If the joy of the album is tracking Ranaldo through his worldly interests, his hippie mode, his indie-rocking, then the struggle is never feeling at home because the record never quite finds its sweet spot.

Reviver might make for interesting enough listening in the immediate, but it‘s also a prime candidate for the cut out bin of memory once the band finally arrives at its aforementioned new destination.

In the end, it's the restraint, control, and unlikely expansiveness that make The Best of Gloucester County a strong and surreal step forward for Smith and his band.

V may be more intimate and introverted than Ancestral Star or Lost in the Glare, but it is no less cinematic. It’s a remarkable return to the fore for Porras and Caminiti.

The songs hover around the four-minute mark, and are economical in their implementation, with an overall sheen that does occasionally come close to overdoing it.

While wildly uneven and far from either's strongest work, Instrumental Tourist does have its moments of inspiration.

Tao of the Dead makes me, by turns, want to improve my attention span and want to listen to something else.

The BQE is best listened to in complete ignorance of the track titles, packaging, or even professed subject matter. The music speaks best when it speaks for itself.

If the first half feels a little like a warm-up, they deliver the payoff in fine style and by the end you may feel as worn out as the band must be.

You'll hear a hint of Arcade Fire in the shout-along choruses, a whisper of Neutral Milk Hotel in the tales of deformed love, an intimation of the Decemberists in the pantomime sea shanties that explode into rock. They're all pretty faint echos, though, the vaguest kinds of familiar outposts in a sea of strangeness.

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).

PH's previous efforts (the live shows, in particular) have been experiments in what an average listener can take, punctuated with bursts of pleasant catchiness. On Laced, Whitehurst has inverted the ratio, which works, which means the more grating leftovers can be appreciated for the oddities they are.

Architecture in Helsinki delivers complex, dynamic composition and arrangement in a package that, while not universally digestible, is entertaining for all.

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.

These songs are meant for dancing. The pieces are sharp, but they fit together in irresistibly body-moving ways. The music stretches out in easy hedonism then judders to a freeze tag stop, holds a pose just long enough that you can admire it, and jitters on from there.

It’s a testament to the strength of Ashley’s reality, and more importantly his adaptability, that the album holds together at all. Although it draws on half a continent’s worth of source material, The Golden Hour still bears, at every turn, the dark, swaggering cynicism that has always defined Firewater.

Finders Keepers has managed to extract another handful of diamonds from a shaft seemingly unsafe for further exploration.

Alpers is smart, you can tell immediately, yet the album feels carefully scrubbed of identifying marks, swinging between Flaming Lips-size pomp and Laurie Anderson-style catatonia.

The music here feels not so much modern as refurbished.

Horses... is Silver Mount Zion’s most musically satisfying disc to date because, while the well-worn formulae are present, sonic variance and compositional modification has brought a welcome diversity to an increasingly wearisome aesthetic.

I suppose that this isn’t the album a lot of people were probably hoping for. But it’s never the album people were hoping for.

The end result is a sugar-high of electronic keyboard and guitars reaching glam-rock heights and booty shaking lows, all based around very simple, classical ideas of song-structure.

The kids will tolerate Maladroit, and probably many more dull records just like it, because it’s a product of Weezer.

While a somewhat trained ear could tease out what came from where, it's a lot easier in this case just to sit back and enjoy work that seems to value interesting textures and arrangements - but not at the expense of the songs themselves.

An album that can be assertive as it is reflective, and as troubled as it is engaged.

Even though this is Blackburn and Hartley’s first record as Higher Authorities, they’ve had this psychedelic, dubby feel nailed down for years now. Making it more prominent is just a nice touch.

The closer “My Will” is a hymn that induces chills, the choral heights a total wave that subsumes the tom tom trot. Those rhythms make this add up to more than folk + rock. But the ancient rhymes transcend equations.

They don’t shy from their strengths, but they don’t struggle to feature them either, creating an album that never feels like a flippant one-off. Big Walnuts Yonder might be doing a whole bunch of things, but it’s largely an album about making those things cohere.