The reissue shows how prickly and difficult Social Climber's aesthetic could be, its arrangements as sparse as Young Marble Giants, though less even less concerned with hook and melody.

This time out, more than ever before, it really feels like Brooks and Co. are half-assing it, victory lap style, when they could have soared once again.

Maybe the problem with The Politics of Envy is that these tracks just sounded too good playing back on shiny studio monitors to a roomful of old friends. If he's struggling to say something about the wider world, maybe Stewart should consider a retreat into his own eccentric interior.

Jiaolong speaks in a more comprehensible language because it's not florid psych-pop, but as with Caribou, I do not see a way to become anything other than a spectator of this music.

Ultimately, though, I can’t escape the feeling that there’s nothing much at stake in All the Way.

Aside from the average genre stabs, What Will We Be is a surprisingly sullen and ponderous album. Absent is Banhart’s mania, the zaniness that he always seemed barely able to contain.

English Little League starts with a memorable and high-quality opener in “Xeno Pariah,” a compact showcase of everything the band does right.... They don’t maintain that high quality--the off-key “Sir Garlic Breath” is just painful--and more often than not, the songs fall into good-not-great territory.

Blonde Redhead haven't run out of ideas, but Misery strips them of their eccentricities so thoroughly that the few that remain sound out of place.

Standing at the Sky's Edge is Hawley's first major misstep.

It was obviously made with care, and, as an result, is pretty easy on the ears. Much of it is also over-saturated, poured on too thick, and it can be cloying in its polite pleasantness.

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

The music is too monochromatically saccharine (whether cheery, wistful, or both) to faithfully conjure anything more than a narrow and fleeting slice of human experience.

Every song in the first half of the album tries so hard to get somewhere, but just ends up breaking down when it becomes obvious there’s no end in sight.

While Jamie Stewart & co. succeed at replicating the fractured nature of their live shows – the mix of sparse and dense, broken and enraged, auxiliary percussion and programming, noise and melodiousness is all here – it's beginning to sound rote.

The problem is that it all sounds so familiar, and they just seem far too comfortable perpetuating stoner rock cliches.

It's always interesting to hear artists develop, but one can't help but question the conviction here.

Too much of The Listener finds Gelb bridging his inspired moments with monotonous jazz piano and dusty crooning.

Everything else seems comparatively flat and unsurprising; while the components of the individual songs are different, the results are of a kind, like a set of recipes using the same ingredients.

On earlier albums, Egyptrixx proved the possibilities, but Pure, Beyond Reproach doesn’t live up to its predecessors.

The first half of this album is so annoying that you might give up before you hit a few of the better songs, all tucked away after the halfway point.

Sushi sounds enthusiastic but slight, with generic synths and run-of-the-mill dubstep-inflected bass lines.

It's not really very interesting, bold or exciting, but neither is it ever objectionable.

A nasty, dense and confrontational mess.

It is something of a missing link, and therefore a reminder of the often uncomfortably close proximity, between indie baroque’s earnestness and the pyrotechnic baroque of a lead singer who keeps a “passion coach” in his entourage.

Goat are a bit too tight and knowing to be transcendental or truly trippy, for now at least, although the Afro-beat leanings that crop up all over Commune point at avenues rich in potential out-of-body experiences.

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

A few promising moments aside, most of it hardly resounds at all.

The thing is, this isn’t a bad album. But it is so full of mediocre songs--as are most of the albums since the end of GBV--that one has to ask why he just didn’t save up all the great ones and make one really excellent album.