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

For a man who long ago turned the fear of change into his best friend, it's disappointing how uneven his explorations are in Nookie Wood.

Like many of their retro-rock peers, however, the band struggles to find a personal identity that transcends imitation and homage; the result is an album that, while excellent at moments, often falls victim to its own stylistic incertitude.

It's not that Scott has nothing to say. Instead, he suffers a fate much worse--he's boring.

The album’s biggest weakness lies in its arrangements.

The Fool brims with potential for something more substantial, but never confronts those depths.

Mostly because the stakes are so high, By the Throat, the would-be comeback from prodigal Minneapolis duo Eyedea & Abilities, has to rate as a disappointment, despite interesting intentions and a few sublime moments.

La Sera's debut is the Kate Moss of garage rock, blank-eyed, pretty and dangerously thin.

In expanding her breadth, Merritt relinquishes too much of the depth that made her debut so distinguished.

The good stuff (those [first] three tracks, and maybe the indignant “Al Green”) provides Kool Keith an appropriate showcase and sounds like nothing else, but for much of this disc, the main man appears AWOL.

Wooden Shjips’ pleasant but toothless music feels insubstantial, if not insipid, in relation to the demands of our unforgiving present.

They're going through the motions, you can't get into it, and then it's over, just like that. Strange Weather, Isn't It? is a party where everyone looks like they're having fun.

It’s overkill. Gangsta rap parodies itself better than any outsider ever could. Homeboy Sandman is so far inside his self-referential bubble that he can’t see his target is already in on the joke.

The Avalanche is, perhaps predictably, a middling reconstitution of its legitimate predecessor.

Over the course of three decades, Gelb has managed to make two albums that are great all the way though: Chore of Enchantment and 'Sno Angel Like You. He's made dozens that are uneven, and this is another one.

Real Estate’s sound is imbued with the same sentimentality as the rest of the indie class of 2009, but with zero ambition.

Seems to be a misguided stab at radio-friendliness.

You can sense what Darkstar wants to create--music that’s genre-less, accessible yet mysterious--but they haven’t found a way to compensate for the rougher finishes they’ve stripped from their work.

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.

This EP still feels like a small plate of leftovers from a meal that promised more than it delivered, as though Wolfgang Puck was on the can, not in the kitchen.

Beautifully played, immaculately recorded and bloated to the gills with 1970s album rock pretensions, it's a throwback to a time that most people don't remember very well (and few of those have any desire to revisit).

On All Things Will Unwind, though, the bursts of inspiration in each corner and crevice remain too stiff to merge into anything more than the sum of their parts.

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.

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

If you put Dos on, then do something else that demands more of your attention. You’ll feel better about whatever it is that you’re doing. That’s as ringing of an endorsement as I can muster.

Drums Between the Bells at its simplest is often Drums Between the Bells at its best.

The result is a pastiche of deja vu moments that distract from a significant level of musicianship that this growing Philadelphia sextet possesses.

Krell seems like a victim of his own good intentions. There's a kernel of an idea here.

The lyrics (and their alternately crooned and flat-rapped delivery) are nothing new is probably the worst that can be said of them.

The Eagulls’ album does a fantastic job of funneling the band’s energy. That’s the good part. But as for the subtleties--the way that players interact, the fit between chug and melody, the depth that emerges with occasional negative space--you won’t find any of that here.

Despite its lackluster production and a dearth of strong songs, Clutching Stems isn't quite a bust. Olson still turns in some strong tracks, which are not coincidentally the ones that sound like they would have been most at home on earlier albums.

There’s little to grasp onto with The Sun, as the record more often than not locks into a cautious mode of jamming on simple figures with little idea as to where to actually take them.

With the exception of the engorged 'Couleurs,' 'Dark Moves of Love's' lift into the stratosphere, and the ambient feather-on-the-breath drones of 'Midnight Souls Still Remain,' Saturdays = Youth is strangely leaden, an album fenced off by its conceptual constraints.

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.

As Malkmus and Kannberg each find out what kind of musician each one is, the end result is less interesting than when they were in the process of discovering that and were having fun trying out different ideas and really discovering new things together.

RZA still sounds determined, but his rhymes are self-obsessed, repetitive, and dulled by constant calls for drugs and women.

The second half of Marciology especially drags on. It’s not songs but huge chunks of poetry piled up, heavy on wordplay, with rhyming done nicely, almost perfectly. But not many of the tracks work as songs at all. Mediocre verses from guests only makes the material more sluggish.

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.

Sly winks at a complicit listener are replaced by a troubling disregard for the audience, and The Magnetic Fields sink to the bottom of the sea of self-satisfaction.

Cryland is, for the most part, a collection of psyched-up blues riffs that underpin lyrics full of anachronistic clichés about old-time religion and various other tried-and-true topics about which people sing The Blues.

Neither of them could truly be called “free” players - most of their own music is fairly composed - and it sometimes seems like they don’t really know what they’re doing with each other.

The album is just disappointing: full of slick beats of undisguised artifice and lacking the one thing all good slow jams need – namely, great vocals.

As a relic relief map of an endearing school of Canadian pop weirdness, Swan Lake's first offering is an accomplishment; still, that doesn't make teasing the occasional shining strand out of so much ugliness any less of a chore.

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.

Its vaguely experimental ambitions and occasionally interesting musical flourishes don’t do much to separate it from the mass of baroque indie already circulating, amassing often unwarranted critical acclaim.

Guantanamo Baywatch is a pretty good all-instrumental surf band with a terrible singer. Chest Crawl... puts vocals on all but three of its 11 songs, attempting Cramps-style, reverbed rants, Trashmen-esque shouted call and response, Elvis-y 12/8 balladry and hiccuping rockabilly vamps and sheep-bleating, vibrato'd yelps, all badly off-key and dreadfully recorded.

Cold Cave are neither here nor there. The pop hooks aren’t catchy enough, the ‘coldness’ too rote, the flirtation with eroticism simply an abbreviated spin on Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.”

Ear Drum is his sprawling, messy 2007 manifesto, loaded with rhymes that take weeks to unpack, to say nothing of the bizarre diversity of producers and guests.

It covers too much ground, spreads its inventive energies too thin.

Wilco is a Great Band, if you like stuff that’s boring. And a lot of people seemingly do.

One of the risks of having faith is becoming deaf to plain truths. The truth in this case is that most of In the Grace of Your Love is lousy.

Its appropriation of G-funk hooks and production is really off-putting, and makes me wonder exactly who this record is for.

The consequences are not always dull, and Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy is as enjoyable at points as the music it’s clearly drawing from.

It's another misfire with a handful of great moments that point to something better.

This is not a one-hit wonder situation, or even an album with only one good song. With King Night, Salem exhausts all its resources in a singular moment, which leaves the rest of the record to suffer through its own paralysis and mediocrity.

From the Valley to the Stars doesn’t have that directness [of her first album]; it gives the persistent feeling that it is nothing but parts.

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

Its successes -- its pleasing idiosyncrasies, its moments of charm, and so on -- are there, but underneath a veneer of such blandness that finding them seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Given that everything here is a like a jam from musicians suspicious of jamming, the charms and defects are like a whole album of B-sides.

Though excellent in brief parts, much of the album is still worrisome, at times specifically seeming to document a band running out of steam.

Although its influences are strong and well synthesized, and the results are listenable, it falls short of being anything other than used bin fodder.

His songs succeed when they balance on the knife-edge of banality and pathos, and when they succeed in making formula redeem itself and regain a kind of innocent power. For most of Realism, unfortunately, Merritt fails to even remotely strike this balance, abandoning any emotional power as he falls victim his penchant for formula and banality.

It’s stale, predictable, and pedestrian in its fussy perfection.

While pleasant enough on a superficial level, the band's third full-length, Traps, falls short of the kind of coherent, compelling vision that would lift them up from intermittently-engaging mediocrity.

The whole of it seems passive and incomplete.

Falling somewhere between a compilation, a beat CD and a producer showcase, this fails to satisfy on any of those levels.

While Beaus$Eros retains his playfulness and wordplay, and while the songs are without doubt catchy, Farquhar is out of his depth.

Where Beaches blended human touch and electricity to create heart-stopping climaxes and an air of constant expectancy, Broken Ear attempts a streamlined repetition of the formula with much more emphasis on the electricity, and the whole does not equal the sum of the parts.

Anika was apparently recorded in a short time, and it's hard not to wish it felt at once more urgent and more cohesive.

What was once an exciting examination of a seldom-explored corner of rock and roll has become a listless, mechanical affair.

Other than some inoffensive feignings at trying something new, there's not too much else to be heard.

The results, which are generally not very good, fall into the same aesthetic gray area as the majority of mashups everywhere: laudable ambition, misbegotten audacity.

Life Sux, however, shows that laziness is still very much the enemy here. And it comes in many flavors, but none more egregious than the penchant for gimmicks.

Marked by inconsistent, not fully formed songwriting, Here We Go Magic's new tracks also make for an indecisive, if not bipolar, collection.

Deacon is a gifted musician capable of so much more, and that makes Bromst feel like a waste.

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.

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.

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

Throughout the album, as soon as the drums and guitar slide into nod-inducing alignment, they veer off-track. The songs simply do not cohere. The numerous instrumental tracks on the album show off the band’s virtuosity, but to entirely unmemorable effect.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra is the most basic, easily digestible, pre-chewed pop archetype. With zero nutritional value.

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

A totally hit and miss affair, with only two of the five songs clicking.

The album is also horribly sequenced, pushing its best tracks down after a morass of prettier, more insipid melodies had fluffed you.

Thom Yorke used to make better music than the nine anemic Atoms for Peace cuts here.

There is literally nothing on Gauntlet Hair that hasn't been done better by more respectable second-order bands like Tonstartssbandht or Ganglians.

Now, we’re certainly all pro-happiness and exuberance, but the same doggedly optimistic message reiterated during several songs begins to sound more than a little shallow, even if such statements have a way of lending themselves more grandeur than they deserve.

It's as if More and Black set out to purposely compose a more "mature" album. By slowing things down they're able to accommodate R&B outings, spoken word stories and artsy offerings, but to be honest, it's not all that much fun.

Together, and backed by the rhythm section of Cornelius' band, one would hope for left-field pop fireworks, but their debut album Salt on Sea Glass is more of a mediocre light show.

Gesturing, though, is just about all it does.

His voice is a delightful constant through good writing and bad. The propeller-arms guitar rock supplied by Pollard's various flesh-and-blood bandmates tend to provide just-off-enough accompaniment, but Tobias mucks it all up.

Vocalist Ryan McPhun deftly walks the line between embarassing naivete and calculation.

While a well-concocted snotty attitude may be a decisive factor in any number of great rock albums, Born Again in the USA feels lazy without any particular agenda. It’s good for a laugh and a couple of listens, but ultimately does not resonate.

When guests appear on a few songs (Maxo Cream and Ohgeesy among the standouts) it appears that Greedo is actually not bad, but only on hooks. His hooks are catchy, melodic and even smart in a dumb way. Most songs are just that, hooks stretched for two minutes. If verses and hooks stand for meat and bones, Netflix and Deal is bones only. Thanks but no thanks.

The problem is the lack of hooks, atmospherics and soul.

Picture is an album’s worth of universal feelings spoiled by his compulsion to present them as sordid or literary, to make them clever or allusive or needlessly alliterative

Particularly in the lugubrious opening half of the disc, Clogs tends to repeat things simply for the sake of repeating them without really building towards anything.

The Ark Work is certainly not black metal. The problem is that it’s really not much else, either. Indeed, even after repeated listens, it comes across not so much as an album but as a sort of formless mass, which could be a good thing, in the right hands, but here does little more than baffle and exasperate.

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.