The 24 songs... are characteristically and uniformly excellent.

By now, Sage Francis is emo; however populist you cut it, he’s treading familiar paths, rhyming in familiar cadence, arguing with the asshole authority of an artist much too comfortable with his niche.

In the context of their seemingly blinkered attempts at finding some source of inspiration they've produced an entertainingly atmospheric, melodic record to bracing and accessible effect.

The Reminder may not surprise, but it does force one to ignore the cloying marketed image and just love Feist for the talented individual that she is.

Unfortunately, too much of Snakes and Arrows is dominated by mid-tempo, lumbering behemoths.

Make no mistake, this is a slight record, but nonetheless one with more than a few enjoyable moments.

Favourite Worst Nightmare seems warped and contrived, bearing all the signs and watermarks of a band trying not to feel uncomfortable.

While undoubtedly charming in it’s naivety, it also feels slight and transitional, filled with a sense of thin momentary distraction.

Sadly, the only true victories on Dumb Luck are Tamborello's own title track and Oberst's "Breakfast in Bed."

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.

Year Zero massively benefits from lowered expectations. Reznor channels his anger, focuses it and takes a much-needed breather from his tried-and-true formula of nihilism and the question of self-destruction, but at its core the album has very little to teach us or anything original to say.

Grinderman isn’t angry and it isn’t raw, just a careful concoction of licentiousness and braying disdain ultimately monotonous and unexciting after the first four cuts.

On Cassadaga Bright Eyes sounds like John Mayer.

It’s still style over substance in a lot of cases, but it manages to be so exciting while being so listenable that I think it demands repeated listens -- even if those are at cocktail parties.

She still has yet to manage a really killer album, but There's No Home finds Hunter well on her way.

If nothing else, Stars of the Lid have achieved Adam's goal of making music "to really relax to," abjectly defying intent listening, laying waste to the established vocabulary of music production and appreciation.

All in all, Jarvis a mixed bag. It feels like the sort of thing that Cocker would do just to expunge his notebooks before moving on.

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.

The best thing, really, that can be said of Because of the Times is that it works the hardest trick: seeming deeply personal and inclusive, but still having an embrace elastic enough to be universally appealing.

This is an album you could easily hate -- especially if you like things like change and development.

A long collection of awful ideas and recycled ideas in the absence of an Idea.

Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters is an album with a sum worse than its parts.... Still, there’s a lot of promise here.

Myths of the Near Future is probably the most assured British debut since Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled.

The problem is that for all the slick operations and glorious machinations of the marketing and production, this band has run out of steam; soulless without being undead.