Pierce cloaks these songs in white with a sort of pious ecstasy.

It is clever and witty like the band is want to be, but when listening to Rant I stopped caring about the lack of instruments and simply enjoyed myself.

Awful.

Much of A Wasteland Companion suffers from the unimaginative fluff that plagued 2009's Hold Time.

Noctourniquet, while not completely successful, finds The Mars Volta at their most pop and their most reasonable.

The problem is that Ishibashi isn't idiosyncratic enough to make this a memorable record... That said, he gets it so right on Manchester it's unbelievable.

[The music] is not exactly bad, but has about as much creativity and passion behind it as a spreadsheet.

A recipe for disaster which tries to please everybody and ends up being enjoyed by nobody.

Perhaps ... the best way to describe Boys & Girls: unwilling to innovate or add anything new to its genre, preferring to remind us of the roots of rock instead of showing us what made the pioneers so great, a reminder of a past love instead of a new love for us to discover.

Keeping it abrasive and sincerely metal in execution is its strength.

It is eccentric and pulsating to the extreme and you exist within its boundless immortality drawing tirelessly from its muse.

Into the Waves is an invitation to float. The mature lyrics and vocal performances in conjunction with the flow of disco-like melodies makes you feel like you're walking the fine line between fantasy and reality. It's a lovely indulgence.

A favorite for punk album of the year.

Only a couple of the tracks really resonate, even with repeated spins.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you, coming all the way from left field, the best album of 2012 so far.

It's endlessly fascinating... [However] the album occasionally com[es] across as wilfully obtuse.

Through headphones, Ssss lacks proper punctum. Through speakers, it fails to infect.

An exceptionally fierce indie pop record.

This is not his creative masterpiece, but there is no doubt that one is yet to come.

DINOWALRUS fuse together a perfect blend of dance punk and art funk.

Willis Earl Beal is a phenomenal vocalist, with a unique drawl and searing tone. Phenomenal in virtuosity, yet even more astounding with his delivery.

Visions is beautifully conceived and executed, musically, lyrically and thematically.

While there's no doubt that Port of Morrow is well crafted, then, it fails because it is ultimately unmoving, and what Mercer has gained in style and execution is overshadowed by the album's lack of either invention or sincerity.

The song writing is passable, the sound is passable, but passable is usually as boring as it sounds.

It's a cleanly produced album, sure, but it lacks the attitude of the era from where it came, the 1970s.

The Belbury Tales is a solid record and a fantastic listen.

Ekstasis abounds with originality and depth; soars and sinks; expands and implodes; evolves and dissipates; crackles and breaks all within one cohesive sound.

The ethereal keyboard lines and the chemistry between the two guitars are able to trap a listener within the album right from the start, and it rarely lets you stray too far from the music.