Oldham continues to reinvent his landscape as a relevant artist with each attempt, and Beware tests his ability to weave different instruments into the fabric of an Americana record without breaking the mold entirely.

And Then We Saw Land isn’t a bad album, it just doesn‘t grab you.

In an age of musical ephemerality and impermanence (especially in the electronica/dance arena) it's good to know that sometimes innovation and inspiration can go hand in hand with experience.

Crush is the result of Abe Vigoda's common practice to evolve without abandoning their signature sound. There's still a fair amount of sharp guitars, post-chorus breakdowns are just as memorable, and metronome time signatures are still shattered. Not to mention, their shrewd tack for melody is as resounding as ever.

It takes an album like Pretty in Black to make you realise the life affirming power of great pop music.

It's when Bridges merges a pop-oriented approach over a modern R&B groove where his creative diffidence shows.

While they try subtle new tricks, like compressing Grohl’s vocals to almost-grating levels amid muddy sound mixing, their attempts at sounding edgy usually land in a pleasant middle ground.

If you’re reading this, stick with it. It has some real rewards in the back end--my only hope is that the songs were recorded in chronological order, to suggest that this is the direction Swift will take future albums.

After a good handful of listens nothing hugely sticks and it isn't quite clear what they're aiming for.

With the amount of care and attention to detail found in tracks like Begin to Remember and Into Distance, it’s a shame that their more atmosphere-oriented tracks feel the least realized, coming off as throwaways in an otherwise structurally sound record.

On Make-Believe, a sloppy more-of-the-same same approach has crippled what this album could have been, ultimately leaving us with some vaguely interesting notions rather than well-explored concepts.

What we find with Tough Love is an album just as conceptually focused as Devotion, yet too willing to waste Ware’s sophisticated emotionality on tracks with no depth or purpose to them.

This is a great album, possibly the finest covers record in recent memory, and it’ll take some beating in 2008.

It’s not quite inspiration, or an emotional center. You leave this record thinking about how complex and refined it is, or maybe about how much Jack Tatum has grown as a songwriter. But at the end of the day, the album doesn’t embed itself into your daily life in the way Nocturne or Gemini did.

Everything Else Has Gone Wrong is about getting through troubling times with grand gestures, projecting those emotions in the most outward way possible. And, coming back from that absence, demonstrating their steady growth as musicians with a joyful disposition that is contagious.

There's a lot of beautiful music to hear and Patton treats it all with an admirer's respect, but there is something about Mondo Cane that reeks of vanity.

On Inside of Rose, the duo chisel their rimy, amorphous arrangements into a finely pointed portrait of emotional disintegration.

Initial listens may lead you to believe it’s a little non-descript, but there’s reward in perseverance.

I’d recommend ten to anyone who bought oaklandazulasylum; to anyone else, I’d recommend both with some urgency...this is the real thing, and you’ll never know how much you needed it until you hear it.

Valtari, their long-awaited joint band effort, revolves to realign their focus instead of undergoing any drastic transformation.

It is broad in its appeal, yes, but it is miles deep in its longevity.

PRODUCT is truly what you make of it - both highly addictive and somewhat unfinished, it leaves a good amount of open space for the listener to construct a set of vivid, imaginary images into something personal, even meaningful.

Ooh La La sharpens that edge with a straight-up shot of soul rock revivalism followed by a chaser of electro-groove. Ditto is at her peak at these moments, where she finds a balance between creativity and sneering attitude, and it would have been great to see more of that, and less of the studio-slick professionalism of the album’s sound.

There’s no denying that the elements that make up Nobody knows. are profoundly captivating, from the album's rich sonic detail to Beal’s reliably powerhouse vocals and personality. But as refined as these elements are, they still don’t quite add up to make the excellent record that many of us are still waiting for Beal to finally make.

The “that's life” solemnity that throbs in Vestiges quickly fizzles into a series of narrative incoherent niceties, and becomes a far more rewarding listen when lyrical fragments are taken out of context.

Two is a gem amongst the labyrinthine post-Cap’n Jazz projects.

Throughout these 11 songs, there’s a conflict between whether the characters are ready to move on or are fighting to go back to how it was.

While one could say the majority of Hippo Lite’s material is experimental, Presley and Le Bon placed their most avant and uptempo vocal tracks toward the album’s latter half, a block of songs that sort of run together before its closer, the violin-driven You Could Be Better. Consequently, the sequencing feels rushed and impatient. By Contrast, Presley and Le Bon initially want to show you around, the light and airy Blue from the Dark opening the door, slowly introducing you to their muse. By the end, it’s difficult not to feel as though you’ve overstayed your welcome.