It does contain some beautiful songs. Its deficiencies won’t miff his indulgent cult (at least not any more than they’ve been miffed previously). But it doesn’t quite hold together.

There's a wider range of styles and sounds here, from dramatic shoegazer epics to the closest they've ever gotten to straight-ahead rock. Not everything gels solidly, and there are some awkward moments, but no real stumbles.

The results may not be as jarring as its predecessor - the excitement of their original experimentation is gone - but ultimately they’re more satisfying, indicative of a duo much more comfortable with their vision.

I Am Not Afraid Of You is a one-stop jukebox.

While Jamie Stewart & co. succeed at replicating the fractured nature of their live shows – the mix of sparse and dense, broken and enraged, auxiliary percussion and programming, noise and melodiousness is all here – it's beginning to sound rote.

Despite the relatively heavy guitars and relatively dense production, you’ll notice a similarity to the smart, earnest, complex material Molina played as Songs: Ohia.

Mostly Taiga is about sensation, playful and wild and smart but moving way too fast for contemplation.

Where Horn of Plenty still had spare singer-songwriter arrangements, Yellow House sounds far more elaborate.

Game Theory turns out to be The Roots’ finest record to date.

Your lost loves will not come back, but the morbid and exquisite plummet of losing them will, and rare is the artist that can make such a prospect as starkly comforting as it is here.

The Body, the Blood, the Machine reveals a band that's a bit older, a step slower, and startlingly sardonic.

There's a bit of Starbucks gloss to this record, a too-easy-to-like quality that may at first put off serious listeners and music heads. That evaporates pretty quickly, though, as you recognize that its lucid simplicity, its artful artlessness is not a trick, but achievement.

The Shining welcomes listeners to reflect on the magnitude of Yancey’s career, as any posthumous work is apt to do. Unlike Donuts, however, this newest offering will not leave Yancey’s listeners despondent about what could have been but, rather, will provide a fitting epitaph for what was.

Skelliconnection feels more like a series of singles and EPs rather than one statement.

Their most accomplished and astounding album to date.

The good news is that this is the band’s strongest music since Seasons in the Abyss. The bad news is that, compared to their vaulted ’80s output, the album lacks intensity.

These first five songs are like a good singles collection, every one of them free-standing and complete, none of them particularly relating to the others. The rest of the album is slighter and less compelling.

Most of White Bread Black Beer is almost unbearably lovely.

Other Animals was a masterpiece, Nightlife is merely pretty good.

The key is minor, the tone is melancholy, the concerns are callow, but the leitmotif is redeeming.

You'll hear a hint of Arcade Fire in the shout-along choruses, a whisper of Neutral Milk Hotel in the tales of deformed love, an intimation of the Decemberists in the pantomime sea shanties that explode into rock. They're all pretty faint echos, though, the vaguest kinds of familiar outposts in a sea of strangeness.

In the Maybe World feels like an (unintentional, perhaps) sequel or response to Geek the Girl, turning down the intensity while sharing a twilit mood.

If it weren't all so much fun, CSS would be really objectionable. But if it wasn't so objectionable, it certainly wouldn't be this much fun.

You could easily call this the sequel to Secret Wars - it has the same mix of baked acoustics, crushing organ and electric guitar lines, staccato vocals, and a meditative finale built around interlocked piano and drums.

The Avalanche is, perhaps predictably, a middling reconstitution of its legitimate predecessor.

Offers taught electro evidence that conviction and innovation can be found in the most minimal environment.

The good stuff (those [first] three tracks, and maybe the indignant “Al Green”) provides Kool Keith an appropriate showcase and sounds like nothing else, but for much of this disc, the main man appears AWOL.

Thankfully, the music that accompanies their lyrical flights of fancy and ever so stoned imagery soothes the chafing caused by such unabashed and often lurid flower power ranting.