Things pick up in the second half, when the lyrics become more surprising and the beats less radio-friendly. Despite some perplexing moments, there's a lot to like.

There are some great garage rock tunes, but too much filler to make for a great album. Maybe they should have trimmed a few of the 16 songs for a shorter but stronger work.

It's wrapped in a confused concept--future lovers (the album title's characters) under siege by some kind of dystopian oppression--but several tunes will surely ignite stadium masses.

If you can stomach the contrived slow jams and the sensitive soul-baring, there are a couple of decent joints produced by West.

The Vampire Weekend crew, who met at Columbia University, have clearly heard enough soukous and highlife to cop a few guitar licks to cloak their orch-pop pretensions, but almost by accident, the way their chamber strings are played over jaunty grooves makes for an engaging concoction, at least for a few spins.

There’s not much new here, but Springsteen has always traded on a maudlin permanent nostalgia that only works because it’s so fucking earnest that it blasts through our attempts to be cynical about it.

On slick, feckless romance ballads like I Belong In Your Arms, that rooted-in-the-past sound can seem like empty nostalgia, but it blooms with freshness when used as a springboard for experimentation.

With a name as dumb as Hockey, these Portland hipsters tempt me to dismiss them as having overdosed on irony. But to their credit, there are a few decent new-wavey pop hooks here.

Sustained by romantic tension, they walk a strange line between being mesmerizing and washing over you like sonic wallpaper.

Having three creative forces acting on the music from different angles leads to frequent twists, turns and stylistic shifts--showing they can roll like Dr. Octagon one minute and Sly Stone the next.

Individually, the songs are absorbing, but when listened back to back, they begin to lose their magic.

Be Your Own Pet attacks with enthusiasm, and everything here rocks sufficently, although some remedial songwriting classes may be required before they make the move to sports arenas.

Still, despite his naive imitations, Costa has a gift for catchy hooks, and once he figures out who he is musically, the results could be remarkable.

It gets tiring trying to figure out what Lew is saying (mostly, her vocals are mixed a touch too low), but the themes are hinted at in her sober delivery.

Nine Types Of Light is mostly mellow, slow jams and funky, upbeat love songs.

KRS-One's wordplay remains clever and topical, especially on the anti-Auto-Tune anthem Robot, while his sanctimoniousness has been toned down to more tolerable levels. Black Moon’s Buckshot is a comfortable pairing and, although his street-savvy sound may not have aged as well as some of his Duck Down Records brethren’s, he still finds a familiar dynamic when rapping alongside old cohorts.

These tunes tend to meander and often feel like they should be going somewhere we never get to. But a lot of it is very lovely.

The uniformity of song structure, tone and tempo, though initially captivating, soon becomes monotonous.

Yours To Keep is kinda like an entire disc of that Lust For Life riff. Fun but a bit flat.

What stands out more than the production is how consistently solid the album is, and how effective the lyrics and songwriting.

A few songs are too long and self-indulgent (Do You Want What I Need, Hold Me), but the fuzzy synths, minor-key melodies and subtle worldy percussion make it very easy listening on the whole.

The results are mixed--a few brilliantly sleazy moments but too few to make this album as good as we’d hoped.

Death Vessel have come up with a uniformly bland set of delicate ditties for Nothing Is Precious Enough For Us that are lightly strummed in a way that’s so frightfully fey, it could make José González want to rip Thibodeau’s guitar from his hands and smash it against the wall John Belushi-style.

If you love car culture, traffic, suburbs or Stevens’s lyrics, this might be where you turn off.

He remains a confident and commanding rapper, full of agile double-time flows and verses that skip from biographical vignettes and life lessons to boasting. But, given he rarely has more than one verse per song, Diaspora gives us a fragmented window into his thoughts.

There are rhythms and sounds that instantly come off as nostalgic, but in the best moments the beats and textures merge to form something wholly unidentifiable.

And Agnes, the gloomy, anticlimactic closer, ejects the listener out of the edgy world that much of the album finds strength in by relying too heavily on a mainstream radio sound that feels too safe. Nonetheless, as a whole, HTBAHB is thrilling enough to achieve replay status.

Too often, Jenkins's use of melody fails to create sticky songs in a pop sense, but it does offset his gruff baritone and stern messaging. ... Jenkins is at his best when taking everyday scenarios and cutting to their emotional core.