For an album steeped so much in coming to terms with loss and grief, with finding redemption, and with starting anew, it captures Surfer Blood doing something they haven't done in years, and that's have fun making music.

Since the lyrical content now borders on morose and even sadistic, the music also follows the leader with a muck of baseless solos and thrilling codas to compensate for the otherwise linear compositions.

When he does adapt a more modern trap-orientated sound on the final two tracks it doesn’t really work, and this brings down the EP as an entire listen. Crown thrives when he stays close to his classic sound and the flourishes he adds, which today's stripped and skeletal approach to beatmaking actively avoid.

Noah And The Whale would have done better to focus on the more organic sound they became quite good at than become just another forgettable crossover act.

There is a clear aspiration for this album to be ubiquitous, and well, overbearing with tunes. Rather than follow the typical pop formula, Rihanna gives an album specifically catered to where she is now with her career, music, and life. And blaring seems to be the point.

Femme Fatale equips Britney with material which is strong enough to enable the original all-American Pop Princess to hold her own in such an overcrowded context.

These songs just lack that certain oomph to separate Free Energy from the thousands of groups who have sang about girls before.

Too many songs disappoint, though.

With Arcade Dynamics, a bit of that moral fiber is lost, resulting in a pleasant number of hooks that hone the psychedelic tag a bit too conventionally.

There are sublime moments here, and occasionally the interplay is breathtaking. This is pretty rare however, which leaves the rest of the record sounding just as you’d imagine it would, which isn’t a bad thing, just not at the levels of creativity we’ve come to expect.

While Outer South may represent a step back from last year’s work, it is perhaps another step forward for Oberst in terms of his evolution as an artist.

Rather than being enjoyable, listening to Breathe in its entirety soon becomes a chore.

Age has its promising moments, but it overall fails to hit the mark. Gibb’s songwriting this time around just doesn't match the range and energy of his previous works.

While the range of tangents explored makes it a more interesting album, its lack of incisiveness prevents Lemon Memory from being called a better record.

Magic Hour's never exactly bad. It's worse than that. It's boring.

From The Valley To The Stars is simply a collection of mostly good and occasionally great songs that just doesn’t quite work as a whole.

Pyramid of the Sun certainly isn't an utterly bad album--it's cohesive enough, and it can be really engaging. At the very least, it serves as a heartfelt tribute to the band's late drummer.

There are some nice moments in the mess, and sometimes I'm almost tempted to look past the annoyances before they build up--but sometimes, that's frankly just not possible.

Each turn the album takes is a good one: the swaying Excerpts reinforces the scope of the music, the vinyl-affected Imprints throws some atmosphere into the approach, and, really, the whole of the album makes for an unrivaled listening experience.

A mature, assured, and beautiful album.

Though the band's approach is fairly consistent throughout the album, there are instrumental ideas explored with tracks like In The Branches of Yggdrasil and Nice Riff, Clichard, the latter of which takes a shot at some melancholic Richard D. James beat invention.

he Way We Separate is an undoubtedly intimate and romantic synth pop album that, for better or worse, pulls no tricks on the listener.

Craft is an artist who values songcraft intensely, structuring his stanzas carefully but with an exuberant self-assuredness. The result of his work in the case of Full Circle Nightmare is a precession of songs that wear out their welcome in a brisk fashion.

Every track is a potential hit, and Sia’s use of pure pop hooks, coupled with an astounding control over her rampant voice, makes this a very good record.

Magic Kids do pull off a winner with Summer, a sultry delight of abounding strings and tropical strums that, sadly, sounds out of place with the obvious eye winks scattered throughout. Memphis may borrow from such an imaginative time period, but their explorative range remains very limited.

Is this the groundbreaking work we'd perhaps hoped for during the album's initial release, an effort worthy of that preliminary giddiness? Sadly, no. Is it an interesting mix of tracks that confronts listeners with reimaging of songs so deeply tied to our heart strings we have no choice but to carefully imbibe and evaluate each note? Sure.

Whereas those earlier songs brought to mind a stream of sunlight trying to break through a grayed sky, now there's a battering of haphazard lightning striking against a furious ocean.

It’s an engaging listen, sure, but sadly Our Earthly Pleasures lacks the euphoric punch to make a listener jump up and down vigourously.