The songwriting is just as strong as anything in Lerner’s output and much like emotional nadirs, emotional zeniths also fade. Lerner’s moment in the sun is as fun for the listener as it is for him.

It's a great, moving set of songs from one of the few modern songwriters to actively challenge his own preconceptions of his art.

Bold and exciting, the project demonstrates the infinite possibilities available to modern producers, if only they look in the unlikeliest of places.

The cool thing about Protean Threat is that he’s got the beast and the collar. He can let things run wild in complicated ways while also keeping it wholly and brilliantly under control. Let’s not mince words. This is one of the best rock albums of 2020.

By most measures, Cream Cuts is Tussle’s most enjoyable and fully realized release yet, but its excellence can’t compensate for the nagging sameness that plagues most of its songs.

Goblin is the messy schizoid splatter painting of the child we've raised and ruined, and it's coherent only as a hopeless plea for us to expect nothing from him again.

Entirely derivative but somehow not obvious, the record is surprisingly--and pleasantly--strange.

That flair for the undramatic has produced yet another fragile and entrancing record.

It’s still a trip, just a marginally more vivid one, and that’s a good thing.

Personal Life is absorbing and entertaining the first few times through, but many may not find it as engaging as the Thermals' best work.

Violent Hearts occasionally plods, as on "No One," "Other Girls," and the opener "Believe," (at least before its delightfully messy climax). But more often it quietly impresses, revealing new melodic and harmonic strands with each subsequent listen.

Pink Graffiti is a strong album, and one that grows on you the more you listen to it. Your opinion of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys probably won't affect your judgment of it all that much.

N-Space was at best ignorable, but Departed Glories makes a mark. Play it quietly and it shades the atmosphere; play it loudly and you can get lost in its sculpted tones and distilled emotions.

The album varies between affecting and emotionally resonant straightforward pieces, and at times moments that increase the level of abstraction and repetition into minimalism. ... Sun Piano is a meditative and elegiac set, yet points towards the possibilities of endless variation and reflection.

Urban Turban is consolidation for Cornershop, pulling together old and new tracks and showing as many hands as they can.

It may be that he doesn’t have a country bone to stand on, but he obviously knows all about the music’s spirit.

This is not a welcoming album, but it’s as gripping and immersive as a good film about dystopia.

Side one of MCIII consists of perfectly enjoyable songs, with similar ingredients--piano, interesting guitar work, a voice reminiscent of ‘60s pop, but that ineffable thing that makes songs stick in your head just doesn’t seem to be here.... The second half of the album is problematic in a different way.

The few moments of clarity don’t diminish Sleepwalk’s seductive anesthetic, which may be one of the album’s drawbacks.

The group [is] at it's best when it stays close to it's R & B foundation. Standing in the Way of Control expands the Gossip's pallette, but the keepers here hug tight to the rump.

Hoffman used to be in Ex-Cult. They have the same driving, droning, chanting, intoning attack, and though it’s pitched way up high in a womanly register, it concedes nothing else at all to conventional femininity. Great stuff.

Polizze has escaped the weight of history, the whole of the Hiss persona reaching the higher plain that the guitar has occupied from day one.

McCauley writes within genre, embraces its trappings, and emerges with completely acceptable results.

Jim is pleasant, polite, listenable, smooth (it’s like Yacht Rock for the nu-soul set), undemanding…and a bit of a bore.

Chasny has souped up his production values, and they’ve never been sharper than they are on Luminous Night, checking everything Chasny has ever done well with unprecedented clarity.

Despite a smattering of highlights, there’s no gut-punch anywhere on Jukebox.

There’s nothing bombastic about it, but it’s large in a way that folk-picking seldom is, and it fills every inch of a sonic landscape.

Gonzalez has wisely resisted the urge to bulk up his sound, and concentrated instead on seeing how far a guitar, his voice and a few continents worth of influences can carry him.