The negatives far outweigh the positives... sounds entirely manufactured.

Her best and most cohesive work to date.

The problem with Radlands is that, armed with the potential to go wild with a new bag of tricks, Mystery Jets often become as conservatively minded as parts of the state whose outline graces the album's cover.

Isn't Anything crystallizes MBV's unique dynamic.

Though neither a high point nor a low point in her freewheeling, four-decade career, Banga has the same charm of Smith's best albums: It flits with the impressionistic fascinations of a single mind.

Endless Flowers is Crocodiles' best album and also their most frustrating. They're simply trying to do good enough and no more.

Curren$y's lyrics drip with nice things, and the joy that comes from fondly describing them. But the language he brings to them exists in its own universe.

This cerebral/visceral friction is one of the most satisfying elements of Black Hippy, and Ab-Soul arguably carries it the furthest of the group.

At times, it sounds far less like his beloved Boys of Summer 2009 so much as a simplified homage to Kompakt's more populist acts, electronic's version of a neophyte performing solo acoustic versions of Zeppelin or Radiohead at a college bar.

Another very good album from a band that consistently turns out good work while charting its own path.

Yet past all the stylistic flourishes, Generals is openhearted, politically engaged, feminist pop that, miraculously, never veers into schmaltz (or worse, didacticism).

[Song "Casualties of War" is] the sole promising moment on an album that ranges from average to disappointing. In the end, Joyful Noise feels like a stopgap.

[Guitarist Dave] Chandler's prowess as an axeman cannot be given enough emphasis: his writhing, twisted, screaming solos, and devilishly heavy riffs funnel blood and mercury into Saint Vitus' heart, as Wino's pipes lay down the soul.

It doesn't advance much on their debut and, like that record, it only intermittently allows their latent promise to creep to the fore.

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.

You get the impression he isn't really trying that hard, that bettering his bests isn't a notion that interests him, 20 years after the release of Red House Painters' debut album. He's the kind of talented songwriter that can mostly pull that off; though for a record so spare and simple, Among the Leaves comes off as strangely confrontational.

The Sister ultimately comes across as, at best, a retread done well and, at worst, a retreat into previously approved territory by an artist who has noticeably improved as a tactician.

Historical importance aside, they're a band built on unreliability and inconsistency, and This Is PiL maintains that reputation.

The problem isn't that Valtari aspires to beauty, even if it's a commonplace, celestial understanding of it. Sigur Ros have proven they can make indelible music that's pretty and unpredictable, pretty and melodic, pretty and unnerving, pretty and inspiring. Valtari wants to be pretty and that's it.

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.

He manages to satiate his obsession for thousand-detail soundscaping while creating pieces that walk the line of sensory overload, never overwhelming but always blurring the edges.

True to its titular subject, Diver constitutes a daring leap for Lemonade, one that, at times, appears destined to result in a belly-flop, but recovers nicely in the end.

Dense and darkly lovely music.

Though it rarely makes good on the promise of her earlier songs, Cheap Seats is polarizing, and by now most listeners will have already decided whether or not they can stomach Spektor's peculiar kind of verite, glass-half-full optimism.

What at first seems rather silly actually proves to be quite purposeful.

Most rewardingly and remarkably, Nudes, Singles & Backsides manages to present a fairly detailed portrait of an artist who found himself suddenly back on the pop music margins.

While it is certainly admirable that the Scissor Sisters' creative vision is strong enough that they sound very much like themselves no matter who they work with, they really could have used a strong push from their collaborators this time around.

The duo taps into a power greater than itself to address impossibly vast and elemental topics-- friendship, lust, revenge, art, self-actualization-- with songs every bit as big.

King Tuff feels like the couch surfer friend you invite to your house party, the one who's often charming and fun but will not leave until every last drop of beer is gone.

There's still a sense of discovery, now paired with playfulness.

With Heaven, they've turned out a record that finds a thousand affecting variations on contented hum.

Ram is a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made.

Despite attempts at lyrical heft detailing a too-vague sexual awakening ("Sebastian") and an encomium for a friend ("Ghost Bike"), Ulicny undermines himself on a second-by-second basis by finding no lyric that can't be subjected to at least six different forms of contortion regardless of its content.

More than a cash-in or credibility play, Passage simply pulls several familiar objects into one detailed picture, a predictably good look from a pair whose script seems every bit as written as much as lived.

The songs on Internal Logic are like triple-exposed photographs, their nebulous, hazy qualities occasionally belying the acute skill with which they've been composed.

They may have changed up their game, but Dope Body still nail the sweet spot between savagery and self-awareness.

Saint Etienne's best LP since 1994 masterpiece Tiger Bay.

Warmth and color fill most of the deluxe edition's (admittedly bloated) 60 minutes, an assortment of bubbly beats forming in gleeful, block party-ready disarray.

Unfortunately, more than mediocre tracks or throaty sexual goofs, what does in Majenta is its scattershot nature. There's no flow to the way the album's sequenced, to the point where it seems purely arbitrary. Furthermore, Edgar seems so concerned about skipping between genres that he neglects to refine any one specific sound; even the strongest cuts rarely rise above "nice try."

They've finally happened on a formula that goes down smoothly for the length of a whole album, [yet] you may still find yourself missing the slick tricks and rough edges, all that dance-as-rock oomph and crap rapping, that once made them so endearing.

Choir of Young Believers have created a singular sonic world all their own.

Cancer 4 Cure's closest analogue may be Portishead's Third: the textures and tones are distinctly different from past releases, but it's unimaginable that it could be made by anyone else.

What elevates I Predict a Graceful Expulsion above pure comfort food, however, is how it subtly tugs against the big, major-network-drama payoff for which it feels custom-built. There's a naggingly elusive quality to the songs that troubles as much as it soothes.

Moments of Ufabulum, particularly the middle stretch, are all but impossible for me to remember after a dozen plays.

Civilization is a record that evokes so many eras and moods at once in parallel that there's a deliberate possibility of the listener losing track of all the sonic attributions.

Never pedantic or didactic, never extreme or aggressive, Poor Moon is a warm hand on a cold shoulder, a vintage piece of soul music for new times in need.

Vol. 2 dive-bombs deeper into the zonked-out ephemera, letting the outré tape noises and sound effects hold center stage.

It is a mostly great show, though not all dynamite.

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.

It may not seem like much, but 32 straight minutes of lyrics about rodents, dead bodies, and acid rain can get exhausting. But, however biting, the payoff is worth it with each individual song.

Though not without highlights, Not Your Kind of People contains nothing as memorable as their big hits, and it's heavier on the filler than their earlier albums.

The album does have its charms. Cosentino is still in fine voice, and she continues to have a warm and agreeable persona... [Yet linear] thinking permeates The Only Place, a grinding sense of marks being hit while inspiration is in short order.

True shows that Elbrecht and his band are more than capable of recreating moments from the past in a way that is reverent and still provides pleasure to those who grew up listening to those past sounds and relative newbies alike. But I'm not so sure that they're good at doing much more than that.

[Blackshaw's] playing carries some of the echoes of his ornate 12-string flourishes, but here there is a grittier edge, with bent notes and the audible sound of his fingers sliding on the strings, his winding melodies casting out concentric smoke rings that call to mind Ben Chasny's acoustic work in Six Organs of Admittance.

Gallery is six Craft Spells songs that range from good to pretty good, which theoretically should make it a welcome addition.

Koima is a beautiful album, and at times beautiful to the exclusion of anything else.

Dopesmoker is an infinitely explorable listen, the kind of record that will goad your attention through miniscule rabbit holes whether or not you're as stoned as the people who made it.

While this record is sure to please longtime fans, it also works as a compelling introduction.

This album provides Dredd fans with a chance to fix this music to their own favorite stories, giving the unrelenting decay and despair of Mega-City One the ferociously solemn musical backdrop it's always deserved.

A rotely rollicking, backward-facing fuzz assault.

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.

Tillman varies things up on Fear Fun, reveals an adventurous palette, and makes what may be his best album to date.

Prophet's widescreen music is wonderful to listen to; it's just hard to really feel.

"Bloom" is also what these 10 songs do, each one starting with the sizzle of a lit fuse and at some fine moment exploding like a firework in slow motion.

Urban Turban feels especially emblematic of a band that's fully liberated itself from any commercial or audience expectations and shifted its experimental ethos into overdrive.

Hoyas, sounds like a soundtrack for an ice-slicked, insomniac winter drive. Blending mumbled folk and bleary-eyed blips, lead-off track "Two Angles" sounds like the Postal Service might have if Jimmy Tamborello's tapes had gotten lost in the mail and accidentally ended up on Phil Elverum's doorstep.

Essentially perfect... It remains a landmark that hasn't aged a day.

Presley finds melodic inspiration in classic rock, but blurs his reference points toward punk by coating the music in lo-fi grit. His third proper album, Family Perfume, doubles down on those zonked out inclinations.

It's an impeccably polished and careful record. But like a shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck, sophistication can wear a guy out.

While OFF! may not have the shock of the new (or, at least, the revitalized) on its side, it still gets in, gets angry, and gets moving in a skull-crackingly satisfying fashion.

Spontaneity is woven into the fiber of every track; it's easy to hear how some of them may have begun with the same sounds and patterns before the musicians' hands worked their magic on the filters, EQ, and delay, rendering each take unique and unrepeatable.

His new EP, Meantime, is an unabashedly beautiful, even sensuous 17 minutes of music.

Oh Holy Molar, Felix's second album, recalls the starkness and exaggerated intimacy of records by Cat Power and Scout Niblett, but Chua is a far more reserved and poised individual... [Yet some songs] reveal the limits of Chua's voice and aesthetic.

[Galaxy Garden is] a wonder, his most complete statement yet, both a refinement and an expansion of the genre-of-one he's been perfecting over the last few years.

The Narrow Garden features some of the most sunny and flowering music that Kang has created, seamlessly joined with a couple of sinister threnodies.

All the more for you to swim around in. And those peaks certainly take you higher when the builds have been teased out to the limit.

Death Dreams might be equally strong [as predecessor, Muster Station], but its inability to step things up can come off like a retreat in light of how much tuneful, wooly garage rock has come out since.

[With Memory] they've developed the approach of making high-energy tracks with subdued and subtle components-- beats that move with grace instead of brute force.

If not always up to their previous heights, Mohn highlights why these guys are still the masters, while so many of Kompakt's new-school driftologists are still students at best.

The Dr Dee soundtrack is a deeply felt but difficult to love entry into Albarn's entirely singular discography.

If guitar-based music is still your source of shameless pop, you'll probably enjoy In the Belly more than most records that actually aspire for art.

What makes this, if not the most fully realized, then the most rewarding entry in RVNG's already ambitious FRKWYS series is that it doesn't sound like noise dudes just trying to make the simulacra of a dub reggae album.

Whilst there's no getting past some of the duller and more unbearable material on this record ... if she'd made a record full of songs as unaffected as these four ["Lies," "Starring Role," "Power & Control," "Living Dead"], Electra Heart could be one of the year's most acclaimed pop albums.

A cautionary tale of what happens when a "hit record" forgets to actually include hits.

[The songs] are peculiarly absorbing, and they only grow more so with repeated listening.

Modern Jester is Dilloway's War and Peace. It covers practically all of his sonic obsessions, stretching them to lengths at which he can explore every detail and tangent. The result-- seven pieces encompassing four sides of vinyl-- feels like a major statement, even if it's made of wordless, sometimes harsh noise.

The record feels wholly substantial and satisfying in its own right, and even those with no prior knowledge of YT//ST's history and elaborate intentions can just enjoy it for what it is: volcanic prog-rock colored with equal parts post-punk urgency, stoner-metal heft, and psychedelic pop whimsy.

Newcombe is a master at turning the minimal into maximal, layering myriad swirling textures into a dizzying head-rush of a tune (see: "Seven Kinds of Wonderful"), but crafty production only takes him so far.

World, You Need a Change of Mind certainly isn't a bad album, and the technical execution is first-rate. Its failure is ultimately one of ambition. This is music to be enjoyed while doing something else, not something you fall in love with.

Exercises is chilly, spacious, and oddly out of time.

Part of what makes listening to Light Asylum so frustrating is a nagging want to see her talent mobilized to the fullest, to roll up your sleeves and try to make a Light Asylum in your own image.

What Schaff's everyloner routine lacks in subtlety, it makes up in a certain fraught, occasionally uncomfortable relatability.

A polished assortment of tidily global-sounding, mid-tempo pop tunes that seem to end before they ever kick off, strung together by a checklist of semi-impassioned capital-K Keywords: Youth, Machine, Riot, Fame, Freak, Pirate, Keepers.

There's a natural path forged between all the shifts, a sense that the abstraction feeds off the structure and vice versa. As such, Black Is Beautiful nears something that could readily be branded as Blunt and Copeland's aesthetic.

As a once-in-a-half-decade demonstration of Talbot's vital signs, The Ghost isn't necessarily compelling enough to make you want to hang around for a follow-up, but the vitriol of a line like, "If you let them burn books, you'll let them burn bodies," is a strong sign of life at least.

This is one of those albums that creates its own little sound world, and a lot of its appeal has to do with qualities like texture and atmosphere.

Pluto is Future's album and no one else's, and though it will sound instantly recognizable, his personality, voice, and skewed take on pop-rap make it instantly different. No Stargate beats necessary.

By presenting a more rounded portrait of Guthrie in which politics is only one subject among so many, The Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions shows just what Guthrie was fighting for and provides a persuasive rebuke to anyone who might whittle the man down to just one dimension.