The big downer about “Vs.” tends to be its sporadic hinting at the greatness that could have been: small pockets of significance surrounded by many mediocre passages.

As it stands, it's a really good, seriously flawed album, with some great songs and some big misses, a sort of living, breathing justification for your CD player's skip button.

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?

While I enjoy Erase Errata’s new album, At Crystal Palace, in the larger, more convoluted scheme of things, I am not sure if I am truly impressed.

Without the contextual anchor that Vo’s art gave to “Deforms,” Girl often gets lost in its own tormented vision. The album plays out like a series of crises, some real, some imaginary, some personal, others global. ... The better angels of Xiu Xiu’s nature are on display in the slow, scraping cello elegy “Amargi ve Moo” and in album closer “Normal Love,” the closest Girl gets to a legitimate pop song.

As interesting as Heretic Pride already is, it misses an opportunity to pick one direction or the other.

Have you ever fallen asleep during the X-Files’ opening credits, then awoken to a Volkswagen commercial? Have you ever wanted to?

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.

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.

Overestimate it for the wrong reasons, and you’ll still get a lot out of A Fool for Everyone; underestimate it for the right reasons and you won’t have to look too hard for a replacement.

The studio can be the bane of a musician’s existence, offering a plethora of ways to work, often to the point of stultifying any interesting end results. This is not necessarily the case with Nace, but it begs the question of what stood between the more interesting work on this album and the pieces which seem to be caught under the inertia of their own weight.

There's no arguing that it's pretty entertaining.... But there's the nagging sense that it's all sound and fury.

Holy Ghost!'s self-titled debut puts me at a loss. There is no way to penetrate this album. It's dance music that exists entirely for its own disposal, either into your iTunes, your DJ set or your garbage can.

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.

Sometimes, too often, you start a band and it's good, but by the time anyone really cares, you've run out of interesting ideas and your live show is boring because you're burnt out and your record sounds like it was sponsored by Guitar Center.

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

Despite these small clunkers, there are many moments on A Strange Arrangement that show careful attention to soul’s craft and demonstrate a full immersion in the genre and its subtleties.

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.

As an album, Brain Pulse Music feels like two things at once, a dichotomous effort in which the nobility of the endeavor is at the core of its biggest aesthetic weakness.

Whilst this is a lovely, well-made album, nothing separates it from countless other acoustic folk recordings.

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.

Unfortunately, after the initial rush of the opening tracks, the album slows down perhaps too much.

The album does lose focus somewhere around the halfway mark, unfortunately, the playful titles (“Cockblocker Blues,” “This is Mister Bigg. How you doing Mister Bigg”) not reflected in barely-formed tracks that disappear into the haze of their own making.

For the most part, Write About Love is a disappointment. That's even truer, I suspect, because Belle and Sebastian aren't the only ones getting older.

When they're on, Mates of State recall the better moments of fellow smilers Quasi or The Anniversary, and the rest of the time their friendly pop buzz is more harmless than irritating.

Just as Yeasayer appears to have planted its two feet firmly on the dance floor, it seems to have lost much of its capacity for eccentric pop magic.

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

Though Patterson is still largely peddling outdated sample-heavy narco-trance, the new disc is quite an improvement from 2001’s career-low Cydonia even if it may share that record’s flaws.

Surrounded as a minor spit-polish improvement on Our Blood is sure to please Buckner’s cultish devotees.

Instead of being an especially bold or dynamic record, however, it only recalls the best moments of Quality Control and EP, seldom reaching their highest peaks.

The end result is an album that would be fine as a first effort--that is, if it did not naturally have to be compared to previous Tunng albums.

Adult. doesn't make their music easy to swallow, and some of the tracks here don't feel fully developed. But this is a band in transition, exchanging the spacious rhythms of their electro for a suffocating spin on rock revivalism.

Formerly Extinct is a little over-cooked, and the album would have benefitted from being left a little more raw at its core.

Spills Out isn't the best record of its ilk to come out this year, but it's not the worst, either.

The group [is] at it's best when it stays close to it's R & B foundation. Standing in the Way of Control expands the Gossip's pallette, but the keepers here hug tight to the rump.

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.

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.

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

Often more conceptually interesting than practically solid.

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.

Beam doesn’t lack wit or inventiveness or honesty, or any of the other things that are good about "conscious rap," but it implicitly disowns them all as impotent or corrupt, as failures before the fact. Its self-loathing is too self-aware, too pervasive, to accomplish anything more productive than wallowing.

To the extent that it falls prey to unnecessary pseudo-sophistication, Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers comes off weak; to the extent that it maintains its own musical niche within the shattered-lover trope, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers makes the shopworn surprisingly compelling.

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

While most of Here We Go Magic works well as a unit, the more noise-based, non-vocal tracks detract from momentum; they’re the least interesting things on the album.

It takes some bands several albums to appreciate the strength in subtlety. On their debut full-length, Midnight Movies may rely on it too much already.

Organ Music may not quite be what Krug hoped for--and it's by no means perfect--but it is intriguing and occasionally illuminating.

ISAM's clusters aren't as advanced as Tobin might have you think, and only represent a monumental leap forward if you compare them to his trio of classic albums, all of which were recorded more than 10 years ago.

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

It's a collection of veiled promise, but only partial pay-off.

The disappointments of Walking Cloud are really quite perplexing, given Mono's limited but impressive history and the promise of their collaboration with Albini. Still, if it fails to live up to the heights of One Step More and their debut Under the Pipal Tree, it has its share of moments.

This is not a diamond in the rough as much as it is a piece of carbon that might, with extreme pressure and effort, turn into something someday.

At other times the songs--while still enjoyable in a nebulous “go to the light” kind-of-way--simply lose all pretense to distinction, bleeding together in a tonal wash of echoed vocals, tremolo guitar and gooey organ.

The reality is that Valley Tangents just sort of floats by as background music even whilst actively listening.

Credit to Beam, of course, for challenging himself rather than continuing to remake The Creek Drank the Cradle over and over again, but Kiss Each Other Clean is unlikely to count among his best work.

“13.6” is where the album takes a noticeable turn and Supersilent finally finds its way.

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

The band clearly understands what their strengths are, and the decision to continuously return to them, keeping the songs simple, short, and straightforward, staves off boredom while covering very little territory.

[Mould's trademark] coupling of aggression and tuneful economy is one of the chief attributes sometimes compromised on Body of Song.

Songs like "Walky Talky" and "Bye-Bye-Bye" reference the band's Devo inspiration a bit too explicitly, but overall Polysics show themselves to have for the most part outgrown their influences.

But largely, Jacaszek's wedding of disparate styles pays off in Glimmer's evocation of certain moods and expert shifts from mode to mode.

The Atlantic Ocean is impressive, at times even masterful, yet falters in reminding us more of what it lacks than of what it possesses.

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

Nothing exciting ever happens, no new spins on the old-fashioned pop idiom or particularly colorful lyrical images, and the record's overarching lack of adventuresome spirit detracts from the grace of its individual songs.

It's the same songwriter we've seen in snapshots from various foreign lands, this time in front of buildings that may as well be down the road: same Seine-side accordion we heard on The Flying Club Cup, same mournfully stately horns he picked up in the Balkans for Gulag Orkestar.

These first five songs are like a good singles collection, every one of them free-standing and complete, none of them particularly relating to the others. The rest of the album is slighter and less compelling.

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.

Sleep on the Wing is quite pleasant, but so soothing and gentle that it’s hard to focus on.

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

I is the result, four long, loosely-related tracks that bump and groove and thrum and throb, often hypnotically, sometimes with a lively intensity. As an idea of musical process reimagined, I is always interesting. But as music, it’s uneven.

Even if The Diver is too lacking in originality for many, it does what it says on the tin, with verve, energy and a keen sense of what went before.

The lyrical approach has so far kept me from really warming to it, but the words are ugly and weird in an interesting way, which makes me think that maybe eventually a light will come on and it will become one of my favorites.

On an emotional level, LISm is hard to get at.

It’s entirely possible that the skillfully-made Odd Blood will find an entirely new bunch of listeners. Many of the old ones, like this writer, will probably just find themselves frustrated.

Matricidal Sons of Bitches frequently dazzles, but there are more than few moments of frustration along the way.

I'm not particularly enthralled by that idea; rock minimalism often is rather aesthetically empty. While faulting the band for taking that route doesn't feel right, it does make the album a rather uneven, if still interesting, affair.

When Animalore clicks, it does it well, but there are too many stretches on here where the band’s restraint feels like they’re playing it safe.

Other Animals was a masterpiece, Nightlife is merely pretty good.

A difficult, flawed record that’s predictably too long, making the highs all the more rewarding.

Naive and wide-eyed, Wander / Wonder tries so damned hard to feel real, to make big dreams and grandiose plans feel distantly (but not quite) attainable.

It’s worth making it through these bare patches for the two gorgeous glimmers of light at the end of the album.

Birchard's music is euphoric and in your face--if only he could combine his staggering technique with some true grit.

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.

This is a “nice” album, not a great one. It pleases with clean, intelligent production, thoughtful arrangements, clever, elliptical words.

In a vacuum, it’s a captivating and well-designed experiment. But in this real world where hip-hop is history, where it owns that history, wears it, references it, reflects it, bounces it around, Two Fingers’ record comes off overcooked and overflowing.

By the end of No Wig, it’s hard not to feel like it suffers from the level of simplicity inherent in much of Nosdam's production.

It's a fine album, but after each listen I find myself wishing a little more had happened, that more of the human behind it all might shine through in unexpected ways.

An hour of delicately portentous electronics that are not so much haunting as haunted, each sonic element sneaking upon another and spooking it out.

The Family Sign is mature in its way, soured by age and wisdom, but it's no fun.

Each taken singly can easily be appreciated, as they’re all gorgeous. But Mellow Waves as a whole is ultimately difficult to recall. Cornelius has certainly achieved the waves he was after, but the mellow winds up needing something more.

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.

If the joy of the album is tracking Ranaldo through his worldly interests, his hippie mode, his indie-rocking, then the struggle is never feeling at home because the record never quite finds its sweet spot.

'Till Kingdom Come' is really the only song that stands apart from the pack, thanks to its strident guitar leads and orchestral underpinnings. The rest of the tracks, while persuasively put, come and go with an effect that’s distantly brooding at best.

The farther it strays into new territory, the older and duller and more dubious Wilderness Heart sounds.

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.

The record’s terminal mission aside, Keith’s latest exploit is one more chance to befuddle insipid rappers and flex his uncalculated argot.

It’s a shame that all of Water Weird isn’t as emotive as its second side. Most of the tracks are head nodders if you’re in the mood for that kind of thing. For anyone seeking something that digs a little deeper, let the second side soothe your inner space.

The key is minor, the tone is melancholy, the concerns are callow, but the leitmotif is redeeming.

Minus ODB, the collective's most charismatic member, and rife with in-group strife, 8 Diagrams is a long way from the hip hop revolution, "Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)." It still ain't nothin’ to fuck with.