I can sense that there's something pretty great going on and even briefly catch glimpses of it. But as an experience, it's a little bit maddening, and eventually I'll want to throw away the glasses and pick up a book.

Showtime’s length dilutes the bursts of exotic spice and flavor laced throughout.

If she wanted to move or enlighten, Let England Shake falls short.

Perez, Pattitucci and Blade are about as blue chip as they come, and they easily outclass their somewhat calcified counterparts on the Rollins outings, but there are still sections in the collection that don’t feel on par with Shorter’s storied brilliance.

Overall, its more up-tempo songs aside, Lucifer on the Sofa is a disappointment, offering regrettable evidence that Britt Daniel’s laudable song writing mojo may have gone off the boil.

The record is more about preserving hip-hop culture that about creating something fresh.

Though this release is bloated and sometimes inconsistent, Horseback remains a distinctive, at times even bewitching band.

On Veckatimest, by contrast, the experimentation can go over the top: the additional arrangements may not add much aside from being one more thing to admire. And, paradoxically, doing that moves some songs out of the avant-garde and squarely into the middle of the road.

The thing that really sucks about Bitte Orca is that the guy is probably onto something pretty good, but his allegiance to cleverness rather than consistency fucks it up.

Chemistry may represent an attempt to marshal these influences into a massive, unified sound. Alternately, it could be the sound of Fucked Up fucking around with a big budget in a studio and seeing who might be duped into believing it genuine. Indeed, who will listen to this record?

At the end, S-M is still a silly tribute band, years away from hoeing a unique row. But when musicians crank out such a joyously chaotic mess of someone else’s forced nostalgia, it’s hard to be mad at them.

So refined at times it borders on the insipid.

There’s a solid, heartening release to be found in Countless Branches. It’s a shame that Fay and Dead Oceans didn’t take the opportunity to tease it out.

It remains to be seen whether Nomad reveals Bombino to be an artist of limited means or one who is making the occasional misstep on the way to something great.

Daylight Daylight flows easily, likeably, languidly — but at times rather forgettably.

The main problem with Tarot Sport is that it sometimes seems to be trying too hard, building drama into repetitive riffs by sheer force, urging greater and greater effort on listeners who are already a bit out of breath.

Entomology is full of music you desperately want to love, as it’s so clearly superior to the music that has subsequently genuflected in its direction. Thing is, I’d much rather hear a couple of minutes of Paul Haig’s droll yet strangely alluring post-Josef K solo records than the entirety of the host outfit’s material.

For an album with such a grandiose title, Big Thief’s Double Infinity is bafflingly mediocre — especially since it arrives on the back of a string of good-to-great albums.

It does contain some beautiful songs. Its deficiencies won’t miff his indulgent cult (at least not any more than they’ve been miffed previously). But it doesn’t quite hold together.

Y’Y has its lovely moments, but it wallows sometimes in woo-woo-y mysticism. It’s a bit soft and cushiony, hard edges sanded down to harmless auras.

The wide variation in music and the uneven results (all of it, perhaps, evidence of the record’s conceptual ambitions and smarts) prevent Dose Your Dreams from being a uniformly pleasurable record. But, man, is it full of ideas and aesthetic vitality.

In forgoing the lifeblood of dynamic and passion, the creative minds behind the project fall to maximize its potential, however agreeable their compositions may be.

Burial doesn’t step into the spotlight particularly masterfully. For the first time, his rhythmic choices get a bit lost, and some of the cuts to silence are more clumsy than disorienting.

All I did was press fast-forward, track after track. When that expectation of emotional articulation wasn't met, it brought up that feeling of outrage, as if somehow Superchunk let me down.

Compared to its predecessor, Wall of Eyes can’t help but come across as transitional. While there are some undeniably great moments, the overall experience feels a little low-stakes and disappointing.

It is at once too ambitious (in the recording process and change of milieu) and not ambitious enough (in its failure to push Bergsman’s music to unexpected and truly experimental places).

Without hearing it in alongside the images that accompany it, it’s hard to pass judgment on Cave and Ellis’s music.

Throughout this often incoherent hodgepodge of tunes, Baroness has mostly abandoned the contrast that made its previous records work so well.

Ultimately, it's hard to embrace Sepalcure. The record has received some critical acclaim, and as far as stateside bass music goes, Sepalcure deserve the attention. But something is missing...risk.

While Carlson and company continue to explore new influences (much has been made over the band's recent declaration of affection for Pentangle and Fairport Convention), Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 sounds to me like a different manifestation of the same sound they've been exploring for some time now.

Parts of Litany were pretty but kind of dull, and The Glass Bead Game is similarly afflicted. Blackshaw’s easy development seems to have reached a plateau.

Parquet Courts needs an extra injection of grandiosity (as 2014’s towering “Instant Disassembly”) when they slow things down, and they don’t always provide it on the songs that need it the most.

They walk a fine line between startlingly fresh songs and caricatured styles that don’t mix well.

It amounts to a frustrating end to a frustrating record, one where some great sounds and ideas aren’t fully worked through into wholly successful songs.

It's a slight little album about fascinations, and a product of them, too, which, whether you share those fascinations or find them boring, is perfectly fine.

Despite a few good moments, this isn’t a record where you feel rewarded by sitting down and sitting through the whole thing. Let’s hope that next time they exercise a little more discipline in putting together a finished record.

The object of his lamentations is conveniently out of reach, hence the constant cat-and-mouse game between enunciation and melisma. When Blake sees fit to loop a phrase or attempt a chorus, the undertaking breaks down under its own weight.

Alligator's biggest missteps are the moments when the music joins in the apprehension, rendering the coyness in Berninger's lyrics unreadable.

Unfortunately, The Elephant Man’s Bones is a step back for both the artist and the producer. ... A generic Alchemist production makes for a generic Marciano verse. In short, there is no chemistry between The Alchemist and Marciano. ... The Elephant Man’s Bones sparks hope in the middle with “Quantum Leap” and “Bubble Bath” but after that it regresses again into a second rate lounge-y Marciano.

This is a heavily flawed album, at times frustratingly so. It can feel painfully sentimental: full of sweeping string arrangements, dramatic instrumental surges, and celestial soundscapes.

The most pressing problem is that Venice is rarely a challenging release.

With his debut album on Shady Records, Conway the Machine shows that he remains a gifted lyricist and a good storyteller, yet hardly offers anything original.

Really, these songs are dance tunes, and the proper place for them is in a club at high volume. Listening to them at home is, to be honest, somewhat disappointing and perhaps does the tracks a disfavor, because they're not that detailed.

Given DePlume’s voice is such a strong flavor, Gold’s appeal will no doubt hinge on whether it’s to your taste. I find it fine in small doses, but domineering over the course of a double album. There’s some great music here if you have the patience to cherry-pick the best bits.

Despite some good ideas and intriguing moments, tracks like “Inside World” feel unsatisfyingly aimless.

As emotionally impenetrable as the instruments are, Kinsella’s own inner song remains even more obscured by uncharacteristically opaque lyrics.

Bird’s intelligence – and obvious delight in the associations that words seem to make on their own – often places his lyrics in the precocious high-school poet camp.

While not without its pleasures, particularly in its first half, the album seems to find the Bonnie ‘Prince’ just a little too much at ease for his (and our) own good.

Seems like an uninspired continuation of last year’s Tomorrow Right Now.

Though much of Dilla’s later works were quick jots, Jay Stay Paid sounds too much like the unrevised pages of a journal.

If another band were to serve up the fiddling strings and lollygagging vocal harmonies of “Animal Shapes,” the wanky guitar breakdowns of “The Poor, The Fair, and the Good,” perhaps Tanglewood Numbers wouldn’t feel like such a disappointment. But Berman’s a brilliant lyricist with 30 or 40 minutes to spare every couple of years, and his voice seems oddly absent from this record.

Ultimately the album adds another respectable line to The Mountain Goats' discography.

It’s not that these songs are bad, just that they sound a lot alike: elegant, chilled, full of foreboding.

The album’s consistent tempo and tone end up making Jellywish feel strangely longer than its concise 34-minute runtime. But, when the band cuts loose a little, such as the lead guitar breaks on “This Was A Gift” and “All the Same Light,” it’s tantalizing to imagine where Jellywish may have ventured given more of a loose rein and a sense of adventure.

[The production] intrudes on the songwriting, distracts the listener, and interferes with what are otherwise solid and sometimes deeply moving performances.

He's not playing to his strengths; he's succumbing to preciousness.

Dip into Ay Ay Ay at leisure and it’s an arresting thing, each song humid with spittle, slick with tongue spit, bumptious and sashaying around the mouth. But when locked together, it’s too homogenous.

As an album, The Crying Light is neither as revelatory nor as consistent as "I Am A Bird Now."

In theory, there may be nothing wrong with a desire for mainstream acceptance, but Cantrell’s music suffers for it.

He doesn't quite sell the thesis that that's the point.

Musically it feels like business as usual, but there’s a spark missing, as if the events of the last few years have pummelled the life out of the band, resulting in a frustratingly uneven record.

There’s not a lot of sand or struggle in these tracks. The vocals never crack. The orchestra never misses a note. .... Only the late album cut “Rust and Steel” has much of a growl in it, and, no coincidence, it’s the track that hits hardest and stays longest. .... It reminds you that even the slickest quiet storm soul needs some fire in it. How about some more of that next time?

Lacking a clear story arc or point of catharsis, Kill for Love drifts off into its own gorgeous gloom.

With experimentation comes occasional failure, however, and at times Since Last We Spoke can feel a bit forced.

It’s hard to think of 7 as anything other than an extension of Beach House’s sound, incorporating slightly different, smaller ideas but all easily applied to their own syntax.

Extremely unoriginal, but well-crafted rock shot through with tantalizingly brief moments of interest.

Bruner has some pretty sweet, vibey chops that he deploys sporadically here. If cultivated, he could deliver that skewed-fusion, weed hazed love letter he's attempted here. In the meantime, best to let him noodle it out on his own.

Things begin promisingly with “She Never Could Resist a Winding Road” and “Beatnik Walking,” two nimbly played songs on which Thompson and his band get to show off their chops without showing off.... Unfortunately, that fact [a relatively small band playing together on relatively little time] begins to show for the worse on "Patty Don’t You Put Me Down."

For as strong as much of the material on You’re Nothing may be, it is an uneven record, without the focus or pacing of its predecessor.

Transference is the victim of an unfortunate irony--the more honed, the less it cuts.

The Bones of What You Believe loses steam quickly, leaving nothing new that approaches the promise of the group’s early releases.

This is an awkward pairing -- there are a number of nice moments, but many haven't been fully developed, and seams divide them.

That shiver of foreignness adds interest to what is essentially a frothy pop sound, as does the occasionally mesmerizing distortion.

Maybe a bit more editing could have given it more coherence. At the same time, there are no duff tracks, and a lot of fascinating moments.

In gaining power and speed, Secret Machines seem to have lost a sense of pace. Now Here is Nowhere rocks hard, but compared to the EP it contains half the ideas in twice the running time.

The Witness is definitely a grower, an elusive listen whose understated charms define its mystique — and also its flaws.

I feel like Flight of the Conchords could do something interesting if they embraced the absurdity of their act and didn’t stand aloof from it at an ironic distance.

Sometimes he continues with the same train of thought; sometimes he changes direction completely. This isn't technique on display. It's more like improvised self-analysis in musical form.

There are certainly more fun moments than not, at the very least rendering The Grey Album enjoyable, but it’s hard to argue for any reason other than its novelty.

With no connecting thread or great songwriting, I Am Very Far is difficult to engage with. It has its moments, of course, but the more I listen, the more I think of it as a creative palette cleanser -- a chance to try out a few ideas while planning the next big song cycle.

Hold Time, Ward’s latest batch of songs, seems slighter, happier and louder than those on 2006’s "Post-War," but also distinctly complacent.

Desire, is a mess: intriguing, puzzling, intriguing and ultimately frustrating as all hell.

Country Funk frontloads these generic examples, and leaves the rest of the compilation up to artists who managed to eke meaning out of the stylistic changes.

If TaDet Lugnt was pristine portraiture, carefully aligned and composed, then Tio Bitar is the off-the-cuff action shot – freely flowing and effortlessly jammed, its hair ruffled and with a face in need of a shave.

While there are some real successes here, Father, Son, Holy Ghost is extremely inconsistent.

“Dayvan Cowboy” is almost worth the price of admission, but it makes the remainder of the album seem derivatively “New Age.”

What A Place to Bury Strangers creates is satisfying, nothing more.

Ultimately, the album is explicitly notable for its musicality, rather than its content.

Stainless Style's problem isn't the music so much as it is the ambivalent authenticity; it's impossible to determine if it's supposed to pay tribute to, make fun of, or be fully situated in the time and place of John DeLorean's rise and fall.

Here is a pretty, pleasant record; and maybe that would be enough if Teenage Fanclub had never done more, wedding angst and bliss in a way that few other bands ever did. ... Teenage Fanclub seems to have swallowed the Serenity Prayer whole, accepting a lot and changing little, and it’s hard to say whether that’s wisdom or stasis.

Much of what made Shallow Grave so striking was its density, its pairing of deftly constructed lyrics with rapid-fire notes and chords. At times, some of the songs on The Wild Hunt--specifically "You're Going Back" and "Love is All"--lead with the more abrasive side of Mattson's voice but don't land with much impact.

The slower songs on The Warning have a kind of raggedy, pioneering charm.

Right from the start, it’s the attention to detail in the arrangements — what Frank Zappa used to describe as “eyebrows” — that brings Norm to vivid, radiant life. ... Regardless of how gorgeous it all sounds, sometimes the songwriting does feel a little wanting, as if Shauf has penned a decent verse and chorus, then run out of ideas about how to add another section to take the song to the next level. ... By keeping all the songs to a succinct few minutes, Shauf stymies their potential to evolve into longer, more complex pieces.

The album's vocals exemplify the real problem here, which is that while the music is appealing and well-executed, everything feels perfectly coordinated and absolutely calculated.

Not groundbreaking, but it sounds great. And yet, these time-tested, still electrifying punk rock torch songs have been neutered somewhat here. The performances are professional, perfectly calibrated, even virtuosic.

Wincing the Night Away feels a little paunchy, a little resigned – this is music that not only is mature enough to know that it can’t change the world, but is content to not try.

There is beauty on Nepenthe, but it’s altogether too clean and self-regarding to pack much of a punch.

Strawberry Jam is a mixed proposition if ever there was one.