Living Thing sounds like a noble but flawed attempt by Peter Bjorn and John to test the fortitude of their songwriting using the most barren and broken of arrangements. But more often that not, it sounds like they settled on the drum-machine presets first, with the lyrics and melodies thrown on top as afterthoughts.

The problem with it, beyond a handful of unflattering genre excursions, is a slight but persistent thinness of imagination.

Americana doesn't so much amount to a caustic commentary on the modern-day American condition as capture a bunch of old pals trying to rediscover their chemistry by sloppily jamming on some standards.

On the whole, it's more entertaining than resonant.

Earrings Off! is filled with these sorts of growing pains, ones that hopefully point to brighter pastures sometime soon for this promising band.

It’s disappointing that these songs don’t have the bones to stand on their own, especially since a precedent for truly great Major Lazer songs exists.

Each composition is fleshed out as well as it can be, the end result still a kind of Appalachian wallpaper music that after further inspection and subsequent listens, leaves the record sounding much more flimsy than urgent. What impression it leaves doesn't last.

while Surfing occasionally fails and does so loudly, but there's something thrillingly unfashionable about how Klaxons take aim at their grayer peers with a tommy gun full of glowsticks--they don't always hit their target, but it's a gloriously fun mess all the same.

They still have the riffs, but without the snap of a snare drum to keep things in line, the chiming guitars become repetitive and amorphous.

While they may have shed some of the quirks that made them unique, Invisible People is far and away Chicano Batman’s most accessible record, with big, clean hooks to match definitive statements. A decade into writing songs together, they sound stronger than ever.

This is a record where inspired ideas are constantly battling for oxygen with dubious ones.

While Theater isn't quite as dire as the above may indicate, like every other Ludacris record, it doesn't grow on you--in fact, it actually contracts.

Whereas many modern film soundtracks are glorified compilation discs with a seemingly random track selection, the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World soundtrack is very thoughtful in its curation and stands as a very accurate interpretation of O'Malley's fictional world.

After nailing the rapid-fire EP format with tracks that constantly threatened to disintegrate themselves from the inside-out, TPC psyche themselves out on their first full-length, over-cooking songs made from otherwise spectacular ingredients.

It's a precision attack, and as lofty and lovely as these tunes can sound, even their note-perfect nature seems to hold the listener at arm's length. But the real distance in the record is generated by Kurosky's lyrics, a series of clipped phrases and red herrings loosely compiled in the shape of story-songs, rich in imagistic detail but short in the personals department.

It would be a tall order to expect them to rival Frost's raw power, but these remixes don't unearth much fascinating stuff, and the EP turns out (mostly) competent but wan.

While the result is a 12-track standard edition full of potential hits, the brunt of it rests on interchangeable tempos from existing, already-charting singles.

Born Again Revisited is a deeply rewarding record and a worthy entry in a pretty stellar catalog.

The main issue with Green Language is that it feels scattered.

It may not be as instantly gratifying as Pleasure, but it's more sophisticated and self-aware.

Bauhaus can hold their head high, mission accomplished; but with no victory-lap tour, no more studio albums, and several awesome new tunes pointing at an un-actualized future, it all feels rather anti-climatic and lacking closure.

If there's a criticism here it's in the way these songs don't stray far from the original pieces, instead working as tasteful updates that add a dab of cohesion that was never needed in the first place. It's a treat for fans, which is really all a project like this is ever going to be. But it also highlights a continuity in their work.

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.

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.

The Vines get credit for ambition, but Highly Evolved covers so much ground that none of it seems convincing: there's just no emotional depth here.

For an album I approached ready to shrug off as sheer novelty, its humor and candor give it a fair amount of staying power.

Like their best, "SNL"-aired material, these songs get better as they go on, mostly because of the way the lyrics carry the joke to its logical and grotesque endpoint.

A decade ago, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were a modest, rickety band bearing the albatross of hype; today, they’re an amorphous, musically adventurous entity basking in the freedom of no expectations.

There are some good songs on here, I guess, but they're not as good as anything from If You're Feeling Sinister, or even The Boy with the Arab Strap. It's weird, because the songs definitely sound better, but the album is still kind of disappointing.

Though inspired by weightier and more evocative themes [than 20122's Too Beautiful to Work], Animator already feels less memorable-- it seems to constantly evade the listener's grasp.

It’s cinematic music, driven by sprawling harmonies and fluid motion. Rather than dreaming of the future, these nostalgic pieces feel as if they’re looking back at the past, taking in a bird’s eye view of the change that occurs throughout life.

Instead of the charming, shaggy stoner vibe that permeates most of the current A&C catalog, Cinematographer shows off a nerdier, bookish quality.

It highlights their strengths (that voice, those beats, that authentic giving-it-their-all vibe) and hides their weaknesses (lack of songwriting breadth and dynamic diversity) making it sound like there's no place more fun than a Gossip concert, and no better host than Beth Ditto.

Despite radio-ready production and commercial hooks that tell us we're hearing pop, it can take some hours of intense listening before most of these tunes ever stick in the head, and there's little to no emotional investment.

Tipped Bowls feels like a minor record, partially by design. It never grabs you by the throat. It never gives you something totally new to consider. It's also highly listenable, and has a way of slipping in through the side door that I admire.

Times changed; Dntel, less so. Aimlessness, his third album of new material, arrives without context, scene, or convenient narrative.

For a band that once stood out for its too-much-ness, Walk the River now gives us too much of the wrong things: too many midtempo songs, too many minor-key acoustic strums, too many codas that outstay their welcome without really connecting.

Maybe some thought Busdriver sounded self-satisfied before, but he used to sound one step ahead of the listener instead of running to catch up.

The Century of Self turns out to be every bit as stubborn as its predecessors, even as it goes a certain way towards justifying them.

The blurry sound drifts through the music and seeps its way into the lyrics, as much of the album is steeped in uncertainty, Nau's footing never steady enough to see a bold, clear image as he had in his Page France days.

It'd be much easier to love, as opposed to merely like, They!Live's glistening, long-form tech-house soundscapes if there were more bombs and curveballs hidden amongst its lovingly pruned forest glades.

The time-slowing, pulse-quelling Spirits is a good place to get some thinking done.

The tracks on Remembrance don’t sound like they’d be improved with people spitting over them, but they do connect to the emotional world of a certain kind of rap production, with chords and patterns that suggest tension, danger, and, ultimately, melancholy.

To paraphrase the great Roy Kent, real love should make you feel like you’ve been struck by lightning. 6LACK manages some sparks here and there, but the tingles fade fast.

You can't deny that Cuomo feels no shame and is making exactly the kind of music he wants, and there's ultimately something disarming about that.

The Fragile Army is an all-out orchestral and choral assault for optimism in a turbulent era, but only infrequently are the Spree's songs as memorable as their numbers.

It's billed as something of a minor release (in the same way What a Time to Be Alive was minor but they still wanted your money for it), but it's still an "official" one, meaning Future swings for a few radio hits here. They feel more obligatory than outright bad.

For all its surface simplicity, Cotillions is saddled with its own peculiar Corganian paradox: the lightest, breeziest songs of his career add up to a demanding slog of a record.

The low ebbs detract from an album that’s otherwise difficult to resist bouncing to.

Rebel Heart grows confusing and irreconcilably uneven as it progresses.

Theirs is the rare lead vocalist/backing vocalist dynamic that feels like an equal partnership, with Violet’s injections propelling these songs nearly as much as their rubbery bass lines or pogoing guitars.

Another goddamn home run.

While the songwriting may be on autopilot, Gallagher’s decision to self-produce Chasing Yesterday was a smart one, resulting in an album that feels both intimate and expansive.

With its variations in mood, tone, and personnel, Basses Loaded plays more like compilation of B-sides culled from multiple recording sessions spanning several years.

What is unexpected is how Wilson sounds almost anonymous here. As he drifts through his greatest hits and personal favorites, he doesn’t invest his playing with much personality, so these smooth sounds are about as memorable as a piano twinkling away in the background of a department store.

The moments where Mastermind gives us William Roberts the man instead of Rick Ross the gangster flick composite character with the borrowed name are scarce, and he remains committed to dialing in good life platitudes that increasingly ring hollow.

To the familiar, Robin Guthrie has already proven he's better than this; to the uninitiated, Imperial offers a muted exposition of his talents.

Forget Yourself is no small resurrection, and though it owes a great deal to The Church's traditionalism, that's nothing to apologize for.

For better or worse, this is not Moon Safari Redux.

Unfortunately, Fire in the Hole fails to invoke any effective nostalgia as it phlegmatically wanders through 12 solid but unexciting tracks.

Young, earnest, eerie, and overzealous, Von is a unique, almost belligerently unaffiliated piece of music that unsubtly blazons its idiosyncrasies.

Hello Happiness is a messy, overproduced, anonymous set of hotel-lobby beats that makes woeful use of one of the greatest voices of all time. ... There’s a moment when Hello Happiness works. On the sensual and affirming closing track, “Ladylike,” Chaka Khan finally breaks free of vocal effects.

At only 33 minutes, Subtítulo doesn't leave Rouse, longtime producer Brad Jones, and their small band much time to recover from such miscues.

Even more denatured and opaque than the soupy Melbourne, Sunshine Redux is self-produced to a gooey, garish, gritty and barely mobile gel.

Terrible Human Beings can still be cherry-picked for catchy singles bound for algorithmic playlists, but it’s impossible to overlook how much of the Orwells’ appeal is bundled into their persona as enfants terribles.

The Magician's Private Library isn't an attention-grabbing debut in the plain sense. The best moments drift along naturally and without hassle.

A broader palate is still under development, but Apar provides a path forward without forfeiting Delorean's effortless energy.

Where Folkloric Feel opted for cobwebby murk, National Anthem of Nowhere dovetails in bright, tidy corners. It's at once straight-laced and funky in the way that only indie rock can be.

True Sadness is a record that can’t seem to get out of its own way. Almost every track is bloated with instrumentation.

The aggressively banal orchestral arrangements and cornball baritone make Jacket Full of Danger something like a rakish Scott Walker for the post-Beck era.

More energy and less uniformly drab scenery might have kept these well-intentioned stories from blurring into each other.

What was once alienating and difficult in Eat Skull’s music now reads as interesting quirks attached to pleasing packages. With III, Eat Skull is willing to be loved--and be loveable, too.

Given its relatively seamless mesh of spiky, aggro party music and the more contemplative electronic moments created by Martinez and Moore, Spring Breakers is the rare soundtrack that covers both extremes and makes it work as a whole.

E S T A R A is almost hypnotic in its tendency to make each individual track blur itself into an indistinct piece of a loosely memorable whole, one with little impression actually retained even if it jumps from mood to mood.

The line between exhilarating and exasperating is still being straddled to the point where it's starting to chafe.

Let Her Burn is so, so dry.

Taken as a whole, Life doesn't really depart from "Hands Across the Void" (itself not exactly a cheery record), but rather refines and builds upon it, besting the previous album's runtime by a factor of 1.5 and boasting, as a bonus, a number of melodies that stick like tar in spite of their spareness.

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.

This is a bedtime record, in both the complementary and dismissive senses of the word: it invites you to relax and soothes like a warm cup of tea, but can cross the line into powerfully soporific territory.

Stewart's increased output and dearth of exploration gives Archives an unflattering offhandedness, and it also dilutes the potency of Vapor City, like putting together an album is just another item to mark off his to-do list.

The evolving identities of Lee Ranaldo might be a valiant pursuit, but they have made for a problematic tone on Last Night on Earth.

Nothing Fits is the band's first release to be recorded in an actual studio, and the result is a shorter, more focused record, but hardly a cleaner one.

Their weakest record to date, one that lacks the subtle power and distinctive personality of their best work.

The deeply uncool Comedown Machine smacks of effort.... Still, the limitations of Comedown Machine's protracted diversity all come back to Casablancas, a man with wide range as a listener and extremely narrow range as a musician.

This is the one that puts them firmly and officially up there in the top tier of the dance-music crossover-album crowd, up with the Daft Punks and, umm, Basement Jaxxes.

The intensity rises and falls with the rolling hills, but the vistas remain the same, and the horizon never gets any closer. Despite the uniformity, there are clear highlights.

With Coolaid, arguably Snoop’s first real hip-hop album in half a decade, we find his reinvention back into “Rapper Snoop” to be a bit wobbly.

As welcome as it is to hear Hekt reflect on her burgeoning identity, the most commanding songs on Going to Hell explore personal feelings in service to a community.

With Boyhood [the Richard Linklater film], you grow invested in the characters as they evolve over 12 years; you can enjoy the flow of Lacuna just as much, but in the 11 songs here, you just wish there was some character to begin with.

Considerably tamer than their stadium-rocking, chart-topping previous albums, Just Enough Education to Perform sounds less like a band voluntarily growing into their new-found maturity, and more like a pet's first, forced visit to the castration clinic.

Marjorie Fair's shiny Beach Boys-meets-Pernice Brothers act suffers primarily from well-intentioned overproduction.

If Young’s recent work has felt like a series of hard-headed dives into his pet obsessions--more interesting for simply existing than for actually listening to--then The Visitor is more all-encompassing, and as a result, more centered.

Dior stays vague and vacant throughout the album, invested in his feelings but short on interesting ideas.

A narrative concept album that runs a mere 29 minutes and is both more musically ornate yet somehow also slighter than anything Girls attempted, a deeply personal work whose arch presentation serves to keep you at an emotional distance.

The shift in perspective necessary to "get" it, though, does work on that level: at the least, it's a fitting testimonial to British Sea Power's partially effective relocation of a classic film into a modern aesthetic scheme.

It's "Sam Baker's album" by name and ownership, but it's also another beat tape in a very crowded field, one where it's easy to get lost amidst the increasingly innovative producers working now.

On Time Is Over One Day Old, any emotional extreme or attempted musical shift just ends up sounding like stasis.

After these frontloaded highlights [Andrew in Drag, God Wants Us to Wait], it doesn't take long for Love at the Bottom of the Sea to become a rain-boot-worthy slog through water-logged mid-tempo material.