It's nice that Primal Scream attacks these tunes with gusto, but the passionate performance doesn't hide the fact that this album is utterly inessential, little more than a sampler for what amounts to a really swell wedding band.

Cursive aspires for greater things, and Kasher’s aims are marred by over-production, a Nickelback whoosh here, a digitized cascade there.

Deft, flawed, entertaining, thrilling, and disappointing, often at the same time.

Though the tracks are lengthy, they’re not indulgent but patient, moving at the pace of Frank Sinatra’s September of My Years (1965) rather than the National’s Alligator (2005).

Get Lonely is a record that requires multiple listens (itself a first) but which absolutely forbids them -- I've been unable to listen to it in one sitting after a month. Not out of its weakness or my boredom, but in its relentless despair and my weakness.

It’s a cohesive, well-produced, well-written set of songs that coheres as an album.

It’s downright exciting for a band like the Thermals to emerge with something so simple and unflustered, so bereft of unnecessary baggage, a shining light of a record that delivers on its early promise.

He’s made a honed, handsome piece of work, never too arresting and never too fickle.

The Shining is not a masterpiece, obviously, and nobody ought claim it as such, but it does show the producer striking out in a moderately novel direction and finding consistently satisfying results.

Her multitudinous influences, free from the collagen that an omnipresent production team offered, have dissolved and separated out of their former matrix, the subsequent runny blotches of genre-hashing burbling up to fill Kelis Was Here with rubbish that has no discernible order.

Beautiful, thematic, meticulous, revelatory, and challenging.

Classics can testify just like Ratatat (2004) did, and there’s no shirking of moral duty to melody, but the “growth” between the two albums leaves the sophomore effort a bit of a chore.

This is the Strokes’ first record without its adherence to formula and form, with better guitars and bigger chords. And, you know, more fun.

There are, of course, a few missteps.... More often, though, the sparse arrangements highlight a resurgent songwriting force.

Ultimately, Avatar’s change in direction is hardly an unpleasant one, partially because it’s really fun to lip synch “Let it burn / Let it bleed!” while playing the air guitar on your knees, but mostly because it still rocks frighteningly hard.

This is as fully realized an example of the Friedberger vision that exists, which is why it’s so frustrating that Winter Women never really gets off the ground, or that Holy Ghost wallows in its creator’s own pique.

Made In Brooklyn’s not as bold or striking or collected as No Said Date, but the sophomore effort’s a fine follow-up, nonetheless, and almost certainly doomed to the same neglect.

Bloated on the rotting corpses of hackneyed scratching, hackneyed drums, hackneyed sampling technique and hackneyed key work (all that in hackneyed combinations), Feedback makes it difficult to differentiate the acceptable from the tired.

What this band needs is a microphone maestro on the order of, say, an Albini, instead of the deep-fried Southern crunch that leaves these eleven songs sounding thin and brittle, ultimately highlighting their clear melodic and structural similarities until what could have been a gut-punching EP becomes a substantial-but-marred LP.

These are good songs, catchy enough to claim a place in your head while grounded by enough passion to put them close to your heart. It’s just that the Long Winters have proven themselves capable of even better than that.

The band has a noticeably meaner, more muscular sound than on previous records.

On Silent Shout, The Knife have shaken off their more tangential musical inclinations and produced an intensely cohesive album, a monochrome rainbow that has emerged from the unfocused torrential rainstorm of before.

For Golden Smog, this is another fine album; fine, fun, but never great enough to make you forget that these guys are in other bands.

The French Kicks have become too smooth and repetitive; they have been polished featureless and barely resemble four distinct personalities contributing to one idea.

Cansei de Ser Sexy is a catchy, brief, and sweaty romp, but nothing that will wow, nothing that’ll smart, nothing that’ll leave a phone number next to the dildo on the bedside table the morning after.

Unfortunately, it seems the group is more interested in refining, rather than re-defining, their craft, whose torpid mechanics bear no mystery, no guts behind all that glamour.

Happy New Year is fresh and adventurous and, most important, it is consistently so.

There’s a wealth of great material buried within The Avalanche, if you don’t mind digging.