Both Lights may be plenty gorgeous, but in Wyland's never-idle hands, that beauty proves fleeting.

Inner Fire's biggest problem is a sporadic lack of energy.

These are pleasant songs, but Twain and Lange’s perfectionism meant even the weakest cuts on The Woman in Me and Come on Over were weapons-grade pop.

Unlike 2015’s Pagans in Vegas, where the band went fully synthpop at a time when seemingly 75% of the music world population was doing the same, Art of Doubt is decidedly rock: guitar and bass loud in the mix, first riffs in the first seconds.

We Knew It Was rarely evinces the same boldness, proffering instead a steady procession of jangle-fuzz jingles that yield moments of brain-massaging beauty (the gleaming outros of “Song From a Short-Lived TV Series” and “What Gets Me By”, in particular) but little of Surf City’s more combustible qualities

There’s a lot going on at high volume, each track barreling into the next with minimal interruption, and the longest reprieve comprises two minutes of droning strings on “Wall Facer,” just before the album ends. ... Blood Karaoke is no less exhausting an experience, albeit far less addictive, and though the sheer volume of content makes it a consistently interesting listen.

Precipice is not without excellent hooks, and the ones on “Crying Over Nothing,” “Not Afraid,” and “Heartthrob” let De Souza’s star power shine through. But when a record’s great moments are just that—moments—waiting on them is tedious.

Unfortunately, their sun-zapped slacker outlook drags them back, miscasting themselves as a modern-day answer to hollow, overly attitude-conscious acts like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

The GAS project has developed so incrementally that Voigt plundering his past isn’t unwelcome or unexpected, and there are enough subtle developments for Der Lange Marsch to strike a distinct tone. ... There’s one development, though, that has already made Der Lange Marsch the most divisive GAS album: the high-pitched beep on every other beat. Some listeners don’t notice it, others seem able to tune it out, and for many, it’s an impassable barrier to entry.

On their latest album Sombrou Dùvida, they transition from the oft-playful homage and stage-ready jams of previous releases to a serious attempt at tight, kaleidoscopic grooves, and the results are akin to a pleasant, cerebral trip--a little more potent than the edibles sold from wagons in Dolores Park, but nothing quite Leary-caliber.

Were we swimming in a sea of likeminded releases, Frauhaus may seem merely competent-- a collection that leaves listeners wishing the trio weren't so slavish in their devotion to early-80s post-punk and no wave, but one that gets the toughly innocent, acidic vibe right nonetheless.

As down-to-earth as Secret Cities can be, at points you wish they'd be more direct: "Vamos a La Playa" and "The End" play so loosely, they border on disintegration, rounding out Pink Graffiti in overly cloudy manner, both sonically and lyrically.

Songs' best moments occur when Verlaine complicates the pop formula with serious tension.

While Lerche remains a promising young songwriter, Phantom Punch doesn't quite fulfill that promise.

There's very little on Son of Evil Reindeer to perk up the ears for anyone with more than a couple Jeepster products in their Case Logic.

While Monument is probably one of their best albums, the narrative beneath their deeply carved patterns remains as elusive as ever.

Release is not Cave’s strongest record, but it’s not a bad entry point. An odds and ends compilation, it provides a clear picture of the group's evolution from free-form psych-noodling toward its more sublime and trance-inducing current incarnation.

3AM’s muted irony dulls the sparkle, leaving the cracks more visible. The album doesn’t have any disastrous lows—but it never quite surpasses that initial dopamine rush, either.

Making a Door Less Open would inevitably benefit from a willingness to risk spectacular failure—this isn’t the hard left-turn “Can’t Cool Me Down” hinted at.

Mono have wisely restrained from directly replicating their previous sound, but here the band has sacrificed sonic heaviness for intellectual ponderousness, and too often has fallen prey to slow, repetitive, tiresome songwriting patterns and a frustrating lack of variation.

s an aural analgesic, it goes down smooth and numbs what it needs to. But instead of tearing open the passageway between this world and whatever lies beyond, it shrinks that portal to the size of a keyhole.

If Eyes Open lacks the vivacity of its breakthrough predecessor, it remains an assured example of a band still paying more than lip service to the notion of rock music as a vital pop form.

Right now Sequitur feels like a step forward for a genre that could happily stay the same forever.

This is comfort music, and comfort never goes out of style. And while the aura of dreamy romantic abstraction is the same, Svanängen distinguishes himself from his peers on the structural level.

With a short history of decay, Nothing have begun to build something fresh and exciting; it’s a shame they didn’t finish clearing the rot first.

An uneven album so preoccupied with giving every single type of fan exactly what they want that it might as well be crowdsourced.

While Seventeen Going Under excels when Fender looks inward, the intimacy is disrupted by scattered political musings.

"Holiday Call" and "Black Lion Massacre" aren't among Barnes' best songs, but they are bold and show that he's an artist who is eager to challenge himself rather than stick to what has become a very successful formula.

If Lerner just keeps on doing his thing, he's clearly getting better at it.

[Icky Blossoms] alternates between caffeinated synth-pop, nocturnal bar crawls, and straight-up electroclash revival. But even if they're working in a genre that demands an icy façade, they fortunately can't hide the enthusiasm that often defines Pressnall's main gig.

Home works as a sensual mood-setting exercise, but less so as a distinct creative statement.

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

When he’s not over-intellectualizing his emotions, Caesar can be disarmingly raw. If only he didn’t write like a cyborg the rest of the time.

It can be hard to square the bleakness of the lyrics with the verdant excess of the sound, though its lo-fi sonics certainly match the rawness of the emotions contained within.

Too often on Port of Miami 2, he locks into the flow of least resistance and simply lets it ride, hiding behind his production instead of asserting his dominion over it. And while his music remains sumptuous as always, that luster alone is no longer enough to wow.

Nuclear Daydream sounds placeless, as if striving for universality. At times the music sounds like it could actually achieve that lofty goal; at times it just sounds blanched, drifting into a kind of anonymity.

In the end, the ambitious misfires and pre-coffee drowsiness of A Ghost Is Born don't ruin the album entirely-- they only serve as distractions that make it much more difficult to excavate the band's strengths from the surrounding detritus.

Pattern of Excel is similarly idiosyncratic--it feels, in many ways, like a fistful of sketches torn from the notebook and tossed to the wind. Making sense of the ways they fall is part of the pleasure of this quiet, cryptic record.

Zig Zaj feels like he's straining a little too hard to make every song different from the last, where he's actually become pinned down by the "eclectic" reputation he's accrued, forcing him to make unwise decisions just to keep a certain degree of diversity afloat in his work.

The chaos comes on the very next track, “Grease in Your Hair,” one of a couple songs that performs the National’s old sleight of hand: working the anxiety around until they pull an anthem out of thin air. As a way to address one of the primary tensions in their catalog—writing songs about dissatisfaction in spite of great conventional success—it’s a great bit. But as Frankenstein moves from wrestling to reckoning, the swells are tamer.

Sonics aside, what truly distinguishes this recent iteration of Sorority Noise is Boucher's newfound sense of responsibility.

The first Savage Mode didn’t become an ATL classic because of celebrity cameos or Billboard numbers; it was because Metro and 21 were at the peak of their powers, and only the producer is close here. 21 Savage is just along for the ride.

Condon’s constant obsession with anachronism occasionally yields lovely, even compelling results. Other times, listening to his music feels like talking to friends from high school you’ve lost touch with. There’s good stuff here, but ultimately, it’s hard to be excited about something that feels so seriously entrenched in the past.

Many of the songs appear to be little more than weak echoes of their similar predecessors.

Gucci, who was rap's most exciting figure a year and a half ago, is on a profound losing streak, and it's easy to hear The Return of Mr. Zone 6, his new street album, as an attempt to reverse that slide.

Young People still find their way to some incredible moments, but the paths that take them there are a good deal less inviting.

As with most of Kasher's work, the main draws of Monogamy aren't really musical--words always get prominence over melody. Simply put, if you get a spark out of idealizing your romantic failures by doing things like drunkenly Googling ex-girlfriends (as he does in great detail on "There Must Be Something I've Lost"), listening to Monogamy as a whole is like dousing yourself in gasoline.

On those early records, like Soviet Kitsch, there was a bracing sense of raw possibility. Songs could swing from kooky anti-folk to cabaret to punk outbursts on a whim. Home, before and after, by contrast, sounds like the work of a seasoned professional. Every note is meticulous; every orchestral swell magnificently labored over.

It would do well as an introduction to the group for an unfamiliar listener, but doesn’t feel necessary by any means. If anything, Spirit comes across as more mood music by design, bespoke and undemanding, and it probably already has real estate on every bedroom-themed playlist on Spotify.

When I take into account that 1) there are actual songs here, not just parodies, and 2) most of the tunes were fun to listen to, I remember that playing rock-- psychedelic, trashy or otherwise-- doesn't have to be an exercise in originality.

A solid, conventional effort by an artist who once seemed so vital.

If The Way and Color is not all the way there yet you can hear it as a promising document of a formative period.

Ullages opens up a greater sense of space for Eagulls to soar, but can feel more distant and isolating as a result.

The unusual dependence on space in the arrangements can make the interiors of Låpsley’s songs seem uncannily empty, glassy structures with their insides removed so all that’s left is angled crystal.... But in other instances her voice dissolves into an overabundance of negative space, and listening to the less-inspired sections of Long Way Home can feel like trying to remember something boring that happened to you once.

The “Dimension Dive” tracks sometimes sound like they belong on a different record altogether, although taken in the grab-bag context of Savage Imagination it just about works. It’s just that elsewhere there’s a more coherent flow from one change to the next.

Congrats isn’t incoherent in its diversity, it just never seems to build on itself--the record lacks a definitive peak, and most of the individual tracks tend to just state their main idea fairly early on.

Musically, though, it is strangely hollow, full of tracks that are technically well-executed but emotionally unmoving. In spite of its high tempos, rave clichés (police sirens, canned spinbacks, a Shephard tone), and rowdy hints of donk and hard house, it only occasionally achieves liftoff.

Ladyhawke is brimming with ideas whose worst moments quantify this past and whose best build upon it.

The vaguely Brian Wilson-esque harmonies manage to keep the listener grounded as the entertaining gobbledygook passes by.

If the remixers embrace McCartney III’s lawless ethos, the cover renditions here are faithful to Macca’s fundamental tunefulness. Almost too faithful: You’d hope Josh Homme would add some QOTSA-sized muscle to a bluesy chugger like “Lavatory Lil,” but his take is actually more restrained than the original. Still, there’s a great deal of fun to be had in hearing Phoebe Bridgers make “Seize the Day” her own.

Ooh Rap I Ya plays it entirely too safe, feeling less like a biting subversion of nostalgia than a straight-up “remember when.” This could have been saved by meatier hooks, a more realized emotional arc, or production choices that didn’t feel as if they were well and fully covered by Neon Indian and Washed Out over a decade ago.

Bluefinger is the best overall solo record Black has released in a long time, but it's still only good, not great.

While it might not be a satisfying goodbye, Last Night All My Dreams Came True is--like all of Wild Beasts’ albums--an artfully rendered snapshot of a band always in motion.

Oh My feels like a pocket-sized chapbook set to music: some songs inspire, some feel thin. When NADINE’s strange poetry does convince you to dog-ear a song, though, returning to it feels as creatively refreshing as when you heard it for the first time.

No doubt that the best halves of this and "Tournament of Hearts" would equal a breakthrough album for the group, but taken as a whole, Kensington Heights sounds like a decisive break in the band's stride.

Its heavy-handedness drags down otherwise solid material.

On Random Axe, the verses are reliably good, but the tedium of clock punching replaces the spirit of competition.

Though much of Spills Out seems to zip by in a blur, it's assembled with enough care to never quite spin out from its center.

The 11-song record lacks the forcefulness and murderous moxie that gave L7 their early power. There are hints of it in the frenetic lead guitar line of “Stadium West” and in Sparks’ “Lock us up, lock us up” chant on “Burn Baby,” one of the few subtly political references on the record.

Ellis seems to have inadvertently wound up splitting the difference between nostalgia and innovation. What’s left is a scattered effort, and one can only wonder what Reality Tunnels might have sounded like if Ellis hadn’t followed so many of them down such sentimental pathways.

Calvi’s synthesized enough musical styles for at least three artists, and she’s clearly got ample chops to pull any of them off. She’s born to make a grand concept album one day. What she needs now is that grand concept.

Goulding can certainly inhabit a soundscape. Her next step is to inhabit just one.

It's one of those odd albums where nearly every track sounds good, but it's all so singleminded and monolithic in its approach that taking it in as a whole almost feels smothering.

They’re crafted artifacts that never quite captured his live charisma. Still, his weathered, yearning voice provided a focal point for Brenneck’s retro fantasias and helped freshen them. If anything, this farewell helps preserve the singer’s charms by illustrating how his revivalism wasn’t pure.

It’s a lot to tackle in seven songs, but there’s a depth and richness in both texture and songwriting that show glimpses of a new direction, one that might free them from their own drone-rock noose.

He’s trying to tell a story here, but he’s just not much of a storyteller—his bars keep the narrative going, but he doesn’t offer enough arresting imagery to make his scenes come to life.

Home for Now isn’t necessarily groundbreaking; there are plenty of bands working with similar fusions of indie, pop, and electronic music, but the album shows them clearly moving forward in their abilities and ambitions.

This is a transitional record, an in-betweener, one that Lidell may eventually look back on as a door to something else. The good news for all of us is that even when he's down, he's not out.

A front-to-back listen through Patterns of Light can feel like a tour through all the places where pop radio and esoteric thought crossed paths during the ’70s, and a tribute to the ways both music and physics strive to explain a universe that can sometimes feel stubbornly unknowable.

While Kommunity Service only hints at what a true synthesis of those artists could be, at times the implication is enough.

Even though the 3xLP/2xCD set jumps backward and forward in Stereolab’s timeline, the result is a fairly comprehensive portrait of their development from their initial motorik nihilist assault to the pop molecules of their later work.

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.

A little like a greatest hits, a little like a soundtrack, and a little like a collaborative art project, Black Mountain's 51 minutes of music for Year Zero serve as a reminder of how good this band has sometimes been and as a tease of the music they might still make.

Again and again, Woodstock promises a protest but delivers a party.

It's not that they're not real, it's that the shivering vocal timbres dominate the mix to the point where large shifts in tempo and style are obscured. It's during these moments when I think that Room(s) and its elevation of the vocal sample was perhaps a better idea than an album.

It feels personal rather than global, and as gnarly as it is, it’s not quite extreme enough to work as a visualization of the horrors of war. It works much better as a record of a man of the wild wandering through the modern world, anxious and a little amused.

There are plenty of signs that UUVVWWZ are on track to become a better band, but "Castle" is the song that will make you impatient for them to hurry up and get to their next level right away.

Empty Estate tries to guide Wild Nothing towards a more physically charged sound, and it’s not always an easy transition.

Muddy mixing can’t entirely sink her compositions—lead single “Days Move Slow” is among the best rock songs of the year—but several other tracks take on water. It’s heart-wrenching to imagine how much better these songs would be, how much more worthy of showcasing Bognanno’s maturation as an artist, had she presided solely over production.

For an album where most tracks don’t extend past three minutes, and from a band with such a breakneck spirit, Visitor feels a little too languid.

Strange Pleasures works on a much more modest scale, content to subliminally scoot its way in, to serve as connective tissue between the Cocteau Twins and Chromatics on a mixtape, but not as the main attraction.

This mix might not help the Rapture pass every test of the best club DJs, but when it comes to maybe the most important one--the ability to make clubbers push their way to the booth and breathlessly ask for the title of that amazing cut they just dropped--they've done their studying.

As engaging as that bluster is at first, over the course of ten songs Whatever Forever begins to grate not unlike a person who tries too hard to look nonchalant when they would hold your attention longer if they just opened up a bit more.

Emerald Sea is audibly crafted with tremendous skill and love, but its uniformity keeps it from soaring, no matter how many deities fly through the upper reaches.

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.

Memoryhouse have a ways to go before they're creating music with as much melodic power or depth of feeling as their dream-pop contemporaries.

Heavy on ballads and low on energy, Banhart sometimes comes in danger of scrubbing away any remnants of his once-magnetic personality. Occasionally, though, Ape approaches sparse brilliance.

They've certainly got the pure sound of it nailed down. More than most mini-genres, goth demands ambiance-- the mood is everything, and on this front, Violet Cries succeeds tremendously.