The Gents waltz their way through these ten sturdy, mid-tempo numbers rarely striking a bum note.

It’s entertaining, sure, but also empty and a bit soulless.

It’s inoffensive, painfully so, with the smell of something run through focus groups from the get go, written and produced by committee to sell the greatest number of copies.

Another wildly uneven affair.

Ted Leo again falls a few hands short of the definitive statement we insist on expecting.

Andrew Bird has thrown down his gauntlet brimming with post-structural imagery, swirling entropy, a truly floral arrangement of genre pieces and genre mixing.

ADULT. are an awesome band that have yet to make an awesome album. This one, however, is still pretty damn good.

Where [Fantastic Damage] assured its legacy through sheer density, piling beats on top of one another haphazardly and layering hype tracks laced with punchlines, subtexts, and asides, Sleep finds El-P focusing his fury into individual crescendos, particularly during the record’s sterling second half.

Without making the new sound genuinely old or the old sound refreshingly new, Mason waffles in the flux between.

Odd, joyous, and wonderful.

Ruff Draft is subtle, full of muddy melodies, magical synths and crispy snares, all typical of Dilla beats that aren’t on major label releases.

They are a handful of shit, of wan, barely extant songs and feeble musings, of worn gimmickry and careful over-production, aping Sufjan and a dozen others, flung against a cultural brick wall.

Her efforts have crafted a soul album that is resistant to any claims of mere charlatanism, a record that brings a modern tongue to a classic style.

Myth Takes is a taut culmination that may just tear dance floors asunder with its locomotive inexorability.

Pocket Symphony is pleasant but not striking.

A considerably more gothic affair than Funeral, a set that sometimes screams “overcompensation!”

The terrible truth is that -- and maybe this is a matter of an album’s length, replayability, interesting tenure, obedience, whatever -- Gruff Rhys will always be as politely awesome as Gruff Rhys has always been, and that’s just not enough anymore.

The songs themselves aren’t so much unlistenable as just a little sad, highlighting the fact that Iggy Pop is less-than-scary nowadays, and his voice is shot to hell.

When it is instrumental, it’s “Get It,” which seems a timid remake of Since We Last Spoke’s title track, or it’s “Murs Beat,” which, tellingly, has no Murs. Some of the rest sounds like a softer, more overproduced, and generally shittier version of the Cars. The rest of the rest sounds like something duller than that.

Despite all the ingenuity on Foley Room, it’s hard for me not to miss the days when Tobin belonged as much to jazz as he did to any electronic genre.

All said, the album’s capably produced by Tony Doogan, Secret Machines aspirations and all, and it’s a debut wrapped in sophomore expansion, a third of a universe away from anything deservedly cosmic and anything appropriately full.

The band seems unsure of what instincts to follow to get more intimate, streamlined rock; their attempts produce a hodgepodge of style that in turns prevents the kind of gut reaction that normally attracts listeners to rock in the first place.

If this is EitS attempting to summarize and compact their three previous albums into one easily consumable package, the results merely drag the listener along through series of “catastrophic” cues that tell them what they should be feeling.

Sift through Are the Dark Horse and the sounds of the Beach Boys or Orbison can certainly be found, but the band has yet to learn the clean, economical songwriting of their influences.

She’s still plenty capable of bringing the funk when she plays to her strengths. Unfortunately, she only does so for half of City Beach, relegating her solo debut to little more than a curiosity for the Luscious Jackson hardcore.

Listening to this record is like hearing someone who has some moral fiber describe their first one-night stand. There is seriousness, jubilation, unease, and regret.

It sounds exactly like Eluvium, only with an organ and not a guitar, and with more overt classical aspirations than before.

With Broken Arm, Marnie Stern has delivered a frenetic and ridiculously entertaining debut.