Tiny Cities differs very little from how we might expect it to sound.

Emotional Mugger isn’t a bad record, but the songs are nowhere near as strong as the ones on Manipulator, and whatever Segall is trying to get at here is not yet in his grasp.

It's not a bad album by any stretch of the imagination. But it also feels (not necessarily is) like someone forcing a turn in their art instead of allowing it to naturally come out of them.

It’s pleasant enough, especially with the shift away from Broken Social Scene towards a dancier Cut Copy aesthetic, but it’s ultimately forgettable. The perfect connector for a full album, but not strong enough to hold its own.

In theory, there may be nothing wrong with a desire for mainstream acceptance, but Cantrell’s music suffers for it.

It's all so tightly buttoned down that the first listen evokes a certain déjà vu; You haven't heard it before, and yet you know what's going to happen anyway.

Beating Back the Claws of the Cold aims for timelessness with its fusion of chamber pop, indie rock, and popular folk, but falls short as just another likable, ephemeral fall release.

And this is pop music, right? Why is it all so damned unmemorable?

With their new third record, though, Horse Feathers have tightened and thickened their autumnal moodiness with a classicist, chamber-ensemble sound--and stifled themselves in the process.

Extremely unoriginal, but well-crafted rock shot through with tantalizingly brief moments of interest.

Cave never quite summons the lyrical beauty that Neu! was capable of, nor do they rock with the blithering, obliterating tension that Oneida brings to its hardest bangers, but once or twice during Neverendless, they do turn locomotive precision into something transformative.

Candela doesn't represent Mice Parade's most memorable outing, but it does showcase a willingness to expand the expectations surrounding their sound.

Burial doesn’t step into the spotlight particularly masterfully. For the first time, his rhythmic choices get a bit lost, and some of the cuts to silence are more clumsy than disorienting.

While Orcas hits on a heavier emotional level than I'd initially expected, that tendency to drift does endure on repeated listens.

It’s not that these songs are bad, just that they sound a lot alike: elegant, chilled, full of foreboding.

It’s undeniably pleasurable, but dangerously close to being superficial and meaningless.

While Freedomland has all the weakness of live albums, it compensates with one main critical strength: It documents a living, breathing experience of music, improvised on the spot, moved by strong, ineffable currents, never to be repeated again.

Though much of Dilla’s later works were quick jots, Jay Stay Paid sounds too much like the unrevised pages of a journal.

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.

American Gong is frustrating. It's not a bad album by far, based on the usual criteria one arranges on the bar graph of goodness: it's melodic, paced well, pleasant and so on. At the same time, however, there's nothing that marks it as unique in any real way or different from any Quasi album of the past.

The music here feels not so much modern as refurbished.

Bill Callahan's latest solo effort is so laid back that it almost never gets going at all.

Like Stephin Merritt, his East Coast cognate, Malkmus’ songwriting chops and eye for upper-middle-class detail are too-available excuses for music that is often unremarkable.

When they’re not trying to imitate the inimitable, Painted Palms hit a pleasant if not ground-shaking plateau.

The album's vocals exemplify the real problem here, which is that while the music is appealing and well-executed, everything feels perfectly coordinated and absolutely calculated.

Ellington and Bean’s voices braid pleasant timbres that sound quite right sailing over the band’s strum and shuffle, but they’re curiously lacking in the chemistry that separates necessary from nice.

Jim is pleasant, polite, listenable, smooth (it’s like Yacht Rock for the nu-soul set), undemanding…and a bit of a bore.

Rather than erupting with new insights, The Mountain sags audibly beneath the weight of its new strata.