All I did was press fast-forward, track after track. When that expectation of emotional articulation wasn't met, it brought up that feeling of outrage, as if somehow Superchunk let me down.

It all sounds very much expected, and very much the same. Which wouldn’t be so bad if that didn’t mean putting himself in the same crowd as so many corporatized, for-sale-at-the-mall acts.

As a listener, you pretty much have Eskmo pegged by halfway, and it's disappointing that there aren't any sonic curveballs in the second half.

Plat du Jour is no great aesthetic success (it is too spotty and inconsistent) and its discursive dogmatism can border on sledgehammer browbeating. Nevertheless, Herbert does ask questions no other artist is wont to pose; for this, he commands our respect.

If The Kills didn't try so hard to be sultry, they might have a similar breakthrough. They're more appealing when you've got no idea what's on their mind.

It's a project with too many authors and not enough personality, too many ideas and not enough meaning.

Despite some good ideas and intriguing moments, tracks like “Inside World” feel unsatisfyingly aimless.

It blunts and softens its influences, whether heavy rock or soul or krautrock, and delivers them in a medium-temperature hippie haze.

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

Volume is fine, fuzz is good, but it shouldn’t obliterate the songs.

Sandwiched between two of the most towering works of its kind, Greenwood's massed strings can't help but transmit a tad cheeky.

The good news is that this is, in fact, a throwback to their earlier work. The bad news is that it’s not throwback enough.

For the most part, Donkey flounders in a sterile morass. It may well bring CSS to a larger audience, one that doesn't consider subversiveness an impediment, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing.

Doseone’s rapping is thicketed to the point of impenetrability; whatever he wishes to convey gets lost in his internal rhymes.

More often, Disappears's new sound plods--especially by comparison with the frantic, loopy movement through spacy echo chambers that characterized much of the group's material on Lux and Guider

But from the stridently Floydian gravitas of its cover to the ponderous, tolling piano notes that close the album, Take My Breath Away finds Boratto straining uncomfortably to make some kind of serious statement.

It’s not sanctimony that drags the album down so much as lack of focus, both lyrical and aesthetic. Coursing between the ham-fisted message-moments is a nimble and reliably engaging display of verbal dexterity.

'Stardust to Sentience' is the only piece on the album with memorable words and a melody, and it’s accompanied by very interesting instrumental warbles that heighten the song. Most of the other singing is bleached out, a pale ghost of what one wishes it were.

Three-Four is simply too filled with excesses and repetitions for its bright moments to add up to a solid album.

It amounts to a frustrating end to a frustrating record, one where some great sounds and ideas aren’t fully worked through into wholly successful songs.

It's hard not to admire the jerky, clean-toned guitar scribbles on 'Cassius,' but most of the rest of the song sounds like a Franz Ferdinand b-side.

The latest full-length from the latest version of The Shins has some amazing songs.... But it also has some of the worst songs The Shins have ever produced.

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.

Their greatest undoing comes from slouching toward completion. So much of their debut worked because it lacked finish. The holes in the record were where the charm oozed most freely. But now that those have been filled in by pedal steel and organ, many of the songs shine with an unoriginal veneer.

It’s plenty theatrical, and tries to be upsetting at some points and rustic at others. It’s hard to get too worked up either way, however, especially when the sound turns fuzzy at all the key moments.

The end result lumps the worst banalities of "indie" music into electronic sounds that, if properly fleshed out, might have been interesting.

Upon repeated listens, the album gets about as intimate as Wembley. Played-up drum fills, crescendoed dynamics and large soundboards add little to the Turin Brakes sound.

Both musicians are good enough at this genre that Joy is never a total drag (if not quite a Joy either), but also both of them have been better, and Segall has been better this year, so caveat emptor.