There's no arguing that it's pretty entertaining.... But there's the nagging sense that it's all sound and fury.

Particularly in the lugubrious opening half of the disc, Clogs tends to repeat things simply for the sake of repeating them without really building towards anything.

A schizophrenic palate of honeyed soul, downbeat electrix, timeless hip hop and bare-knuckle beats, these 31 tracks (spread over 44 minutes) are packed with triple the hooks – and suffer from attention deficit disorder (to the listener’s benefit).

A record that spits in the eye of assertions that they don’t make records like they used to.

To be sure, grime is a hybrid genre, but Run the Road 2 often shows how the balance can be weighed too heavily towards American rap idioms.

The experiment does at times rush off the tracks into the bushes, where either the spastic tempos prove too much for Oldham's cool croon, or the meat-and-potatoes song structures reject Tortoise's occasional proclivity toward overseasoning.

It's a fairly fun album, albeit not one that sticks with you.

The group [is] at it's best when it stays close to it's R & B foundation. Standing in the Way of Control expands the Gossip's pallette, but the keepers here hug tight to the rump.

Pearls and Brass have your ultimate Friday afternoon "just got paid today" soundtrack right here. Turn it up loud and enjoy.

A pretty percolating electro-pop record that embraces sweetness and strangeness in equal measure.

More like faithful reiterations of soul cliches than anything fresh or interesting, nearly every track will remind you of someone else.

Defever can still write great, melancholic pop songs.

The Line may be as polarizing as ever, but fuck me, can it play a righteous drinking song.

Father Divine ranks among the best of Ladd’s efforts, and is easily one of his most adventurous.

Cheers to the second installment of this beautiful friendship.

Pollard’s imagistic lyrics and ragged musicality create a bridge between the mundane and the exceptional.

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

Given that it’s a collection of EPs and singles, These Were the Earlies is predictably all over the map, a problem exacerbated by the Earlies’ wide-ranging stylistic ambitions and long-distance collaborative methods.

Most of Tom Vek’s influences are at least fifteen years old and easily triangulated. But he’s unencumbered by nostalgia. We Have Sound is so difficult to isolate from Vek’s ass-backwards charisma, I wonder if the man might be a visionary.

That Vashti Bunyan had the courage to step out of seclusion and follow up her classic debut is admirable. That she was able to do so with an excellent batch of songs is a joy to behold, pure and simple.

So refined at times it borders on the insipid.

“Dayvan Cowboy” is almost worth the price of admission, but it makes the remainder of the album seem derivatively “New Age.”

Essentially, the Brians don't really need to innovate that much anymore and instead are just fine-tuning their craft in glorious ways.

If another band were to serve up the fiddling strings and lollygagging vocal harmonies of “Animal Shapes,” the wanky guitar breakdowns of “The Poor, The Fair, and the Good,” perhaps Tanglewood Numbers wouldn’t feel like such a disappointment. But Berman’s a brilliant lyricist with 30 or 40 minutes to spare every couple of years, and his voice seems oddly absent from this record.

Nine bracing blasts of terse, catchy noise-pop.

Here’s a band so fond of their particular brand of mid-tempo dream pop that they do not feel compelled to try anything else. At least they take the time to be particularly observant as they comb their territory.

What makes the Constantines appealing, then, is not that they do something totally new but rather that they do something familiar very well.

Like Paul's Boutique, The Mouse and the Mask is at times frustrating in its top-heaviness. Thank god it's got Doom.