Clocking in at an hour, there's ample opportunity for missteps and toss-offs, but also first rate, two-chord grinds that stand up to the best material the Fall has ever recorded.

There’s not a lot behind the well-polished surfaces.

With so much in the blender, it's a testament to BSS's production skills that tracks like this don't fly apart. But they do get muddled.

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.

Alas, the manic pace of the total structural collage makes it awfully hard to settle in as a listener. Deerhoof vs. Evil has a Guernica quality, in which pleasure and humanity are sublimated to the grotesque, which in turn is justified by the supposed inevitability of rational progress.

The record doesn’t sound much like a free improv session, but it retains the crucial dynamic of starting from zero and seeing where it goes, and there’s enough going on here to make me curious where they’ll go next.

This is where the irony comes in--he sacrifices most of his originality to referential tropes. Through successfully emulating noteworthy keyboardists of the past, he nearly obliterates his own identity as a practitioner. It's not that he isn't good, either. He's too good.

Much of what made Shallow Grave so striking was its density, its pairing of deftly constructed lyrics with rapid-fire notes and chords. At times, some of the songs on The Wild Hunt--specifically "You're Going Back" and "Love is All"--lead with the more abrasive side of Mattson's voice but don't land with much impact.

There is certainly not much to coax the ladies onto the dance floor here. Still visions are visions, and whether you find them through hedonism or self-denial, worth having. In some cases, it is hard to tell the difference.

It is at once too ambitious (in the recording process and change of milieu) and not ambitious enough (in its failure to push Bergsman’s music to unexpected and truly experimental places).

The big downer about “Vs.” tends to be its sporadic hinting at the greatness that could have been: small pockets of significance surrounded by many mediocre passages.

As it stands, it's a really good, seriously flawed album, with some great songs and some big misses, a sort of living, breathing justification for your CD player's skip button.

Chemistry may represent an attempt to marshal these influences into a massive, unified sound. Alternately, it could be the sound of Fucked Up fucking around with a big budget in a studio and seeing who might be duped into believing it genuine. Indeed, who will listen to this record?

While I enjoy Erase Errata’s new album, At Crystal Palace, in the larger, more convoluted scheme of things, I am not sure if I am truly impressed.

Without the contextual anchor that Vo’s art gave to “Deforms,” Girl often gets lost in its own tormented vision. The album plays out like a series of crises, some real, some imaginary, some personal, others global. ... The better angels of Xiu Xiu’s nature are on display in the slow, scraping cello elegy “Amargi ve Moo” and in album closer “Normal Love,” the closest Girl gets to a legitimate pop song.

As interesting as Heretic Pride already is, it misses an opportunity to pick one direction or the other.

Have you ever fallen asleep during the X-Files’ opening credits, then awoken to a Volkswagen commercial? Have you ever wanted to?

Overall, its more up-tempo songs aside, Lucifer on the Sofa is a disappointment, offering regrettable evidence that Britt Daniel’s laudable song writing mojo may have gone off the boil.

It's a slight little album about fascinations, and a product of them, too, which, whether you share those fascinations or find them boring, is perfectly fine.

Overestimate it for the wrong reasons, and you’ll still get a lot out of A Fool for Everyone; underestimate it for the right reasons and you won’t have to look too hard for a replacement.

The studio can be the bane of a musician’s existence, offering a plethora of ways to work, often to the point of stultifying any interesting end results. This is not necessarily the case with Nace, but it begs the question of what stood between the more interesting work on this album and the pieces which seem to be caught under the inertia of their own weight.

There's no arguing that it's pretty entertaining.... But there's the nagging sense that it's all sound and fury.

Holy Ghost!'s self-titled debut puts me at a loss. There is no way to penetrate this album. It's dance music that exists entirely for its own disposal, either into your iTunes, your DJ set or your garbage can.

Maybe a bit more editing could have given it more coherence. At the same time, there are no duff tracks, and a lot of fascinating moments.

Sometimes, too often, you start a band and it's good, but by the time anyone really cares, you've run out of interesting ideas and your live show is boring because you're burnt out and your record sounds like it was sponsored by Guitar Center.

The most pressing problem is that Venice is rarely a challenging release.

Despite these small clunkers, there are many moments on A Strange Arrangement that show careful attention to soul’s craft and demonstrate a full immersion in the genre and its subtleties.

Bird’s intelligence – and obvious delight in the associations that words seem to make on their own – often places his lyrics in the precocious high-school poet camp.