My Maudlin Career is just such a uniformly endearing record. It’s sentimental, yes, but pleasantly so, charming in its own little way.

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

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.

If "Woke On A Whaleheart" (2007) was the cuckoo clock, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle‘s Callahan’s triumphant Renaissance.

Fantasies is, rather unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, just another Metric album.

You Can Have What You Want is like "Turn on the Bright Lights" (2002) without the drama, without a voice as deep or distinct as Paul Banks’, and without the hooks. Instead of all that, Papercuts opt for a vague, beige production and generally indecipherable lyrics that may or may not be about some kind of futuristic utopia/dystopia.

The Future Will Come is still a mostly solid as just about any full-length release on DFA, and if some of the best ideas die too soon or don’t go far enough, at least they appear at all.

It’s refreshing to hear Herren at least trying after the wash that was Preparations (2007) but this new sprawl of a record is one that’s much easier to appreciate and respect than it is to feel.

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.

Anyways, ignore the write-ups (uh, except this one), which won’t be able to help quoting all the spiritual mumbo jumbo about dualism, and enjoy what seems, to me, unstated genre practice at play on a very large stage.

Micachu’s album has all the markers of quirky chic--an unusual voice, a fairly well-known producer, and a distinctive approach centered around pastiche.

While it feels a little sheepish to rag on a band for being a little too competent at what they do, the best you can really say about this, their fourth LP, is that it’s simply a good product that’s easily recognizable as a Doves album.

Begone Dull Care spans eight aimless, meandering slow jams--each averaging a bloated six and a half minutes--and, returning to the pacing issues that threatened to put "So This Is Goodbye" fans to sleep, there’s simply not enough to distinguish one track from the next.

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.

Perhaps there will come a moment when Repo suddenly clicks as a beautifully connected opus, but that seems doubtful; for the time being it’s just a frustrating listen, held back by its unnecessarily unconventional explorations.

It’s the Casiotone defence mechanism: take your innermost awkward lumps and bathe them in rose-tinted easy listening. Ashworth successfully translate this to his new instruments no fewer than nine or ten times on this eleven track set.

Lerner’s honesty lasts forty-three minutes, and supplies the predictable yet scrumptious party-time melodies that chase away clouds like a sidekick.

Most of that sonic rage is in absentia on It’s Blitz!, which is part OK electro dance record and part atmospheric boredom courtesy of producer nerd David Sitek, who, it’s becoming increasingly clear, saves all of his best ideas for his main squeeze TV On the Radio.

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

UGK 4 Life leaves listeners wondering where they might go next, and even if sated with one last release still lamenting that those further steps—gargantuan or tiny, toward greatness or overreach, whichever—will necessarily be solo, uncontrasted by that inimitable, nimble, lascivious whine we’ve lost.

Cohen manages to find the happy (and probably most obvious) middle ground between his spare origins and the sheen of his later work with light, jazzy instrumentation, with the songs stretched out to allow for several solos and interludes.

In all, the languidness of Rules has its own odd charm—since WBA never aspire to be much beyond a wistful dance pop quartet, they don’t fall down the stairs too embarrassingly.

The fact is that Black Cascade is half victory lap and half turf statement: it hones in on their strengths without sacrificing originality; it pays off magnificently on all the chances they’ve taken in the past; it is fucking brutal; and it is another high water mark in the band’s catalogue for the New Wave of American Metal.

Nite Jewel’s schtick may well revolve around crafting a distinctive and specific sound/mood and doing it well, but Good Evening‘s best moments arise when Gonzalez goes for just a little more range.

LotusFlow3r achieves nothing so much as reliving the glory and joy of emulation, which is saddened by the image of Prince nudging our shoulders, urging us to relive with him.

MPLSound appeals to nostalgia both implicitly (a reminder of the reasons for our adoration) and explicitly (the album sounds good because it sounds like Sign O’ The Times).

In lieu of an actual follow-up [to The Knife's "Silent Shout"] we get something that manages to make good on two of those three elements [of the decade’s best electronic records]. I’ll take it.

Here we see the often-resourceful Deacon approaching a big canvas with too little paint, and the result is a record which feels bloated, overlong, and ultimately empty.