Gesturing, though, is just about all it does.

Listen to the tracks that are not being released as singles and you'll see that the band truly does have something to offer outside of their super-fun-party-time aesthetic.

Gardner and Hammel haven’t come close to exhausting their songwriting prowess, and Re-Arrange Us is probably their most appealing album to date.

Mohn is a foreboding album that also has its comforts.

This is not a bad album, and if it weren't carrying the Gang of Four name, you might find it casually enjoyable.

Mostly, though, the record shows off Grass Widow's continued ability to hone their own style.

While the individual songs here impress, Holograms feels more like a collection of singles than a cohesive work.

For a handful of solid pop songs, S-M Backwards adds nothing good to our conception of Serena-Maneesh, historically or otherwise. It’s a boon for the deeply interested, but it fails to make the case for its own existence.

If the last Red Krayola With Art & Language record, "Sighs Trapped By Liars," surprised with its gentility, Thompson’s dialectical relationship to/with form pretty much dictated that its follow-up had to jut out at right angles from its predecessor.

But largely, Jacaszek's wedding of disparate styles pays off in Glimmer's evocation of certain moods and expert shifts from mode to mode.

Barry Adamson, formerly of Magazine and The Bad Seeds, has released his most commercial-friendly album to date.

Circular Sounds takes the craft aspect to a higher level. Stoltz’s early records were scrappy, guitar-centric home recordings, and his previous LP, Below the Branches, was a piano-dominated, primary colors affair, but this one is a study in how to blend signifiers and sonorities so that they enhance each other.

Voxtrot hew to the genre standards to consistently pleasing, if never thrilling, effect.

On earlier albums, Egyptrixx proved the possibilities, but Pure, Beyond Reproach doesn’t live up to its predecessors.

It more or less picks up where Beaches and Canyons left off, allowing for more subtle changes in tone while distilling the Black Dice sound down to a considerably purer essence.

Defever can still write great, melancholic pop songs.

Alcoholic ne’er-do-wells or not, New Bums has allowed the duo to ditch old genre entrapments and celebrate new life as troubadours of enrapturing darkness.

Therein lies the power of this understatedly great debut – in avoiding a simple homage to sounds that came and went a couple of decades ago, Gonzalez managed to imbue her music with a greater historical perspective.

It's always interesting to hear artists develop, but one can't help but question the conviction here.

Together is a good album that is catchy and full of hooks and does a lot of what we've come to expect from the band. Having said that, it's also a step down.

It feels like a genuine use of the source material; not even as something conscious, like a person that travels around hoping to find new sounds, but rather as an act of dialectical eruption--the past naturally coming back in a different form.

Vocalist Ryan McPhun deftly walks the line between embarassing naivete and calculation.

English Little League starts with a memorable and high-quality opener in “Xeno Pariah,” a compact showcase of everything the band does right.... They don’t maintain that high quality--the off-key “Sir Garlic Breath” is just painful--and more often than not, the songs fall into good-not-great territory.

Bardo Pond's self-titled is a massive, monumental piece of work, proving once again that this long-running outfit can still crank the heavy, mind-numbing psych that it's always been known for.

Despite its velocity, the album is ambient in the sense that it sounds best when heard with the same indirect, free-associative attention that’s behind it.

This set is intriguing, though recent Fall is easiest to take in small doses.

I is the result, four long, loosely-related tracks that bump and groove and thrum and throb, often hypnotically, sometimes with a lively intensity. As an idea of musical process reimagined, I is always interesting. But as music, it’s uneven.

A glorious and preposterous journey.