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.

If you're in the mood, the repeating riffs may fit right in; if you're not, you'll grow weary midway through each song.

As it is, Cyclop Reaps has the aura of automatic writing, a stream of unfiltered imagery that is, intermittently, quite arresting, but as a whole shapeless and hard to navigate.

Drones and feedback accumulate, intensify, and the whole thing threatens to collapse or combust. It does neither. ... Menuck’s difficult record is clearly a post-Trump artwork, a soundtrack for outrage fatigue. Its odd power raises questions.

Ordinary moments are distilled into liquid bits of musical clarity, surrounded by a rich but muted palette of sounds and let fly into the world. It is rare for songs so soft and confiding to sound this sophisticated.

All these songs drown together, dissipating like wet Kleenex as soon as they're done.

None of this is terrible, but none, also, is as tensely, gloriously obliterating as Coconut’s opening blow.

Unlike previous output, the ten tracks on Attention Please are slick, synthesized, almost club-ready vamps (or at least that seems to be their aspiration). The affect may be intentional but for the most part I found them to be drowsy, forgettable, head-nodding throwaways with at least a passable amount of textural variety but very little in the way of memorable song-writing.

It is, in short, the sound of a group confidently, and unassumingly, re-defining its own universe.

While most of Here We Go Magic works well as a unit, the more noise-based, non-vocal tracks detract from momentum; they’re the least interesting things on the album.

In Heaven is a significant advance for Twin Sister, both in the way that it smoothes over and clarifies its original aesthetic and in the way it explores a handful of new avenues.

Ghettoville is a purposefully secretive record, a vision quest, a Cassavetes lens--at times challenging to sit through, but the more you look into it, the more you might discover.

It has a denser, more cohesive sound, more defined rhythms and richer arrangements--and yet lacks some of the subterranean pull of its predecessor.

Richard Youngs has given us an album that just about anyone can pick up a guitar to play along to, but that doesn’t mean the experience of listening to The Rest is Scenery is an easy one. Fans of his, of course, wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Errant Charm is by no means a bad album, but it's not great either; it's just nice in a way that is too easy to ignore for its own good.

The most interesting tracks on this album sound like music for the great Pier 1 Imports in the sky, suggesting an infinity of pure, terrifying stasis.

While Goldfrapp's new sound calls to mind the likes of the Human League, Donna Summer, and Soft Cell, it's more than the sum of those parts and benefits from much heavier beats than many of its apparent influences.

Promise Of Love would be a good joint, by indie rock standards, if the passive-aggressive everyschmuck ex-girlfriend mixed-tape staples on the latter half didn’t suck so badly.

Anxiety Always shows Miller and Kuperus trying a lot of new ideas and singing with much more range and emotion.

It's not as interesting as it could and probably should be.

Wolfe seems out in the open for the first time--overall, though, she's more interesting when she's deep in the woods.

Natural History is at its best when it's at its most focused.

Lust Lust Lust is the best The Raveonettes have ever been.

False Idols could have been impressive and believable at fewer than a dozen tracks, but nine of the 15 seem insufferably lazy.

It’s overkill. Gangsta rap parodies itself better than any outsider ever could. Homeboy Sandman is so far inside his self-referential bubble that he can’t see his target is already in on the joke.

A puny, ill-conceived record in comparison to both Alphabetical and its predecessor United.

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

If that all sounds a bit lofty and conceptual, well, BBF is just that, but it’s also fun. Some tracks plod a little, and will sound pretentious to some ears, but each one contains a wealth of detail, and its best moments are miniature triumphs.