He puts together a good melody for each of these songs, as effortlessly as Ray Davies and in as nasally a voice.

Intense and moving throughout, Six builds a fair amount of variation into its downbeat aesthetic.

The sound is harder, more precise and altogether more of a sock in the gut.

It's a record with 20-20 hindsight vision. It perfects the past's mistakes, but misses the fun in making them.

[The final track is] less antic and virtuoso than the earlier tracks, but a good deal more touching. Elsewhere Neufeld jets off for the stratosphere, technical dexterity gleaming in a rarified, surgically clean space. Here she sinks into a rich, loamy here and now, luxuriating in slow exploration of certainties.

Range Anxiety provides plenty of action and feeling, though not always in the ways you catch on a surface listen.

It’s an ambitious album, but only in the sense that most of the songs are outrageously long and feature approximately eighteen gratuitous time signatures each.

It's a collection of veiled promise, but only partial pay-off.

Though Kid Sister might lack some versatility, her club-friendly material is more than above average, and gleams colorfully if synthetically, like her outstretched hand of freshly painted nails.

Its successes -- its pleasing idiosyncrasies, its moments of charm, and so on -- are there, but underneath a veneer of such blandness that finding them seems like more trouble than it's worth.

It’s incredibly inexplicable, and inexplicably incredible.

A few promising moments aside, most of it hardly resounds at all.

This is still a fun and fast record, showcasing a band with as many ideas as bratty rave-ups. Next time out, they might take a look at the pros with ridiculous hats that co-inhabit their hometown, though, and tell a story.

Despite the added breadth, Porras still sticks to the bare necessities to get his point across, making for guitar passages that meditate on every ringing note and hazy chord.

The tunes still aren't anything too memorable (though in fairness that's never been Boris's particular forte), and the frippertronics and sonic detail on songs like "Galaxians" makes things less ordinary than they might otherwise be, ranging between fairly standard chugging and brief breakdowns intended to sound heavily narcotic.

Coming Out of the Fog is quite a good album, but it contains no real surprises.

I’ll be listening to Through the Devil Softly for years to come.

There's plenty of kicks left over, but it tilts the impression of the band. The Teen Beat questionnaires that come in the disc jacket (What's your favorite color? What's your shoe size?) and the shortened tracklist end up emphasizing the nerdiness over the jerkiness.

It’s elegantly expressive music where warm tones from cold machines cut to the quick of human emotion.

Even more densely angular and awkward than usual, It’ll Be Cool finds a band so deeply immersed in its own idiom that it’s hard to imagine an ear making any sense of this music, and yet, in spite of itself, the record works.

The People's Key, more or less Oberst's 10th album as Bright Eyes, finds him aiming for the prophetic over the personal, embracing the luxuries of the studio instead of hunkering down in the bedroom.

Pretty Ugly is neither very pretty nor particularly ugly, rather a lumpen, unengaging mess.

More often, Disappears's new sound plods--especially by comparison with the frantic, loopy movement through spacy echo chambers that characterized much of the group's material on Lux and Guider

Cold Showers uses that cavalier attitude behind such a simple bedrock of references--Joy Division (a song called "New Dawn" all but writes a countermelody to "Insight"), The Church, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Strokes, Interpol--that creates a level of tension across Love and Regret that sustains them far better than any of their peers.

Like Masana Temples as a whole, “Dripping Sun” is fun but uneven, too ambitious stylistically and not quite ambitious enough sonically.

The weak spot, as ever, are lyrics that clasp to cliches without transforming them. So we get a song about a certain four-letter-word, and lines about rain or taking chances. On the other hand, the punchline of 'Men in Love' is pretty great, and Beth’s belting usually subsumes the stock imagery.

Unfortunately, after the initial rush of the opening tracks, the album slows down perhaps too much.

“The Drunken Boat” one of the best tracks he’s done to date. The rest of the album isn’t as daring or unique. Joyner mostly follows the "Hotel Lives" template and reaps the same rewards.