The subdued guitars and steady percussive clip-clop are a noticeable change from the band's usual jangly late-afternoon pop, but even on the richest melodies lyrics and delivery drive the album.

Besides their inability to meet the very aims they set out for themselves, Clean and Zegon fail to do much of anything exciting with their all-star cast.

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.

All At Once shares many of the same stylistic preoccupations as War Prayers, but by carefully reworking similar material, it improves on its predecessor.

This album, like others that nudge closer to perfection without technically breaking new ground--I'm thinking of the Cass McCombs and Tape albums, to name ones I've written about this year--could be a springboard for thinking about why musicians who seem capable of almost anything stay in their comfort zones for albums at a time.

The record finds the band operating in a similar space as the War on Drugs or Real Estate: a fuller sound with a little more polish that still feels homegrown. But in this case, the layers of production do more to maintain a distance than swallow you whole.

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.

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 Richest Man In Babylon is strictly background fare. If you run a coffeeshop, you’re cooking with gas.

You need to listen and absorb. It won't always work. But when it does, you'll find the door open and a fascinating terrain inside.

The fact that the middle of the album is easier to swallow than the beginning is not an indication of any real improvement, but a sign that you become habituated, or at least desensitized, to its utter lack of creativity or soul.

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.

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

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

Even accounting for his career of uncharitable experimentation, Martin Rev’s eighth solo album is something new again. To wit, it’s a haunting, intricate electro-classical record.

Although sloppiness normally both describes and compliments their sound, Shadows is messy with little to redeem it.

The rehearsal takes are probably the real draw (aside from the customary production corrections and sonic scrub all reissues get) for those already tuned to the album’s contrary wavelength, and they do not disappoint.

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

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.

On an emotional level, LISm is hard to get at.

The Mother Stone sounds like a flowering of long gestated creativity but the over gilded lily looms heavy over the bed and smothers the delicacy of his songs. For all the admirable experimentation, the breadth of his vision and the pristine production, Jones takes his leave before an audience overawed and enervated by sensory overload.

Nothing is entirely serious. It’s all in fun--and it is fun, fortunately.

OK, it’s not pretty, but it’s pure Fall. And that’s what makes them a difficult band to feel disappointed with, even if the release is, like Re-Mit, something of a second-rate offering.

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.

The disappointments of Walking Cloud are really quite perplexing, given Mono's limited but impressive history and the promise of their collaboration with Albini. Still, if it fails to live up to the heights of One Step More and their debut Under the Pipal Tree, it has its share of moments.

As a mood piece, there are poignant moments, but nothing resembling a clear emotional statement.

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

The cadre of eclectic guest appearances... make it seem like this record would play more like a mix tape, but Shadow pulls it off, and for the most part, each of the guest artists deliver the goods.