There’s a moment of startling emotional clarity on “Shoot at Will,” a revealing track where Zayn alludes to his and Hadid’s daughter: “When I look at her, all I see is you/When you look at her, do you see me too?” But for the most part, Zayn appears much more comfortable wearing the mask of vulnerability instead of actually exercising it.

Sure, most of Chorus is pretty, but it's only that: Between the glistening guitars, cymbal washes, sighing strings, and electric piano, the beauty LaValle conjures is effortless but ultimately less impressive for not having any sort of contrast.

The Brooklyn-based foursome spends a lot of time here style-pinching, connecting dots already drawn by contemporary indie acts. And yet Miniature Tigers are often able to pull it off.

For a group who traded so well in whimsy, who got off to such a kaleidoscopic start, Original Colors can feel unusually drab.

Like the Blood Brothers, Take Me to the Sea is united by Whitney's voice, impossible to ignore as it slides between seemingly any style that could be described using the verb "wail."

Seraph might be shifty, but Arsenault still works with blunt force.

He’s got undeniable talent, refined taste, and a studio of cool friends. Yet, despite it all, Cometa fails to leave a lasting impression, convey a guiding sensibility, or, worse, clarify anything remotely idiosyncratic about Nick Hakim.

Future Brown feels overwhelmingly like a bunch of intriguing ideas left to drift off inconclusively.

The first seven songs play out like a 20-minute power hour, but the album loses a bit of steam after that.

While Glover's exaggerated, cartoonish flow and overblown pop-rap production would be enough to make Camp one of the most uniquely unlikable rap records of this year (and most others), what's worse is how he uses heavy topics like race, masculinity, relationships, street cred, and "real hip-hop" as props to construct a false outsider persona.

Unsurprisingly, Rademaker makes his mark when he forsakes goth-rock and embraces his jangle-pop roots.

It's remarkable that an album with so much fast, dynamic percussion still has such a lugubrious pace, which makes all the sharp details drift by in an indistinct mass.

What follows is 13 tracks of sometimes great, sometimes anonymous music.

For an album recorded primitively inside a Nashville box, there are some stunning performances on A Letter Home.... Occasionally, though, the recording quality distracts from the album's content.

Setting aside the occasional meandering instrumental break, there are enough genuinely charming and well-crafted songs here that you can sort of understand what they're aiming at.

Frustratingly, most songs have great ideas in them, sitting alongside creative dead ends. The overall sound of the record--to be reductionist, rave-rap--is a welcome trend, and it proves they have their ear to the ground.

The disappointment is in how it sounds like their years apart have needlessly chastened them into fast-forwarding through the idiosyncratic streak they showed on Some Loud Thunder instead of embracing it, coming out of the wilderness only to end up smack dab in the middle of the road.

A boilerplate, but immensely satisfying, noise-pop record.

Magic Potion is a record where overwhelming competence meets measured restraint, but for me, sacrilege trumps sincerity, and I'd rather hear tuneful blasphemy than a tasteful snoozer of an album.

Even in its most indulgent turns, Star Stuff serves its purpose: After making an overly disciplined live album for zero spectators, it’s refreshing to hear Bundick really jam like no one’s looking.

Because its overt politics now feel so inadequate, Warzone works best as a melancholy gesture, a long look back at a time when dreaming of a better world felt invigorating rather than exhausting.

For all the sonic strides Svanangen takes on Hall Music, he sometimes seems stuck singing the same sad song.

The better part of this record is certainly charming, even more likeable than the folk that came before it... The only problem is that the magic fades.

Ferree obviously loves his source material, and the way he weaves in the references throughout is ingenious. But something about the pleasure he takes in his obsession cloisters it away - he can't quite make his subject matter in a way that transcends Bobby Driscoll's life and death.

There is rarely nuance to Baio’s lyrics, and everything is offered up with little in the way of poetry or insight.

That sense of focus on making emotionally redolent material, and keeping the overall thrust of the project in view despite having many hands on the tiller, are ultimately what makes Harbors solidify into a satisfyingly cohesive whole.

Structural over-tinkering is endemic on Neck of the Woods, an album that Silversun Pickups claim was inspired by horror movies; if so, they're the kind of horror movies where you wait a long time for twists you can see coming a mile away, with the visceral impact all but diluted by a glossy CGI sheen.

While some of these songs can feel regressive or at least undercooked on their own, they’re reframed by the open-hearted sadness that takes over the album’s second half.

VI strips down the prog to an ingestible 2-guitar/drums setup, forgoing many of the spacey, Yes-influenced synths and flare of previous releases and instead narrowing its focus on more immediate hooks and transitions.

They arrive at the settled creative space they’ve hinted at but never quite reached in the past.

They’re still making some alluring music, yet their albums have never sounded more disjointed.

While Animal Feelings has good instincts, it is still too cerebral and impressed with its own production flourishes to actually be fun.

Juul's vocals and production are emotive and permeable, always trying to convey something without any sort of coercion as to what that feeling's supposed to be.

For an album reportedly inspired by Carl Sagan, the 10-song, 36-minute Momentary Masters is remarkably lean and focused.

An album that turns out to be a lot more idiosyncratic than its coffee-chain marketing plan suggests.

While A Place to Bury Strangers take the brave step of allowing the distortion to dissipate, the unfettered view isn't always flattering: Ackermann's lyrics can sound like they were torn out of a bored, trench-coated high-school kid's notebook, with the cyber-punk fantasia of "Mind Control" and I-want-to-die miserablism.

The consistency of Solex material is potentially the agent of its own downfall. Play Solex vs. the Hitmeister after Low Kick and Hard Bop and you might think that they were recorded at the same time, rather than four years apart.

It's here, about halfway through this four-disc set, that most people will turn off Join the Dots.

All Yr Atal Genhedlaeth lacks is the unifying ambition of the great SFA records.

At the end of the day, though, I'm a bit puzzled over why the world needed an album of Sinead O'Connor reggae covers.

But if this introduction presents a retreat from the heavy metal parking lot, the rest of Western Xterminator returns to the usual spot and sets up a permanent trailer-home in it, with the 70s-Stones sleaze of Herrema's former band all but vanquished for a full-on 80s headbanger's ball pitched halfway between Sunset Strip flash and New Wave of British Heavy Metal thrash.

Given the exploratory transience of Six Organs' catalogue, Shelter from the Ash feels too much like work, too much like what had to happen.

In its own combustive way, it's weirdly memorable.

Like the other white rapper he will never escape comparisons to, Cage exhausts the patience of even his faithful followers at times, and Depart From Me almost reads like a plea to whoever might be left checking for him in 2009.

The 10 songs on Too Young to Be in Love are exuberant snapshots of rock music's earliest years, bursting with teenage romance and allusions to oral sex, but they are also very faithful ones.

Unlike Beach Fossils' compartmentalized distance, though, Brown Recluse sound bright and direct throughout Evening Tapestry, like light shining through their sleepy fog. Sort of like a dream? No-- better.

The band works via accumulation, gradually building up to moments of muted drama, yet LaCount's leads wreck that momentum.

h parties click together because they're willing to let genre be an afterthought, yet they still avoid succumbing to a rootless, stylistically overreaching identity crisis.

Meek has made the move from mixtapes to the majors with a solid vision.

Much of Curiosity finds Wampire a bit too comfortable and self-satisfied within their washed-out aesthetic, and the premeditated haziness of the recordings--and obvious attempts to weird them up, through squeaky synth settings and effete vocal tics--ultimately undermines the duo’s songwriting ambitions.

With their third release, the five-song Small Sound EP, Tennis complicate the easy breezy beautiful schtick with some positive results.

By burrowing down into a few key sounds rather than stiffly approximating a dozen-plus, the intermittently funky, unshakably finicky Wave 1 is a mostly welcome return.

A handful of tracks on Volume X are decent placeholders that do nothing to expand or appreciably reinforce the band’s aesthetic, but “Ice Fortress” stands out to represent everything Trans Am does right.

Egregiously melodramatic missteps aside, Creatures exists as a reminder that out there in the between of electronic music are swirling, delirious spaces that are yet to be explored.

As a whole Lucky 7 sounds a lot like everything else Statik Selektah has done up to this point; the album is neither offputting nor particularly exciting, and it's hard to feel strongly about at all.

The best Jeezy music often exploited how far he could go with memorable ad libs and punchlines, a triumphant kind of simplicity. Here that gets muted to muddied results.

Dälek took hip-hop into new stylistic realms before. This time, although Brooks and company may not have specifically intended as much, on Asphalt for Eden, hip hop ascends into the noosphere.

Woptober slogs towards the end, but it moves too quickly to feel like a chore to sit through. It has all the markings of what we’ve come to expect from Gucci’s music only this time—rather than drowning in his addictions—he’s found a way to integrate drugs and violence into his new outlook.

Musically, it is hardly satisfying, as the fleeting enjoyable moments are swallowed up by a great deal of frustrating mediocrity.

The Ornaments are yet another in a long line of floppy-haired guitar bands flying the flag of a purer pop past, but they’re also, unmistakably, one of the better, least pretentious ones. Sometimes it pays to be grateful rather than cynical.

One of the most radical departures in Segall’s catalog and a significant breakthrough for the band, exposing and refining the complex mechanisms behind their murky sound.

The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, maximally bloated with 15 (15!) additional songs. Those that stand out mostly do so for the wrong reasons.

The only problem is that the rambling approach that let Smith get these things out has kept the results from being all they might have been.

Adams' 1989, for all its sincerity and technical execution, is ultimately hollow because it's nothing but context.

Out Among the Stars is a boon for fans of country music history as well as those who just can’t get enough Cash. More importantly, it highlights a missing link between the often disparate eras of a long and complicated career.

It's not so much that the quality varies, but that a bloated, lethargic feel permeates the record.

Class Actress still sound a little too weird to truly break through (and if they toned that weirdness down, this record just wouldn't be as interesting).

Kinski have the potential, the skill, the other requisite intangibles to be awe-inspiring, but somehow they keep shooting left of the mark.

This is Weird War at their most minimal and stoned.

While Sunday at Devil Dirt may be more of the same (with glimpses of Tom Waits' junkyard blues tossed in to good effect), Campbell and Lanegan were never out to do anything different.

Roll with the Punches never falls, or even falters, exactly; it’s just a series of punches, whether of the clock or in the air, landing with consistency and specificity and only occasionally drifting into anonymity. To paraphrase Morrison himself, it doesn't pull any punches, but it doesn't push the river.

Some songs miss the mark—“I Get What I Need”’s creeping, bluesy bassline proves awkward—but most of them work, if only because the band sounds like they’re truly putting their all into their melodies and riffs, rather than leaving the heavy lifting to distortion.

The Uglysuit are certainly competent, but on this debut their music feels too by-the-book.

The Strange Boys have proved to be great attention-grabbers but seem a little lost when things get too quiet.

Summer of Hate felt meek at times, content to retreat into its own shadow; Sleep Forever's many oversized melodies and wider-reaching sound prove that these guys do a lot better taking a few steps into the light.

Tidelands, by contrast, finds the Moondoggies (and particularly lead singer Kevin Murphy) admirably striving to find their own voice, yet it's frequently a more crabbed and deliberate album than its predecessor. In other words, a quintessential example of artistic growing pains.

Despite their abstraction over the last few years, Autechre aren't an altogether different beast than when they started. In fact, they're smarter, more refined.

A record that finds SMD operating at half-speed when the accelerator is pedal is close within their reach.

While there are some musical highlights--like the 8-bit ambience of the Ricky Eat Acid-produced title-track--the album is constantly in pursuit of a voice it never finds. Which highlight Smith’s writing, some of the worst in rap this year. His lyrics are crass and half-baked and insulting to one’s intelligence.

The inner-space exploration is enjoyable to a point, but it comes with an underlying claustrophobia and, at times, a weariness.

With Dark Red, he’s taken another turn, slipping out of the pop-shadowing path he was on in exchange for something darker and bolder, but compromised by its own disorder.

Unfortunately, the duo's apparent ambitions to be something more hold it back from reaching serotonin-peaking heights (like Carly Rae Jepsen's E•MO•TION).

Home Wrecking Years feels like a guy just filling in the downtime before he gets back to work with his main band.

While [Matt Sharp] wisely defers to Wolfe and Laessig to deliver the album's biggest hooks, his unwavering wistfulness still has a way of flattening out Lost in Alphaville’s emotional terrain and lending the album a steady-to-a-fault temperament.

Outclassed by their own ambition, the band has aimed Annabel Dream Reader toward the lofty heights of Poe’s glum, fog-shrouded majesty--and winds up hitting, at best, late-period Tim Burton.

It can feel indulgent. Yes, they have expressed some of these thoughts more succinctly in the past; and yes, the tracklist could be condensed so that you don’t have to clear your schedule to get through it. But when everything clicks, their work has never sounded so patient, so personal.

Although these pieces are wrought with meticulous detail, they're rarely memorable.

Although Michael is likely destined to end up a minor effort in Bundick’s expanding catalogue, his talent and radiant passion for new musical ideas and a wide breadth of sounds render the album a worthwhile effort for even casual listeners.

More than anything, Glazin's sneer'n'strut is just too much of a pretty good thing: One or two at a time, these songs work wonders, but over half an hour, the Boys' retrograde sneer and strut proves a bit too safe and samey.

The split between Perry and Gerrard's singing parts remains distinct not only vocally, but for the different subjects each explores. That could be a stumbling block in other hands, but always seems to bring out the best where these two are concerned.

The contrasting styles don't always sit comfortably, but individual tracks sparkle with creativity and the newfound dark side is a surprisingly pleasant fit.

Damage is a far cry from the stripped-down screech that made these guys famous. In its contrast, it calls out everything the Blues Explosion once was and now isn't.

Before, it seemed like these beautiful free spirits were just cranking out great happy-sad songs, one of which happened to sneak into a Target commercial. Now it seems like they're trying to make music for a Target commercial.

Not everything here is as compelling, but the true takeaways (the first three cuts, including the outsized, life-affirming "16 Years") are well worth the misguided ambition and watered down moments that inhabit the EP's second half.

It’s easy to miss the album’s sonic and conceptual ingenuity amid the lyrical bloat. The thing is, even Barnes’ worst clunkers serve a purpose.

Overall, it's this sense of forced importance that makes the album no fun: You feel like it's meant to do something to you, not for you.

Unlike ...For the Whole World to See, N.E.W. does not sound like a lost proto-punk classic; it's just a pretty good rock record made by guys who have been at it for a long time.

California Nights is a professional album: heavy-ish, filled with hooks, somewhere between "fast enough to dance" and "slow enough to sigh to while looking out of a window."