There’s a jump in recording quality, but this isn’t always a boon to this sort music and can be a distraction here.... When they put their harmonies in unexpected setting, it works.

None of this is terrible, but none, also, is as tensely, gloriously obliterating as Coconut’s opening blow.

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.

When RVG get it right, the results are deeply affecting. ... The weaker moments — “Little Sharky & The White Pointer,” “Prima Donna” and “The Baby & The Bottle” — could easily have been excised for a sharper listen. It’s not that anything here is cringe-inducing, it’s just that because the band’s sound is so straightforward, the songs need a little spark to make them stand out.

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?

As a listening experience it’s akin to viewing a water color painting, its delicate hues no doubt appealing to anyone attuned to such subtlety. But to someone aching for a little more conviction, grit and risk, it may prove frustratingly listless.

On the mic end, MC Naledge has a comfortable flow reminiscent of a more polished Kanye, but his lyrics on The In Crowd are less than remarkable.

It's obvious that most of the songs have been meticulously worked over, and as a listener you're thankful for it, but as an album it feels like the paint has hit the canvas at random.

There are the four originals here on Horses and High Heels. And for my dope money at least, they count among the highest songs she's had since getting off the stuff some 20 years ago.

There’s something Spinal Tap-ish about the reach for grandeur here--not that it’s bad exactly, more that it seems not fully justified by the material.

Various people have tried to explain to me why I find Object 47 so frustrating.... My inclination is to forget all that and just play the last four tracks over and over.

On The Odd Couple, Gnarls Barkley gets halfway to the heights of St. Elsewhere and seems content to stay there.

Jónsi plays with orchestral beauty and flirts with pop, and ends up somewhere in between, fascinating and inscrutable.

The melodies are often big, but they rarely stick with you after the song is over, having been overcome by nervous tension and a project whose first goal is self-effacement.

The album as a whole is more often prone to meander, as if the band gets a little lost in their new terrain, unable, at times, to bring their thought full circle.

Tallied up, the hits and the misses are about equal. But it would be unfair to describe Interstellar as middling. What the misses lack is not quality but a strong sense of self in terms of songcraft.

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.

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.

A lot of the material sounds incomplete, as Scher and Hey have a habit of backing off just when a song sounds like its coming together.

So, enjoy it if you will, and forget it if you like.

They simply begin, evolve, repeat, and end, very much as though they were designed to play out while we directed our attention elsewhere.

James Pants may well develop a style or voice of greater substance with future releases. But, as of now, his reliance on his synthesizer aptitude is too repetitive, too flat, and too conventional to convey much meaning or purpose.

Mainly these songs remain steadfastly, quietly, emotional. For every moment that comes off too lightly, there’s an equal moment of memorable melody.

While there are moments where En Form for Bla (named for the Oslo club where it was recorded) rolls right over you like a rogue wave, more often it sounds like the main action was situated a couple rooms away from the microphones.

Vocally, In the Cool of the Day often lacks that urgency: it's a beautifully played, highly accessible album that nevertheless leaves much less of an impact than one might expect.

This album’s austerity puts it more in the ranks of bizarro reduxes like Scott Walker’s The Drift. That’s impressive company, but even with its slight runtime, it’s hard to imagine feeling compelled to come back to I’m New Here once you’ve understood what’s going on.

Jurado’s ambition seems to have outpaced his execution this time out.

I can't say I'll be giving Inside the Ships more spins this year, but it's offbeat charm never felt like a waste of my time when I did, and that's more than I can say for most albums this year.

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

Bundick occasionally turns the energy up, like in the last 30 seconds of album highlight “Low Shoulders,” but those moments are too few and far between to make an impact.

Dead Drunk on the whole could be taken as noise music, noise music with none of the brutality and half the imagination.

As it stands here, it too often feels as if the tools mastered them.

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

A few tracks wisp away into nothingness, but on work like "Your Heart is a Twisted Vine," Nadler approaches timelessness as well.

Mostly these songs seem slight and shy, unable, really, to support the massive facades of synth and disco drums that Small Black layers onto them.

Brilliant Colors understand to stick to what you know, and keep it short and sweet--a couple of platitudes that serve this band well.

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

Revisiting the past isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but turning elements from one of their discography’s savage outliers into a competently turned-out, but not outstanding new chapter in the ongoing story of Wire hardly seems like the most ambitious thing they could have done with that material.

Maybe they've been listening to The Byrds and Love, but detecting those influences in a band that doesn't have any vocal melodies makes it hard to say for sure.

Oneida’s chemistry alone isn’t enough to make modest material effloresce.

Tiny Cities differs very little from how we might expect it to sound.

Emotional Mugger isn’t a bad record, but the songs are nowhere near as strong as the ones on Manipulator, and whatever Segall is trying to get at here is not yet in his grasp.

It's not a bad album by any stretch of the imagination. But it also feels (not necessarily is) like someone forcing a turn in their art instead of allowing it to naturally come out of them.

It’s pleasant enough, especially with the shift away from Broken Social Scene towards a dancier Cut Copy aesthetic, but it’s ultimately forgettable. The perfect connector for a full album, but not strong enough to hold its own.

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

It's all so tightly buttoned down that the first listen evokes a certain déjà vu; You haven't heard it before, and yet you know what's going to happen anyway.

Beating Back the Claws of the Cold aims for timelessness with its fusion of chamber pop, indie rock, and popular folk, but falls short as just another likable, ephemeral fall release.

And this is pop music, right? Why is it all so damned unmemorable?

With their new third record, though, Horse Feathers have tightened and thickened their autumnal moodiness with a classicist, chamber-ensemble sound--and stifled themselves in the process.

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

Cave never quite summons the lyrical beauty that Neu! was capable of, nor do they rock with the blithering, obliterating tension that Oneida brings to its hardest bangers, but once or twice during Neverendless, they do turn locomotive precision into something transformative.

Candela doesn't represent Mice Parade's most memorable outing, but it does showcase a willingness to expand the expectations surrounding their sound.

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.

While Orcas hits on a heavier emotional level than I'd initially expected, that tendency to drift does endure on repeated listens.

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

It’s undeniably pleasurable, but dangerously close to being superficial and meaningless.

While Freedomland has all the weakness of live albums, it compensates with one main critical strength: It documents a living, breathing experience of music, improvised on the spot, moved by strong, ineffable currents, never to be repeated again.

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

The weak spot, as ever, are lyrics that clasp to cliches without transforming them. So we get a song about a certain four-letter-word, and lines about rain or taking chances. On the other hand, the punchline of 'Men in Love' is pretty great, and Beth’s belting usually subsumes the stock imagery.

American Gong is frustrating. It's not a bad album by far, based on the usual criteria one arranges on the bar graph of goodness: it's melodic, paced well, pleasant and so on. At the same time, however, there's nothing that marks it as unique in any real way or different from any Quasi album of the past.

The music here feels not so much modern as refurbished.

Bill Callahan's latest solo effort is so laid back that it almost never gets going at all.

Like Stephin Merritt, his East Coast cognate, Malkmus’ songwriting chops and eye for upper-middle-class detail are too-available excuses for music that is often unremarkable.

When they’re not trying to imitate the inimitable, Painted Palms hit a pleasant if not ground-shaking plateau.

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.

Ellington and Bean’s voices braid pleasant timbres that sound quite right sailing over the band’s strum and shuffle, but they’re curiously lacking in the chemistry that separates necessary from nice.

Jim is pleasant, polite, listenable, smooth (it’s like Yacht Rock for the nu-soul set), undemanding…and a bit of a bore.

Rather than erupting with new insights, The Mountain sags audibly beneath the weight of its new strata.

Love Is All have turned down the sax, exchanging many of their former bursts of spunk for half an album that’s tighter and more heartbreakingly anthemic, and a remainder that drifts into directionless tedium.

They show that they can write sloppy songs with real hooks and something to bop along to. Something that rarely happens thereafter, unfortunately.

It is a difficult piece to listen to on many levels.

It’s kind of fun to hear Ex Hex experiment with their production, but it would have been more fun to hear them take some real risks with, say, an acoustic number or some synths. Truth is, despite its heft, It’s Real isn’t a huge departure from Rips. It’s more like a bulky rough draft of the record that preceded it.

It's hard to imagine 200 Years standing out, even considering its low-key spirit.

This final tension--between the desire to exceed perceived aesthetic limits and the reality of the artists’ own limitations--is one that is present throughout Futuristically Speaking. Jwl B and Shunda K are, as of now, stronger conceptually than they are in execution.

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.

Though these may succeed as pop songs, Belle & Sebastian ultimately subvert their appeal by contradicting precious, self-effacing sentiments with brash music.

Whether Ferraro’s singing is purposefully amateurish or not, it puts the album in a particular light, one in which NYC, Hell 3:00 AM is either an awkward misstep or a tongue-in-cheek spoof. Actually, it probably falls somewhere between the two, but either way, this isn’t James Ferraro playing to his strengths.

When their sound tends towards the more coherent and homogeneous (even on the excellent title track) they risk falling victim to an imitativeness, or perhaps simply a lack of aesthetic ambitiousness, that threatens to overwhelm the originality that they bring to the table.

There are two fairly strange intermezzo experiments and a few heavier-hitting sing-a-longs thrown in to excite ardent fans of their self-titled debut, but overall the album sacrifices listenability to broadcast and hint at Payseur’s “I will say what I will” evolutions to come.

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

These songs are ultimately undone by their ambition in an attempt to turn what could be pleasantly ephemeral fare into moment-defining anthems.

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.

Shrines lacks any friction; Purity Ring has created a very viable sound that doesn't offend or stick.

There’s nothing particular catchy. No song stands out.

Despite the album’s disparate material, it has a lulling cohesiveness. All the songs, wherever they come from, feel like they have been reimagined at the same volume and tempo and in the same wistful ambience.

I'm From Barcelona is fun, but ultimately shallow.

These songs aren't particularly denser or busier than their predecessors, but their burbles and whines serve less purpose than before; instead of sounding overzealous, they sound affected, voluminous for volume's sake.

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.

As it is, Cyclop Reaps has the aura of automatic writing, a stream of unfiltered imagery that is, intermittently, quite arresting, but as a whole shapeless and hard to navigate.

They’ve attempted to tighten up where their debut hung slack – shorter, less songs, less room to drag. Yet dragging is all that Celebration Castle does, falling deeper into the garage-meets-new wave dichotomy that looks good on paper but would require considerably more talent to execute.

To be sure, grime is a hybrid genre, but Run the Road 2 often shows how the balance can be weighed too heavily towards American rap idioms.

For a handful of solid pop songs, S-M Backwards adds nothing good to our conception of Serena-Maneesh, historically or otherwise. It’s a boon for the deeply interested, but it fails to make the case for its own existence.

Aside from the chopped vocal of the title-track, the mind-warp of "R in Zero G," and the woodpecker rhythms that liven up "Fraction" on the back end, the album feels dated.

It either needs to at least nod to actual humanity or just be off-the-wall insane, but doing neither, it just comes off as fake. Grey Oceans falls in-between the cracks of the extremes, and while still an interesting album, feels too shallow and too Serious.

Dispensable, and far from groundbreaking.

12 Reasons doesn’t find Coles in poor form, but he’s nowhere near his Fishscale peak, in terms of lyrical depth or the intensity of his delivery.

All these songs drown together, dissipating like wet Kleenex as soon as they're done.

We can see Power as a breakthrough provided that we do not think about the DFA, !!! or Out Hud, or Les Savy Fav. Unfortunately, Q and Not U do not have much to add to what those bands have already done.