Zoomer is a very, very good album, but one thing it makes clear is that the songwriting aspect of this sort of lap[pop] hybrid must continue to improve.

Every song drips with bawdy attempts at sexually shocking the listener. But just as Vince Neil screaming "girls, girls, girls" and name-checking strip bars is unlikely to whip a woman into a frenzy of amour, the Donnas attempt to titillate and fail miserably.

The disc feels more like an Insomniac Records sampler featuring Viktor Vaughn than a proper Vaughn release.

Homosapien's constant fluctuations between styles means it's a mercurial and somewhat uneven listen.

No tens here—sixes and sevens abound, for sure, a few fives, maybe an eight. Even mired among the sixes, though, you can feel the palpable yearning.

Rudimental are casting a wider musical net than their peers, which has the unintended effect of magnifying their flaws by comparison, making for a decent but ultimately second-tier effort in a crowded year for big-ticket dance-pop.

Though too scattered to stand alone, The Greatest Gift adds new dimension to Carrie & Lowell.

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.

The album loses a little of its steam toward the end, when too many songs play up the rap side of the equation over the rock, but on the whole A Gun Called Tension is surprisingly balanced and beholden to no preconceptions of how these two styles should mix.

While the music on Land and Fixed revels in this newfound clarity, the vocals are still processed and manipulated. Where that juxtaposition worked on earlier recordings (when the two sides were still on the same playing field), it doesn't coalesce nearly as well here.

The true charm of this record lies in the way it craftily retrofits the sound of ’70s excess for our age of austerity.

Their debut album, Embrace, dispenses its earth-quaking riffage in such carefully measured, perfectly spaced-out rations, it tricks you into thinking the band is much heavier than it actually is.

In the end, One Second of Love is enjoyable but slight: its stronger moments render the weaker ones particularly forgettable.

The Bachelor most damningly lacks the charm attendant with any of those character descriptions, continuing Wolf's ability to please one's inner music critic, but too often ignoring any sort of pleasure principle.

Synthetica is something of a polemic, but Haines' moments of ambivalence are what make the record compelling.

One of this year's most remarkable "punk" albums.

Bundick embraces a cleaner and mellower sound that's more indebted to hip-hop. He wears his inspirations proudly, and throughout there's a clear nod to producers like J Dilla and Flying Lotus.

There's nothing intrinsically flawed about what's otherwise a solid instrumental record, but so much of it feels so close to many of the things happening on the radio and the pop charts right now that, 90 seconds into a song, the mind might start wandering and wondering what this kind of stuff would sound like with Wale or Rihanna on top of it.

Hot Hot Heat sound like they're playing scared and playing it safe, and in doing so fall through the cracks between their established fans and their imagined ones.

Because of its multifarious song types--leftfield club thumpers, futuristic sex ditties, and funky space jams--some will contend that Sweaty Magic lacks cohesion, that it's too ADD to be listenable, but I would argue that is precisely Rafter's point.

Sun Airway [has] crafted a mature and confident collection of alternate-reality singles far less common than its sound might initially imply.

They were and continue to be first-wave, American indie rock survivors whose legacy has become, at this point, less about their music and more about surviving. Riot Now!, the veteran outfit's first full-length in five years is a meat-and-potatoes rock record that goes one step further in explaining why that it is.

As with their other work with Michio Kurihara, False Beats and True Hearts is a slow bloom, an album whose rewards can become fully apparent only through thoughtful immersion.

The Redeemer ends up somewhere between sarcasm and sensitivity, but can't dig deep enough in either direction to provide something that's worth returning to.

While nearly every track on Nausea finds Vallesteros trying to grapple with these issues [feeling displaced and connected at the same time], he rarely wrenches out any insight or personal detail.

Much like the producer’s former offerings, Dame Fortune tries to be everything all at once, making for a good listen with occasional lapses.

The hooks aren't quite as catchy or well-written on Murder For Hire 2 as they have been in recent months.

Trading the timbral menagerie of an expanded chamber ensemble for something more barren and monochromatic, Moore is occasionally forced out of his comfort zone into abstraction and dissonance. These forays can feel like a significant artistic leap, but complacency flattens some of this music.

There’s enough proof here that Post has the voice, demeanor, and goodwill to easily ingratiate himself into the Nashville scene.

Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? tries to make a masterpiece from spray paint, but for every cool mural, there’s a splatter of obtrusive tags.

While Right Words achieves a baseline level of quality or at least competency with the exception of “Goodbye Friends and Lovers” and "Love Illumination", they lack the conviction to take most of their lesser ideas to the realm of being unpleasant rather than kinda boring.

Sophisticated as all this is, bits of it still flop, and other bits seem like they've gone overboard on the sophistication.

Where the music in Good Evening manages to mostly please without much compromise, the visual documentation of said music bends over backwards to make itself palatable to only the most fervent of fans.

It arrives at this whole in a sneaky way, and it manages to avoid feeling like a concept album, or like anything else Mouse on Mars, or anyone, have done.

The new album is hardly a huge leap from Elephant Shell in most senses, but it does find TPC reaching out, growing more comfortable, and letting loose.

None of these covers is quite as transformed as “Jezebel”, so nothing on Strange Weather delivers the same subversive charge. Partly that’s due to her choice in material, which for the most part is recent and more indie-oriented.

If Abandon was the sound of a young man in flux, then Pleasure is the sound of settling.

Wilson first walked away when he felt the band’s songwriting had become too formulaic. Closure/Continuation is admirable in its attempts to reject that formula, but in the end, it also proves just how good they were at it.

Quever has extended his transition into dreamy territory really well.

Aqueduct's most relaxed numbers are the strongest, where guitar, piano, and synth fuse in rare harmony.

While it’s laudable that Jenkinson is always moving, never resting, Elektrac feels a bit of a sideshow: a flexing of technique with little to display but its own shiny spectacle.

Lewis’ singing is one of the few novelties on AudioLust & HigherLove. The rest is all breezy grooves and cabana jams, frictionless and blemish-free.

In short, it's familiar without feeling rote.

Rocket Juice & the Moon feels like a decent record, but an unfocused, meandering one.

It helps to show Pains not as period fetishists, but instead a group of indie-pop aesthetes who seem to be able to operate comfortably within several different subdivisions of the genre.

Like the rest of his comedy oeuvre, Heidecker pulls no punches. In Glendale arrives as a fully formed beast, equal parts parody and confession of our universal lameness.

Laminated Denim gives us two linear, conventionally structured, vocal-driven songs that carve out their own lane in the Gizzard discography, somewhere between the ceaseless propulsion of their signature strobe-lit rock-outs and the blissful melodicism that defines their occasional forays into pastoral whimsy. ... The two pieces on Laminated Denim stay true to their original mission: They each make 15 minutes go by in a breeze.

They're sounding less and less relatable, leaving us pining not just for the days of a little grunge trio from Seattle, but for the relentlessly catchy and charismatic Dave Grohl of the Foos' still-fantastic self-titled debut and the better half of "The Colour and the Shape."

Mirror Mirror smacks of a band struggling to be taken more seriously, but simply settling on a more stone-faced form of pastiche isn't the way to do it. All they've really done is trade a Halloween party for a history lesson.

Even with all of the bands he punches the time card for, it's starting to become very clear that, with Is Growing Faith, his solo efforts are the ones that reap the most rewards.

Mostly it's like coming across a public-access channel late at night, where it never feels like the people on screen are fully in control. It works because Copeland isn't too rigidly stuck to his aesthetic, instead setting up his stall and letting the chaos pour in.

Otherwise, all these nested layers of samples and beats and propaganda wrap infinitely around a hollow core, making for excitable music that eventually collapses into boredom.

Bits of space rock, dub, leftfield disco, and post-punk all feed into Square One, but despite the Scandinavian disco pedigree of its two participants, it’s less a dancefloor weapon than a soundtrack for dorm room philosophizing.

Regardless of Heart Head West’s stretch of sweet-and-sour ballads, its lack of textural and rhythmic variety leaves you hungry for something heartier.

Mr. Love & Justice isn't exactly the musical equivalent of dropping flowers down the barrels of rifles, but there is a certain passivity to the disc, a characteristic magnified by the rootsy approach of Bragg's trusty band the Blokes, who channel the bucolic bent of the Band rather than the edge of the Clash.

It's not a record that's going to hit you over the head-- it's almost fatally unassuming and more likely to meekly ask if you maybe wanted to spare a few seconds to listen-- but it's one that will offer a surprising amount of replay value if you accept its coy, hesitant invitation.

The highs on Kidnapped are incredibly high, the lows very low, and there's not much in between.

The two musicians match well in terms of overall ethos, but at some points it feels like they just stopped listening to each other, and what should be otherworldly comes clunking to the ground.

Not only do Dayes and Misch offer an alluring marriage of virtuosity and pop, the album feels like the best recent example of Brian Eno’s theory of scenius as opposed to genius: the theory that it takes community and collaboration to spark something incredible, rather than the work of one gifted individual.

As a lyricist, Fink's too reliant on indistinct yearn, and while you might relate to some of Spring's bummed-out bromide, Fink's moping seems too scopic to hit anyone very deep for very long. Sometimes you just put it in a letter.

It's a pretty, well-thought out collection--but for all the ideas and layers, Heritage feels somewhat empty.

A foreboding chronicle of the unpleasantness to follow, the typical arc of a break-up tale never materializes as "The Beginning" promises.

The record alone makes for the latest solid effort from these two outsize talents, but the stage show ought to be the ideal way to enjoy it

For the most part, it's all the same old bong-thrash, save for the record's one non-heavy trick: English-jig folk.

Frequently gorgeous but over-lubed, the album forges soundscapes so lush they're almost narcotic.

In 1997, this kind of thing--crisp, echoing guitars, provincial strings, existential moodiness--actually sounded kind of exciting. Just over a decade later, though, the exact same recipe, prepared exactly the same way, conjures up new dominant aftertastes: false profundity, compositional laziness, and outsized egos.

Ultimately, Laika make pleasant music that's difficult to be passionate about.

Too often, the new record substitutes weighty, Biblical language for true heft.

So Split the Difference is an opportunity missed, with Gomez settling into a safe, well-worn ocean colour scene at a time when an adventurous indie/jamband hybrid might've clicked with Lollapaloozers.

It's not that Múm have broken a barrier to make their first entirely unpleasant record-- the addition of drums and trumpet do make for some compelling instrumental moments-- but there simply aren't enough exciting or even vaguely interesting moments in each song, and between this scarcity and, Jesus, that voice, Summer Make Good seems an unfortunate addition to 2004's disappointments.

Slipping dissonant, screeching bleeps into a placid, space-age bachelor pad schema seems oddly passive-aggressive, though not enough of either to pass as legitimately interesting.

Often, Costello just sounds prissy and uptight in these more relaxed environs.

Alone was worth the occasional cringe to show Cuomo's experiments and sonic baby photos through the years, especially after three studiously formulaic records.

Rather than re-tracing the path that made him popular, he has hacked into the wilderness of his new inspirations, no matter how divergent, and emerged triumphant.

The band has easily come up with its best set of songs since its sort-of 2001 breakthrough "Behind the Music." If not every track on the set is a winner, neither are there any outright stinkers.

That's How We Burn's sonic normalcy would all but consign the record for the used record bins if this band didn't sound so damn good when they break out of the mold.

It's both overstuffed and messy, and so overworked that what life there may once have been now exists as a kind of primordial paste.

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

Weiss and Takahashi lay out their visions in purely instrumental terms, and the production is sumptuous and beautifully tactile. This is what Teengirl Fantasy do best: They craft immaculate headphones music, full of enveloping small details.

Nothing about Timeline is bad. It's a pretty strong release for a brand new imprint to build on. But if the same record were released from, say, Stones Throw, we might sigh, and chalk it up to another good-but-not-great album from a label that still hasn't quite figured out a unified new direction.

The album packages a loosened-up (read: defanged), groove-centric sound, infinitely more urbane but so much more boring, too.

Human Highway work best in this inviting, flickering-campfire headspace, and for an amiable if ephemeral 40 minutes, Moody Motorcycle offers a pleasant soundtrack to the dwindling days of the summer.

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.

On Totale Nite, they manage to use small-scale elements--jangling guitars, cheapo drum machines, toy keyboards--to project the urgency of bands with louder screams and bigger amps.

The Human Fear isn’t provocative enough to revitalize their reputation, but it certainly won’t do it any harm.

Early Buck albums had all the professionalism of a late-night weed experiment, but Terfry is growin' up and it shows.

Throughout the album, glimmers of invention and humor are allowed to shine through.

Under and Under dispatches the charge of repetition and "samey" songcraft very quickly.

Its style is limited, but the band manages to spread out within it, discovering their own idiosyncratic little vocabulary without ever exhausting it.

The problem is that the production on ununiform struggles to match the raw, naive ingenuity of Tricky’s early music, instead suggesting the rather basic electronic beats of 2014’s Adrian Thaws.

Byen feels a little safe and complacent by comparison. Perhaps because he has spent the past decade upending his listeners’ expectations, this largely successful attempt to string together a cohesive set of nu-disco tracks has the odd effect of making him seem kind of predictable.

It's a little disappointing that none of the band's stylistic shifts have let them bloom into much more, but as furrows for ploughing go, this one's still pretty fascinating, and still all theirs.

Even with its imposing length, Spirit Counsel is arguably the most accessible entry point into Moore’s boundless experimental canon.

Laughing Gas suffers from the same issues as its predecessor without introducing any new ideas. Even Tatum’s usually enjoyable melodies feel bloodless.

A strange, slow fog settles in over the course of the record, which comes to feel like an album-length exercise in torpor, clouding over some unabashedly gorgeous turns by Mockasin.

It’s not a conventionally sequenced DJ mix, either: Segments of seamlessly beat-matched tracks (almost certainly Kode9’s handiwork, given the style of them) abruptly give way to left turns and trapdoors.

It’s a confused album that sounds like it wants to sit on the shelf next to do-it-all pop savants like Jeff Lynne or Todd Rundgren, yet retreats to the safety of Antonoff’s alt-pop impulses before anything spectacular really develops.

Badu keeps the proceedings here buoyant and relaxed with that supple-lipped scat of hers, stretching out scant syllables at her lounging, loopy leisure.