It’s a formidable return to his more familiar post-’04 pop form, a better album by any assessment than YATQ.

The good news is that this is, in fact, a throwback to their earlier work. The bad news is that it’s not throwback enough.

Besides their inability to meet the very aims they set out for themselves, Clean and Zegon fail to do much of anything exciting with their all-star cast.

On the surface, Tight Knit may sound like more of the same for Vetiver, and thankfully so. While the band reaches a bit further than previously, they are careful not to stretch too far, focusing instead on the continued refinement of their position as rock’s youngest elder statesmen.

Goodnight Oslo is more like the seemingly “normal” yet slightly “off” one-night-stand, the one you don’t think about much the next week but wonder about 10 years later. Don’t expect it to enthrall on contact, but it might settle gently into the subconscious.

On All Aboard Future, These Are Powers’ songs distract from the music. Consequently, the record sputters.

Reviver might make for interesting enough listening in the immediate, but it‘s also a prime candidate for the cut out bin of memory once the band finally arrives at its aforementioned new destination.

He never quite sells us on the necessity of getting into Bobby D.’s head, and only rarely evinces that he’s done so himself. The good news is that the album is strong anyway, more so when unyoked from the underlying concept.

The unifying factor is Mi Ami’s live vibrancy. Except for the overdubbed vocals, almost the entirety of Watersports was performed live in the studio, allowing the three musicians to explore texture and space, collapsing their influences into a gripping dialogue on the darker side of human experience that we so often ignore.

There’s not a bad song in the bunch, but the songs from Death’s only official release are the clear highlights on ...For the Whole World to See.

The result is a slinky, spiky, minimalist groove, clanking like some kind of extinct, rusty machinery. Lyrics are impressionistic, insinuated over heaving rhythms in not-quite-linear blurts of imagery, but they seem to consider the place of music in times of conflict.

It’s fine for a lark, but you can leave the tikis in the attic where they belong.

The record’s oversized persona feels strange because these sounds don’t owe that much to the twang or crate-digging excavations that built Romweber’s reputation.

To Willie seems more like a personal effort than a proper follow-up to "Pride," and it’s not as inventive as that album. It works well as a covers collection.

It’s a confident outing from an outfit with all the right reasons to be confident, a unified and often arresting record with few qualms about what it’s supposed to be.

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

They’re simply better songwriters than many others in the field, and their ability to recontextualize these sounds into something so subsequently fresh and familiar is a stunning achievement.

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 music is progressive as hell, but this feels less and less like the right thing to be concerned with.

Loney Dear’s latest, Dear John, is an endearing slice of small sigh indie-pop, well ornamented and too cute by half.

It's not a return to form so much as a complete reinvention, this is an album that highlights a particularly buoyant Animal Collective, one that’s managed to expand their sound in surprising ways while still retaining the same basic creative impulses that made them such a joy to watch develop over the past decade

As an album, The Crying Light is neither as revelatory nor as consistent as "I Am A Bird Now."

Get Guilty isn’t an easy album at all. It just sounds like one.

It has a warm, uncertain humanity that its predecessors, for all their depth and beauty, did not: it scans as genuine, music made from necessity rather than from the impulse of an extraordinary showman.

The narrators’ weaknesses become the songs’ weaknesses; Mercer apparently prefers to sustain verisimilitude at the expense of Skin of Evil’s potential. It’s a bold artistic move that lends itself to the page far more convincingly than it does to the ear.

Drone Trailer comes off as one of MV & EE’s richest conciliations of primal rock impulse and agrarian drift – the kind of record that a confused major label would have leaked out into the world in the early 1970s, the last time the underground had any chance of seriously warping the mainstream milieu.

Throughout the album, as soon as the drums and guitar slide into nod-inducing alignment, they veer off-track. The songs simply do not cohere. The numerous instrumental tracks on the album show off the band’s virtuosity, but to entirely unmemorable effect.

The balance--between groove and experiment, organic and synthetic sound--shifts constantly on this very strong album, sometimes prodding listeners to think, other times comforting them with familiar sounds and, occasionally, overwhelming them with ephemeral beauty.