The result is a slick, accessible rap record that's about nine songs too long.

Surrounded by blunt-force catharsis and brandishing some clever, caustic wordplay (like rhyming Lil Boosie with Susan Lucci), Blanco manages to be a pure delight as a rapper, even if he isn't calling himself one.

It’s a masterpiece of uneasy listening but would be a lot more digestible had it been trimmed to a manageable length.

Sonic Youth fans should find plenty to love, but we’re more intrigued by the instances where Moore leaves his established comfort zone.

It's a quick, occasionally dirty and sweetly affecting collection of ballads about ill-fated romance, the Bay City Rollers and letting go of love.

The latter half of WIXIW has enough to offset their plodding attempts to be experimental.

Though murky mixing obscures their incendiary songs, the overall mood of disquiet and anxiety is potent (perhaps prescient?). If only they could shape it into something with more of a jolt.

Although Lay It Down is initially appealing because it has the super­ficial sound of Green’s classic Hi material, you soon discover that Green has nothing terribly deep to offer lyrically, and his vocals are locked on cruise control throughout.

Alphabets picks up where Animal Planet left off and the devastating Labels began in 1995, but it suffers from the law of diminishing returns.

This much material is exhausting to make your way through, the stretches between moments of genius way too long.

There’s a mopey, self-pitying quality to the lyrics, and the duo never once connect with or transmit the sultry passion that existed between those 60s icons [Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot].

Q might appear masked on the album cover, but his explicit tales of hardship, prosperity and loss hide nothing.

More for the dedicated convert than the curious.

Too few of the two dozen half-developed tracks here do justice to Smith's talent as a songwriter.

It may be exactly what fans have been waiting for, but you have to wonder how long the band can keep using the same templates.

There’s no mistaking the album for anyone but Yorke’s, but despite his rep as a singular genius, he does play well with others.

The biggest flaw: the band attempts to cram too many ideas into a song (Cleaning Out The Rooms), particularly in the album's second half.

Hit Reset, the Julie Ruin’s second album, is super-spunky.

They’ve got the formula down now, so you can’t sweat the technique, but it would make for a more engaging spin if Stereolab could mess with the equation now and again.

They’ve topped up every track with so many hooks and contemporary indie rock clichés that their new songs sometimes go right past catchy into corny.

Judging by Devonté Hynes’s ambitiously grand follow-up to Falling Off The Lavender Bridge, with its piano intermissions, ubiquitous orchestra and choral chants, there’s been some Freddy Mercury blaring through his player.

Ultimately, it’s Rubinos’s unflinching lyrics that linger long after Black Terry Cat ends.

Seventies and 80s soul and funk influences shine through on nearly every track.

There are enough good songs to give Queen a pass, but if it’s going to be 19 tracks, it needs to be more consistently awesome.

Grown-up, seductive and a little bit explicit (when it needs to be), it’s a small triumph for guys trying to get in touch with their emotions through the medium of R&B.

Mr. Impossible is easily Black Dice's most accessible album yet, but that's not saying much. It's still very uneasy listening.

It's a solid denouement to Elaenia's touring cycle, and perhaps helps us appreciate that album for its use of exactly the right tools for the job and appropriate scope for its ideas.

It's apparent Nelson doesn't share Adams's enthusiasm for the Fleetwood Mac and Grateful Dead numbers, but he's at home with Gram Parsons's $1,000 Wedding and Leonard Cohen's well-covered Hallelujah.