Like many spinoffs from the Odd Future machine, it's a small piece of a larger puzzle, useful for obsessives concerned with keeping their catalogs up to date.

It's ultimately a spotty album from a guy who has released a lot of spotty albums.

If his eccentricity was tamed and the pained attempts to hop genres were avoided, Luke Steele could just produce something close to sublime. As it stands, Lovers is a fairly pleasant application of some charming reference points, but please, let's stop pretending that that's good enough.

Antiphon is still a likeable, pleasant listen that will always wait for you by the hearth after a long day. But for a “forget everything you know about Midlake!” album, it's almost exactly how you remember them.

Considering the band's taste for zoning out to infinity, One Track Mind really needed a harsher edit. With some tightening and pruning, it could have burst into bloom.

Atheist's Cornea maintains an urgency that’s palpable even for those who don’t speak Fukagawa’s native language.

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

Jel's music here doesn't focus your attention to a laser-point the way Them did, but neither is it big enough to saturate it-- it lurks comfortably in the middle distance.

This is a merely pleasant album, and especially after 11 long years, pleasant is a low hurdle for such an inimitable singer.

Foals’ problem is that they have the same ambitions as just about every other large-font rock band these days and thus the same pitfalls. Making apolitical art feels borderline negligent, and yet it’s easier than ever to feel desensitized to the doomsaying when everything just seems to get incrementally worse.

Frankly, it could be much worse.

When they stop arching their eyebrows and put some work into doing time-tested pop stuff, they can be great.

The biggest detractor here is the band's lack of focus. The record is downright messy at times, even if the thick, murky quality does, in some instances, work to considerable effect.

Wire never wanted to be a satisfying band, yet they somehow became one--which leaves the otherwise bold impulse behind Document and Eyewitness curiously inconclusive.

America Give Up is inconsistent and derivative yet promising, and not nearly as impressive as some early adopters would have people believe.

Feel Something is a so-so listen that never rises above the band’s influences.

Friendly and nondescript.

In 2001, their Brit-derived goth-punk was just gaining a foothold and still felt like a novel reinvention; now, its dreary slog is as commonplace as three-chord punk after the millennium's turn.

What once was exciting is now a bit boring, and it’s hard to say exactly why. Stott is still a wonderful sound technician of unerring good taste, but something seems to go slack at the center of Never the Right Time.

Kanye’s tenth album arrives barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.

Here, blocky synth structures feel mismatched to the themes, and heavy-handed arrangements sometimes threaten to overwhelm the lyrics.

Clear Heart is just good enough to keep us listening.

Their forlorn, polished California pop is like the sprawling Valley suburbs: nice enough, if that's your sort of thing.

The six-piece around Houck is more competent than combustible, a quality that’s long made Phosphorescent a good band to see for a 90-minute show but not one that makes you need to take them home.

Ryan Adams is a persuasively dark album, one defined by themes of struggle, instability, isolation, and regret.

Convertibles ends up a low-stakes affair without being a low-quality one.

There’s just enough to think about without getting fatigued, as the Strokes continue to toy with the sound of their late period.

Bibio's [Ambivalence Avenue] had two things Look a Little Closer is missing, namely context and a true sense of discovery.

The meat of the album is generally good, with strong vocals and decent songs, but there's enough gristle on this record that it ultimately obscures some of the pleasures of listening to it.

Taken as a whole, it’s a pretty, enveloping record that executes its modern influences with panache, though the intangible, purely aesthetic nature of Woolhouse’s vaguely downhearted emotional state makes it hard to appreciate Defo as anything other than luxurious ambient icing.

The Giveon of Take Time experimented with melody and challenged himself vocally; Give or Take stunts that growth in favor of secluding himself in his comfort zone.

Milosh’s crisp electronic soundscapes work mainly as contrast, immaculate bedding designed to melt away as his warm voice slithers in. At his best on Jetlag, Milosh builds up his tracks in the simple interest of pulling them back to let the vocal take over.

If Never Gonna Touch the Ground is less a party album and more an album as party--self-contained, relentlessly upbeat, rowdy, self-celebratory--too many of these songs come across as kegs of near beer.

Kiyoko’s debut won’t blow past anyone’s expectations, but it contains just enough intrigue and individuality to sustain them for a second shot.

Yeah Right has its charms, but they're echoes of a band Bleeding Rainbow used to be under a slightly different name.

Without that commitment to either pop immediacy or boundary-pushing weirdness, let alone being able to pull of both at once, Tussle are always going to feel like they occupy some kind of tepid middle-ground, however sharply their cymbals are recorded.

Perhaps they’re too-smart-for-their own good, but in the moments they can get over themselves, Althaea, at least for a flash, can offer more than just a thrill.

What’s missing from Panic is some kind of levity or the cutting humor that once personalized Hutchison’s self-loathing.

Like its predecessors, Three's Co. mixes the sun-soaked power pop proclivities of Teenage Fanclub with the sylvan jangle of Felt, though the Tyde too often seem afraid to really make waves.

They’re the sort of tunes that the Keys can pull off with ease, as satisfying as a perfectly tossed curveball landing in a beaten-up catcher’s mitt. But they also make you wish the Keys didn't spend the rest of Dropout Boogie lobbing underhand pitches right down the middle of the plate.

Borrowing Mahler’s vivid contrasts while jettisoning the soothing unity, Song of the Earth feels more like something coming apart than coming together, which may relate to Longstreth’s ideas about the earth and how we live now. But if you can’t get on its chaotic wavelength, it can wear you out.

Is Octahedron the band's best album? No, but if you dig on MV's unrepentantly "big" and meandering suite-driven concept-album thing, you won't necessarily be disappointed.

Neither off-putting nor engaging, Client's debut occupies a rather uninteresting place in electropop's soft middle.

The struggle of the wealthy and talented white rapper was never especially sympathetic. And on Ben, his trials are mostly internal, the enduring struggle of man to find meaning and leave a legacy. This Macklemore is likely the most honest version we’ve seen to date.

At the very least, it sounds terrific. With imaginative production from Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn and accompaniment from a sterling cast of (largely) North Carolina ringers. ... But across the 42 minutes of Henry St., Matsson rarely responds to them in kind. To put it plainly, the writing is just bad, as though it were some slapdash afterthought to the strong instrumentals already in place.

Even if the overall effect here isn't terribly original, there are still plenty of nice touches spread throughout these tracks to suggest Le Loup holds the potential to become more than an amalgam of well-regarded influences.

We're Animals still has haywire guitars, bushwhacking rhythms, and those homemade synthesizers we're always hearing about, but the real story is the band's conflicted strategy for melody.

The album is so densely packed that it’s easy to miss Marr’s overarching themes, a shame exacerbated by his habitual neglect to draw attention to his lyrics. A pleasantly flat, unassuming singer, he functions mostly as a conduit for his melodies, which is only a detriment on an album with so much potential thematic resonance.

There are solid hooks scattered all over No Life For Me, and they sound like they could've been knocked out in five minutes--each melodic note notches in the expected place over thrumming power chords and steady drums.

It’s all so easy to digest, so pitch-perfect, so safe. Let’s Start Here. clearly and badly wants to be hanging up on those dorm room walls with Currents and Blonde and IGOR.

This is clearly a band with some musicology under its collective belt, and its members have the technical skill to fold their diverse interests into guitar rock without forcing anything; the surprises come fast and, often, satisfyingly. But Haege's big voice puts a lot of emphasis on the prolix lyrics, which remain dismal.

Every darker, weirder impulse got glossed over while the music gives an agreeable shrug.

Mogwai’s cautionary approach all but drowns out the faint echoes of the once brave band struggling to get out from within.

Gravity the Seducer is a transitional album bearing the growing pains and separation anxiety that we usually associate with bands that are in between periods of true inspiration.

In the end, Lenses comes off like a proggy, synth pop album that wants to get treated like sound sculpture, but Soft Metals don't fully commit to either endeavor in spite of the record's handful of successes.

In a way, this is representative of the album--it's got all the right moves in place, but MSTRKRFT's handle on content is still slightly lagging behind their facility for tone and form.

They’ve been slowing down for a while now, but here they feel nearly worn out.

There's no getting around the fact that June 2009 acquires most of its value, if not all of it, in context with Causers of This and Underneath the Pine.

The kind of music that Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, La-La and Po might enjoy kicking back to after a hard day's romping with bunny rabbits.

While Rap-Metal 101 drums bang away in the background, the basslines are replaced by chugging guitar riffs reminiscent of your high school hardcore band. What remains, though, is the exceptional quality of Pharrell's voice, which, unlike the bass sound, doesn't lose its intensity due to repeated radio exposure.

It can't be said that Senior fails to meet its modest wallpaper-ish aims, yet it hardly represents the best Royksopp has to offer.

As a benefit for earthquake victims and as an outlet for Batoh's grief and fear, there's plenty to recommend. As a pure sonic experience, it is a very novel, very undeveloped idea mingling with some very old ones.

Domesticated is a concept album whose concept falls flat; a shot at the future that’s too in debt to the past; a brilliant idea consumed by inertia—less back-breaking deep clean than half-hearted tidy.

Although Everything Touching is post-rock at its most winsome, and rarely unpleasant to listen to, closer "Murmurations" might be the key to understanding why several years of triumphant live shows hasn't translated into the ultimate debut album.

Geist's contributions to electronica have always seemed fringe--label head, remix specialist, in-demand crate digger--and it's once again nice for him to have something to put his own name on. But after years of waiting, Double Night Time confirms that Geist is most valuable behind the curtain.

Future Bible Heroes frontman Chris Ewen just isn't a Merritt-caliber composer, and this EP suffers in comparison to the Magnetic Fields.

Though each track is named for where it was recorded, there’s not much to distinguish one stop from another, and though you could connect the locations into a journey, these tracks don’t form an arc but play as if stacked atop one another.

All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is the musical equivalent of a late Woody Allen film (possibly a good or bad thing, depending on your temperament): The action unfolds predictably, but the dramatic effect can also be increased by your fondness for and familiarity with the idiom.

The result sounds like something that's already been comp'ed to death by Putumayo.

Shine isn’t dark. But it feels like an exercise in avoidance as if Wale took the advice to ease up too far.

Even as he shifts from his typically elliptical songwriting to more structure-bound forms, he never sounds overly fussy. It makes Former Lives a brisk listen even when the songs themselves aren't particularly innovative.

The countrypolitan aspirations of Bury Me often make it sound hollow--there's a basis in roots music, but it isn't "rootsy" by any stretch. Instead, the clean-shaven guitars, pedal steels, and violins (not fiddles) achieve an eerie minimalism.

A good deal of this album sounds like it could've been recorded by a lone foot-stomping folksinger, carrying over the intimate, around-the-kitchen-table ambience of Ebert's 2011 solo release, Alexander.

As impressive and encouraging as the production is, Pemberton's rapping isn't up to snuff. He's still overly dry and often noticeably amateurish, and he sometimes pushes himself to do things he can't.

Five albums in, Cults sound just as eerie and cheery as ever but struggle to transcend the fleeting pleasantries of paint-by-numbers pop.

The biggest difference between the two 6ths records is obvious: Wasps' Nest allowed some of indie rock's finest vocalists to lend their talents to a grade-a batch of Merritt tunes; Hyacinths and Thistles pairs remarkably average Merritt songs with largely substandard vocalists.

In general, the album is sequenced awkwardly. The first two tracks have vocals and are around 19 and seven minutes long, respectively.

A Positive Rage isn't much of an opening gambit. It's a memento for the fans, for better or for worse. But if you were too loaded on Halloween 2007 to remember much from this show, maybe this is the album for you.

There’s nothing here that touches the band’s creative peak--and, honestly, even the best of these nine songs falter next to Wonky’s highs--but there’s just enough pleasure to be gained on Monsters Exist to justify the album as a worthwhile endeavor.

Revisit older Factory Floor tracks like “A Wooden Box” or “(R E A L L O V E)” and there remains something tantalizing there--the way they morph back and forth between live band and broiling techno, a trompe l’oeil for the ear. On 25 25, they’ve shed this dimension, and the results can feel depthless and a little flat.

The aesthetics of her songs with Hershenow remain timid and careful.

The upshot of these six tracks seems to be that Adult. have been listening to a hell of a lot of Bauhaus. And I have to give them credit: They've followed that impulse right out to the sweet spot.

Despite a couple of intriguing, spaced-out interludes that have much in common with Boards of Canada's inky psychedelia, the album carries on predictably, checking off boxes: punishing banger ("Extrusion"), acid workout ("Spirals"), piano-led stomper ("0I0x").

Most of Tree City sounds lifted from Britt Daniel's songbook. By that, I don't mean it sounds somewhat like it. I mean, it sounds like they stole the tapes from Britt's house and scribbled their name over his.

So no shocker then that One Day sounds less the work of punk provocateurs than a Keith Richards solo album: grizzled rock vets backed by a nominally gritty if too-well-rehearsed troupe of young(er) hired guns.

It’s the easiness of Monuments that truly make it an outlier--whether Corgan constructed a masterpiece or just sounded labored, it was obvious that a ton of effort went into Smashing Pumpkins

Nocturnes finds her settling on one that aspires to the distance of Saint Etienne's Sarah Cracknell or Sophie Ellis-Bextor. She’s not quite there, and when her approach doesn’t work, it really doesn’t. Nocturnes is a big improvement over Hands, though, where even the biggest singles' hooks were made of saccharine, not sugar.

It makes you feel like you are in on a longstanding inside joke with an old friend. Even if the joke is super dumb and at times problematic, it is strangely comforting to know that the guy responsible hasn’t changed one iota.

Pale Fire doesn't command your attention so much as wait patiently until it drifts into your view and then goes away.

While the record is far from a failure, Bishop Allen's studio revisionism also falls short of offering anything substantially new to much of the EP material.

It is a painfully raw, emotionally generous, politically charged, intensely intelligent, sometimes unlistenable album.

After initially promising a return to form, 50 doesn't have the ability or initiative to hold the listener's interest over the long run.

Trap or Die 3 offers real reminders of Jeezy’s greatness, then, something Church in These Streets couldn’t claim. But some of these songs just sound terrible.

Alone for the First Time is the furthest he's pushed himself, and the growing pains on the album can be chalked up to the strain of trying new things, a kind of adolescent awkwardness that shows signs of maturing into something sophisticated and unique.

This is a record with a handful of standout songs struggling and straining against one another after being crammed into the standard album format.

Sonically rich but melodically staid, Corporate World ultimately brings to mind Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.'s extramusical affairs: alluring at first, but a bit wanting under the surface.

Compelling... [Yet] Forever So's resolutely overcast vibe grows a touch dreary around the three-quarter mark; Husky's tempos tend toward the deliberate, and they're most comfortable hanging out in a minor key, but after nine or 10 fairly maudlin affairs in a row, you may find yourself longing for a little respite.

The best that can be said of Defend Yourself is that it isn't embarrassing; they didn't lose the plot like the Pixies, and it's better than The Sebadoh simply because they got out of that L.A. studio and back to their roots. But it also doesn't add anything to the story or feel like it needs to exist.