It’s entirely possible that the skillfully-made Odd Blood will find an entirely new bunch of listeners. Many of the old ones, like this writer, will probably just find themselves frustrated.

We have to unpack One Life Stand a bit to understand how its ambition operates. There are, to begin with, some tracks so fine that there is little more to say, except “listen,” including the opening “Thieves in the Night.”

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.

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.

Thankfully, the rest of Black Noise manages to maintain an elegant balance of the concrete and the ephemeral.

When Shining go technical, they do so with a flourish, but often seem too eager to return to the simpler crowd-pleasing verses and choruses that make up the meat of the album.

Paper Dolls is a really delightful piece of work, tender and whimsical and, despite a certain amount of artifice, touchingly sincere.

Although sloppiness normally both describes and compliments their sound, Shadows is messy with little to redeem it.

That’s not to say that development is necessary, but I still found myself wishing for more of a sense of progress. While sometimes it is about the journey, not the destination, two hours of journey is still better off with some pit stops along the way.

Like many collaborations, the material on Stoney Jackson is varied and can feel rudderless at moments.

Teen Dream’s best material comes up front (“Zebra,” “Silver Soul,” “Norway” “Walk in the Park”) , and there’s a bit of a sag in the middle (“Lover of Mine,” “Better Times”), with songs that are pretty enough, but without any big payoffs.

There is Love in You, his first solo full-length in half a decade, is rooted in beat music, but perambulates all of those former infatuations in an expected but enjoyable way.

His songs succeed when they balance on the knife-edge of banality and pathos, and when they succeed in making formula redeem itself and regain a kind of innocent power. For most of Realism, unfortunately, Merritt fails to even remotely strike this balance, abandoning any emotional power as he falls victim his penchant for formula and banality.

As much as anything, the record seems to be about holding the dark at bay, with stabbing riffs that jut at odd angles into the void, with frantic, interlocked rhythms that echo over silent spaces, with dance-syncopated sing-songs darting and fading into impenetrable gloom.

Couple Tracks seizes on these dichotomies and captures Fucked Up in all of its multi-faceted glory.

A bit of guitar jangle pushes up under her voice, a subliminal rumble of bass, but mostly, notes are allowed to ripen, carry and decay slowly, on their own terms. On a record that runs a flag of hedonism over brainy complications, here is the real thing, swooning, wordless and headily scented.

It takes an incredibly steady hand and a reservoir of patience to pull off this tone, but delightfully, still below the surface is that tension. There are these competing moments in her music then, and it is the way they compete that makes her aesthetic unique and beautiful.

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.

Mazurek is a trumpeter and Taylor a drummer, but each contributes via electronics as well. Despite that augmentation, and that the Orchestra has been more an imagined community than an album-releasing entity, Taylor and Mazurek sound lonely.

More than once Return To Form reminds me of a regular season game by the Chicago Bulls in the later years of Michael Jordan’s reign; needing something to surmount before they pull out the brilliance, they let things coast until they’re behind and then pull things out of the fire in the last couple minutes.

It sounds like the Good Shoes are tired and mildly sick of it all--and unfortunately, it’s catching.

It all sounds very much expected, and very much the same. Which wouldn’t be so bad if that didn’t mean putting himself in the same crowd as so many corporatized, for-sale-at-the-mall acts.

Their potential is the wrong thing to appreciate: it's their immediacy, their unstudied and unfocused energy, that hits the spot.

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

Front-to-back, Real Life Is No Cool does exactly what it set out to do and no more: be a collection of dance pop tunes so solid it feels like they’ve always been there.

Ultimately, as the disc draws to a close and one hushed sonic wisp after another drifts by, justice is done to neither Foster’s considerable talents nor Dickinson’s genius.

He and his accompanists perform perfectly, with Barker’s elegant leads being one of, rather than the exclusive, focal point.