Various people have tried to explain to me why I find Object 47 so frustrating.... My inclination is to forget all that and just play the last four tracks over and over.

On The Odd Couple, Gnarls Barkley gets halfway to the heights of St. Elsewhere and seems content to stay there.

Jónsi plays with orchestral beauty and flirts with pop, and ends up somewhere in between, fascinating and inscrutable.

The melodies are often big, but they rarely stick with you after the song is over, having been overcome by nervous tension and a project whose first goal is self-effacement.

The album as a whole is more often prone to meander, as if the band gets a little lost in their new terrain, unable, at times, to bring their thought full circle.

Tallied up, the hits and the misses are about equal. But it would be unfair to describe Interstellar as middling. What the misses lack is not quality but a strong sense of self in terms of songcraft.

If TaDet Lugnt was pristine portraiture, carefully aligned and composed, then Tio Bitar is the off-the-cuff action shot – freely flowing and effortlessly jammed, its hair ruffled and with a face in need of a shave.

Dip into Ay Ay Ay at leisure and it’s an arresting thing, each song humid with spittle, slick with tongue spit, bumptious and sashaying around the mouth. But when locked together, it’s too homogenous.

A lot of the material sounds incomplete, as Scher and Hey have a habit of backing off just when a song sounds like its coming together.

So, enjoy it if you will, and forget it if you like.

They simply begin, evolve, repeat, and end, very much as though they were designed to play out while we directed our attention elsewhere.

James Pants may well develop a style or voice of greater substance with future releases. But, as of now, his reliance on his synthesizer aptitude is too repetitive, too flat, and too conventional to convey much meaning or purpose.

Mainly these songs remain steadfastly, quietly, emotional. For every moment that comes off too lightly, there’s an equal moment of memorable melody.

While there are moments where En Form for Bla (named for the Oslo club where it was recorded) rolls right over you like a rogue wave, more often it sounds like the main action was situated a couple rooms away from the microphones.

Vocally, In the Cool of the Day often lacks that urgency: it's a beautifully played, highly accessible album that nevertheless leaves much less of an impact than one might expect.

This album’s austerity puts it more in the ranks of bizarro reduxes like Scott Walker’s The Drift. That’s impressive company, but even with its slight runtime, it’s hard to imagine feeling compelled to come back to I’m New Here once you’ve understood what’s going on.

Jurado’s ambition seems to have outpaced his execution this time out.

I can't say I'll be giving Inside the Ships more spins this year, but it's offbeat charm never felt like a waste of my time when I did, and that's more than I can say for most albums this year.

Transference is the victim of an unfortunate irony--the more honed, the less it cuts.

Bundick occasionally turns the energy up, like in the last 30 seconds of album highlight “Low Shoulders,” but those moments are too few and far between to make an impact.

Dead Drunk on the whole could be taken as noise music, noise music with none of the brutality and half the imagination.

As it stands here, it too often feels as if the tools mastered them.

As emotionally impenetrable as the instruments are, Kinsella’s own inner song remains even more obscured by uncharacteristically opaque lyrics.

A few tracks wisp away into nothingness, but on work like "Your Heart is a Twisted Vine," Nadler approaches timelessness as well.

Mostly these songs seem slight and shy, unable, really, to support the massive facades of synth and disco drums that Small Black layers onto them.

Brilliant Colors understand to stick to what you know, and keep it short and sweet--a couple of platitudes that serve this band well.

He doesn't quite sell the thesis that that's the point.

Revisiting the past isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but turning elements from one of their discography’s savage outliers into a competently turned-out, but not outstanding new chapter in the ongoing story of Wire hardly seems like the most ambitious thing they could have done with that material.