Throughout Turn Blue, it's difficult to tell how invested these guys actually are in the music they're making, an indifferent attitude that encourages the listener to act in tandem.

Enter works best when it's not begging for an ENT.

It's wide-eyed pop minus the fizz, demonstrating that sizzle can still be subtle.

The arrangements stick to an effective coast-and-surge model of development: The tracks skim low and then tilt upward with the addition of a drum or synth part. It's a stock trick that works well, and Lali Puna use it with unusual tact.

She is at her most winning when she sounds like she is having fun.

Lamb of God's general lack of adventurousness makes them mostly indistinguishable from their heroes and, budget excepted, the bulk of their contemporaries.

Edwards often sounds lost in these new songs.

Overall, White Hot Moon is likely to please existing fans of Pity Sex--its 12 tracks largely find the band continuing to leverage what worked on Feast of Love. That said, White Hot Moon isn’t quite as catchy as that record.

For all the dust O’Donovan kicks up, the point is neither the destination nor the journey. It’s the leaving.

Not only are there scattered moments of lyrical brilliance on The Hardest Way, but from a producerly standpoint, it's probably Skinner's most accomplished and interesting record yet.

The sounds he pursues here as Blood Orange might be more hip than his work as Lightspeed Champion, but the end results are less satisfying.

Merritt's songs are as delicate and meticulous as porcelain miniatures. Unfortunately, Realism holds more tchotchkes than museum pieces.

A top-heavy album, with his best material-- the more operatic and unconstrained works-- all unfolded within the album's first half hour.

The most disappointing aspect of Probot is that many of the songs sound more like Foo Fighters turned to eleven than actual metal.

If few of these tracks could be called great, there aren't any terrible ones either-- the entire thing floats along nicely on a snug bed of cotton.

Occasionally plodding, and too ruminative by half, Anarchic Breezes is a journey in need of a destination, stuck between staring at the sun and gazing thoughtfully at its own navel.

While bidding for timeless and universal appeal, Finneas sometimes comes up with hollow platitudes. ... Occasionally, he hits on something more stirring, like on “Love Is Pain” when he recalls waking in tears from a dream about his parents’ death—demonstrating the very real consequences of getting older rather than vaguely fretting about them. Finneas’ exercise in restraint has its limits: These subdued songs are surrounded by highly produced, pointedly topical ones.

Tender New Signs makes the listener work a little harder within Tamaryn's framework, but it rewards as much, if not more, than the walls of noise threatening to hem them in just a few years ago.

Such frequent attempts to elevate the banal into the meaningful ultimately keep Release the Stars from achieving any significant momentum and only add weight to the notion that Wainwright's shaky aim-- rather than his lack of talent-- might be his biggest downfall.

It's a success, without doubt.

This is pop music made with synthesizers, but it's not what you'd call normally synth-pop--even when Diamonds builds his minimalist beats into proper grooves, the songs are tense and twitchy.

His music works when every element blends together, and And After That, We Didn't Talk is most interesting when he shares only the most vital details from a moment. It's then that he can wring his experiences for their emotions and convey feelings with more than just words.

There are boring Foo Fighters albums and pretty good ones; C&G is a pretty good one, and in two years there will probably be another.

When, on “The Same Again,” she sings, “Move slow when you speak, so you really get to say what you’re meaning,” sounding as if her face is scrunched into a grimace, she turns a fairly oblique phrase into a razor-sharp barb. These moments, although far between, suggest that A New Reality Mind could have been a more dynamic record if it had zeroed in on Kenney’s intentional, suggestive performances.

If this is an album about growth and greatness, then it’s the kind you see depicted in charts on an end-of-year earnings report. It is precision engineered to stream big, and all the duller for it.

Every track here has successful passages, but frustratingly, they too often turn out to be detours or trap doors. In general, the less cluttered and more focused their tracks are, the better they turn out.

At the very least, “End of an Era” is a disturbance to Autodrama’s surface-level shimmer and proof of Puro Instinct making an effort to provide depth.

You half-expect the thing to fall apart under its own weight. But it never does. Mr. Tophat has a gift for this kind of balancing act, and on Trust Me, he manages to share the spotlight with one of his country’s famous pop stars.

Here, Duffy is at their most instrumentally complex and collaboratively generous. The result of this free-for-all cooperation is Hand Habits’ most engrossing project yet.

Too many of these songs are just bluster in search of a purpose. Casualties of the duo’s noncommittal approach, they fall into a thankless gray area, too tinkered-over to function as punk, yet too haphazard to be great pop.

The catch-22 for MellowHype is that while their centrism certainly has its merits, their music is unlikely to convert anyone that has, at this point, already written off Odd Future. Which leaves them with a solid, fun rap album to satiate a feverish cult and a growing number of casual fans.

With more intensely vigorous drumming, more obviously personal lyrics, and a more blatant interest in glossy electro-pop, Edenloff's band carves out their own niche. It is one that masterfully blends the masculine and the feminine, the refined and the coarse, the dark and the bright.

Lindstrøm may have timed these tracks to fit on a vinyl record, another sign of putting material concerns over creative vision, but there’s a good 15 minutes of so of beauty within those grooves that just might make a believer out of you.

By drawing this deeply on both the physical and sonic landscapes of their forebears, and with too many go-nowhere solos blotting out its songs, Fain winds up feeling stuck in time.

After the strong, finger-picked Buckingham solo feature of “In My World,” however, the rush of hearing these two pop-rock titans team up starts to wear off. ... Granted, successful moments are sprinkled throughout the whole album.

It’s hard to grasp who Childish Gambino is supposed to be. So even when he’s genuine, I have a little bit of skepticism on my mind.

The album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms.

Working on a Dream works hard on sound, but sleeps on actual songs.

It's a good album, and without the pressure of making it under the Roxy Music name, Ferry has made a confident and remarkably fresh-sounding record simply by doing what he's done best for over three decades.

Levitate leverages rave nostalgia to get to a deeper truth: Free your inner child, and your ass and mind will follow.

Don’t Get Too Close, the more adventurous but marginally less successful of the two, scores the interior world of our hero’s adventure in a very-now merger of emo, rap, J-pop, memecore, video game music, and angsty boy-girl duets.

Giving too much credit to Taylor's influence and direction, however, undermines the Morning Benders' stylistic transition, one any band would envy and many listeners will love.

This album’s equilibrium-upsetting aural eclecticism comes into sharp focus: even if you’re not a working mom trying to function on four hours of sleep per night, the buzzing busyness and hallucinatory disorientation of Cosmic Logic are liable to make you feel like one.

Bolstered by a gimmick and a catchphrase, the album is by-and-large Jeezy qua Jeezy, and the new fissures aren't enough to keep pundits gabbing.

In Slim Twig’s incessant and overbearing winks to the camera, he’s lost sight of his own potential.

That sudden stop is the only moment on Something Dirty that could be called a gimmick, but it feels oddly right. A fade-out would be too easy--better to bluntly suggest that there's more music beyond that final frame, and encourage the rumor that this version of Faust is far from finished.

It's rarely boring, and often full of promise, but it's a direction that calls for further tweaks, experiments, and exploration to get the balance just right.

There's nothing even the slightest bit innovative about Gunz n' Butta, but it does give us Cam, Vado, and Araab, three guys with great chemistry, doing what they do. It's a one-dimensional affair, but that one dimension is pretty awesome.

What is frustrating are the infrequent but genuinely interesting moments of creativity and cohesion, which suggest that if Marching Church had taken their time and laid off the improv a little, there might have been something special here.

While such transformations are pleasant, if not exactly commanding, they do manage to slyly deconstruct the "real" songs into the most basic building blocks, which are very specific to this setting.

Her blasé delivery might seem impenetrable at first, but there is warmth and wit to her work that rewards those who are patient enough to hear its message.

These songs are bolder and more brutal, less interested in florid wording or oblique metaphor; they express feelings of alienation and self-loathing with discomfiting clarity.

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

What For? is so passive it leaves your system the moment you’re done with it.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about it of course, but the album is consumed by the already menacingly "not intrinsically bad"-ness of their canon.

No single passage lasts very long, which gives even the prettier moments an unstable feeling, like everything might at any moment crumble into a void of distortion and noise. Throughout, her lyrics are venomous and apocalyptic.

Love Is Here isn't bad, and its prospect for radio play is far more appealing than, say, Train. The four just don't have the depth of their admitted influences.

Timms has made some perplexing choices in song selection.

Power is, to say the least, hardly the collection of hard rockers that No Kill and Different Damage were. But with its lilt melodies, Davis' downplayed role, and the band's admission that, hey, a bassline here or there couldn't hurt, Power boasts a cohesion and distinct identity missing from Q & Not U's two previous albums.

Cam's flow is a thing of beauty.

Feathers may not have the heft of Dead Meadow's other albums, but it's easily its most listenable and satisfying from end to end.

There's a wealth of great material here... all diminished, to various degrees, by genre affectations.

To that end, the whole album has a lightness of touch that makes it sound warm and comfortable, especially after the sad weight evident on the also-excellent "Margerine Eclipse."

Widowspeak seem to have found a home in the swamps, and now they're inviting us in to set awhile.

Recorded with a full band, Western Swing moves away from Wall’s unvarnished veneration of the Wild West and swings wide the barn doors. This here’s a party.

Too often, the trio sounds like they’re writing over or past each other instead of locking in.

If these four songs [bad enough, healthy habit, you’re still everything, and bittersweet] were a standalone EP, it would be a showcase of Beer’s pop prowess; instead they’re an island in a sea of weaker, more derivative tracks.

Some might wish this gift for fastidious arrangements would carry over to the lyrics, which feature a bevy of look-it-up references and descriptions that might stymie attempts at easy listening. It doesn't hurt to do a little research or, like, pay attention to lyrics worth a damn.

As for now, he has the voice, the pathos, and the charisma required of an American folk hero. Now all he needs are the songs.

The record's violent, revolution-themed artwork is misleading. Viva is more like a bloodless coup--shrewd and inconspicuous in its progressive impulses.

Now, he finally has some good music of his own attached to his name. It may or may not be enough to catch up to the rapidly accelerating talents of his younger peers-- but it's certainly a start.

Vanderslice hasn't made a bad record, but he's only made a couple that are this good. If you've never dipped an ear into his world before, Romanian Names is a great place to do it.

The Night is a record uncomfortable with all the trappings of the corporeal world--time, words, its own skin--and occasionally, improbably, it actually breaks free of them all.

Lew has a remarkable talent for portraying scenes in the starkest terms.

The problem is that while Ambivalence Avenue was a pleasant surprise in all forms, an astounding leap from an unexpected source that constantly offered new sounds, Silver Wilkinson provides the same thing without the surprises. And all that’s left is the pleasant part.

Occult Architecture Vol. 1 is a good record that’s at its best when Moon Duo fully give in to these seductive inklings, like on “The Death Set” or “Creepin.’”

Spirit If… offers jams that don't really jam, acoustic ballads about fights and lies, and lushly orchestrated songs that come together effortlessly while cracking up hopelessly.

Given the similarities to its source material, Cowboy Worship probably would’ve made more sense as a bonus-disc appendage to Love than a stand-alone release.

Freedom Wind includes three of the four songs on the Explorers Club's original EP, and it partly fulfills that record's promise.

For whatever perverse reasons we want to be unsettled by their music, and made psychically uncomfortable. They’ve always delivered, but never before with this sense of style.

Like Infiniheart, Skelliconnection is undermined by seemingly random sequencing, still feeling more like a hodgepodge compilation than an album with a purposeful arc... But Skelliconnection still stands as an impressive document of VanGaalen's intuitive and inventive songwriting.

For Those Who Stay won’t change your opinion either way, and at the most, it might make you feel more strongly about what you already believe.

There’s no question he can put a good tune together; what’s less clear is whether he can interpret those tunes as well as he writes them, and breathe a little flesh-and-blood human messiness into them in the process.

A stylish but stilted pastiche, 5:55 follows a decade's worth of mostly superior homages, often involving the same artists.

Not only do they add urgency to familiar psychedelic rock templates, but they pay just as close attention to the quiet moments as the raging ones--each track on their self-titled Thrill Jockey debut displays a careful layering of sounds and atmospheres.

The music's measured rhythm and plaintive chords may belie those bright sentiments, but if everything lined up perfectly, this wouldn't be Richard Youngs.

Re: ECM stands out not just for its depth but for its variety, for the sheer number of musics it incorporates.

Maximo Park so often sound on The National Health like they're trying too hard, struggling to find a sound that once came naturally.

Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart does leave you wondering what more the two entities could have accomplished had they worked on this for more than a week.

Occasionally Palana will burst open, revealing churning undercurrents beneath Hilton’s surface calm.

Poliça is a group with too much collected talent for that; as in life these days, one only waits and hopes the clouds will clear.

While less bombastic than Dangers’ ’90s albums, many of which came strapped with absolute banger singles (“Asbestos Lead Asbestos,” “Radio Babylon,” “Helter Skelter,” “Acid Again,” etc.), it evokes their wide-ranging combination of macabre moodiness, driving dance beats and playful aural collage, all while sounding surprisingly contemporary.

Devotion is not a disaster, but the chasm between ambition and execution feels vast. The new ideas are ill-fitting, when they’re not derivative from the start. Beneath the processing, the album’s best moments sound oddly like a less polished version of Emotions & Math.

There’s an album’s worth of tracks here that put Clavish head and shoulders above his peers, which only makes the other album’s worth of misfires more disappointing for their inclusion.

The contrast between his sound and substance has never been more striking, either. Backed on these 11 tracks by versatile Toronto band Bahamas, Paisley is cool above the country funk of “Say What You Like” and “Make It a Double,” collected over the spartan “Holy Roller” and “Rewrite History.”

Evaporator satisfies in a low-stakes way, providing an oasis of chill in a world on fire; it’s an episode of Friends with a spoonful of vanilla ice cream, a familiar joy that won’t trouble the palate.

Hurricane is classic Jones.