possibly a rare summer thing that’ll survive the post-August comedown and re-emerge in heavy rotation in late fall, when its sunny disposition will try its damnedest to win my heart and maybe even succeed.

Clearly, this record is boring. Whether or not that’s a good thing remains up to your discretion.

So it’s possible that the songs on Wait For Me will end up in the same coffeehouses and car commercials and other small, sterile environments as those on Play, but Hall’s drawing inwards as hard as he can, to the great benefit of his compositions, and Wait For Me is unabashedly majestic.

What’s so frustrating about this effort is its potential to be great, a possibility visible even through its painfully apparent flaws.

The thing that stands out for me this time around is how little Tinariwen are confrontational about their experiences. Instead, it just naturally permeates their music--love songs with a thousand-yard stare.

This is the real key to understanding Varshon: it can’t be a truly cynical attempt to recapture former glory because it’s too half-assed.

They’ve yet to lose it: Farm comes in a bit longer and countrified than its predecessor, but it’s also a more muscular and emotional album.

Nothing on this album surprises me because anyone who has listened to this band regularly has become so steeped in pointless oddity that they have moved past surprise into the realm of mild annoyance.

I was surprised that it holds up well to close scrutiny--in spite of my reservations, the album is well performed and crafted, with a surprisingly mordant thematic unity touching on mortality and the soured promises of childhood--but I’m still bothered by its anonymity.

Dragonslayer is a shockingly good record, but it’s no surprise that things ended up this way.

It was as if all of those constituent elements were combined in equal parts and to perfect balance and have since simply been maintained.

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.

No single frontman in indie quite possesses Falkous’s unique blend of obnoxious charisma, and that fact alone makes Travels a sometimes engaging listen, but he’s still made an album that steers dangerously close to emulating the bros he’s spent his entire career railing against.

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.

This might sound like a blunder, but Diplo can never be criticized for not being adventurous enough; though he can be criticized, magnanimously, for Major Lazer.

As relatively good as most of Bitte Orca is, 'Stillness Is The Move' alone gives us reason enough to be optimistic: should Longstreth pursue his newfound fascination with mainstream music further, it's proof that the Dirty Projectors are capable of evolving into a far better pop band than their experimental selves ever let on.

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.

He may no longer be the novelistic observer of Black on Both Sides or the fearless explorer of The New Danger, or even the wised-up star of True Magic, but The Ecstatic is still imbued with all that and not making a big deal out of it, perhaps the first truly mature thing Mos Def has ever admitted.

Mostly, though, Flowers just feels like a breather album after the last two, a typical Joan of Arc album wholly trapped in the moment of creation.

At its best, DJ Quik and Kurupt’s BlaQKout is a disarming and unexpected update of the West Coast sound made entirely and staggeringly relevant in a long post-Coast rap landscape.

The best the band could do is take this folk stance and make it somehow relatable to the sort of listeners like those in Chicago, blessed as they are with one of the most storied and diverse stocks of bands in the country. What Of the Cathmawr Yards ends up instead is a cold catalogue of personal taste and increasingly diminishing scope.

It’s perfectly reasonable to listen to Tape Chants at an ultra-low volume (a la Morton Feldman), but to absorb all of the color and contour of this veritable ocean of sound, I recommend playing it very loud.

Oh, charm abounds; what the album lacks is direction.

There’s something oddly sweet about how completely out of step Eels are with trends and genres, something nourishing about how secluded their music has become. Shame, then, that it must necessarily also be so exclusive.

This might be the last material we hear from Dilla that echoes the endlessly fascinating turn his music was taking before his passing, and it couldn’t be constructed more appealingly, its jittery creativity augmented by one of Dilla’s esteemed contemporaries, himself a fan and close friend.

It’s a sophisticated work, delicately and meticulously crafted, and its effete pleasantness lends itself as well to "Late Night" performances as "New Yorker" coverage.

It’s an approximation of what perfection might mean, which is: precise, lean, deliberate. There’s not a wasted moment here, and not one moment overstays it’s welcome, which from a bunch of aristocrats (I get) is pretty frickin’ rich.

Eating Us works as a pop record and tends to be only as good as its songs, as opposed to the monochromatic statement of purpose that was "Dandelion Gum." Luckily, these are some pretty good songs.