Easily 30 minutes too long and four symphony orchestras too many, Human Conditions feels like a soundtrack to Barnum and Bailey, with Ashcroft’s earnest vocals drowned out by a cast of thousands.

The A List of Burning Mountains performance is a stand-out LP, which shows a pleasing growth of confidence to expand beyond the confines of hyphen-rock.

The balance--between groove and experiment, organic and synthetic sound--shifts constantly on this very strong album, sometimes prodding listeners to think, other times comforting them with familiar sounds and, occasionally, overwhelming them with ephemeral beauty.

In the Maybe World feels like an (unintentional, perhaps) sequel or response to Geek the Girl, turning down the intensity while sharing a twilit mood.

Reid’s rolling, sweeping, ever-present groove takes on colors and textures, courtesy of Hebden and his suite of gizmos (real or imagined), but it’s always the same hard road, the same track of tandem steel rays that cut through every borough, every station, every hall and every mind.

When obtuse means nonsensical and there's no one consistently there to tie the free associations together, it becomes less a case of judging Vast on his own street odyssey and more a case, ironically, of falling back to where we started in the least desirable way: It's good, yeah, but it's no "Iron Galaxy."

A bit melodramatic, but undeniably compelling, Scattergood’s work has already drawn comparisons to Tori Amos and Kate Bush.

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.

For a collaboration that could've easily become a Cocoon of styles and persons past, The Orbserver in the Star House plays surprisingly spry.

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.

This is a wonderful album, easily as good, though perhaps less immediately accessible, than last year’s "Rites of Uncovering."

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.

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.

More like faithful reiterations of soul cliches than anything fresh or interesting, nearly every track will remind you of someone else.

Calamity shows the Curtains to be a band of great moments more than great songs, and in this distinction lies the difference between the listener that dismisses the album and the one that holds on to it despite its flaws.

Six Cups is a busy, urgent and joyous trip that sidesteps categorization, a feat unto itself in field where new micro-genres are described every few months.

It sounds like the Good Shoes are tired and mildly sick of it all--and unfortunately, it’s catching.

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

Even with so many strikes against it, however, Seconds manages to be a surprisingly compelling listen.

You can hear him trying to sort out the differences between Aeroplane's past and its/his future without resolving them yet. Appropriately, if you often find yourself unwittingly listening to pop hits from 1975-1985, you are the target demographic of We Can't Fly.

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.

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.

Uncanney Valley looks like a Dismemberment Plan record and largely sounds like a Dismemberment Plan record. But yet, it’s not a Dismemberment Plan record. Not a very good one, anyway.

A messy, disappointing record that would be a miss from any artist, but from an artist of Mos Def’s talents, it’s a minor disaster.

Cosy Moments moves slightly toward pop-and-hook than the last Kinski album did, but more than maintains its integrity as an outsized purveyor of aggressive guitar rock.

Only “Travel Fox” and “RocMarcable” in the second half come close to the usual Marci in his macking mode. But even they won’t warrant revisiting this EP in a couple of years.

The music offers plenty of reasons to feel good about feeling bad; too bad that the lyrics, which suggest these feelings in the first place, evacuate themselves moments after they surface, making for a curiously glossy listening experience.

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

It seems borne more out of logical considerations than organic ones. It doesn’t mean the music is necessarily bad, but rather that it’s animated more out of a lifelessness than anything else. It’s undead music.

This second full-length is like looking at fog through a clean window. There's nothing there, and boy can you ever hear that nothing clearly.

Anywhere I Lay My Head falters on Johansson’s vocals, or lack of a distinctive voice.

I ultimately found Solo Electric Bass 1 as dull as it must have been difficult to play.

It's a conservative, often misguided assault on mainstream dance music.

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.

Unfortunately, the observational heart of the disc's best rhymes are obscured by manicured eccentricity and musical dilettantism.

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 weird and promising thing is that it works without ever feeling natural. The actual coexistence of the earnest and the smoove stops being so striking after a while, but the best songs on Rules don’t let you forget there is one.

The songs here are mostly ponderous, nine-minute long epics with very little in the way of song form, melody, or musical interest.

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.

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

The spoken words mix wonderfully with excellent musical arrangements, but the original songs primarily suffer in comparison.

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.

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.

The result is a slinky, spiky, minimalist groove, clanking like some kind of extinct, rusty machinery. Lyrics are impressionistic, insinuated over heaving rhythms in not-quite-linear blurts of imagery, but they seem to consider the place of music in times of conflict.

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.

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

It’s clear from the beginning that Bell can handle the vocal chores but what remains questionable is Clarke’s ability to rescue his beats from the predictable morass of synth pop’s stodgy past without, of course, overdoing it.

What we do get is delay-drenched college rock, circa 1983.

To all indications, Rain in England is irredeemably bad. This is what it sounds like when everyone fails to point out that an idea isn't worth indulging.