It's all pleasant, but when it's over, the only truly memorable song is "Wave Forms."

Repetition is key to this music, but after several cycles, tracks begin to plod, broken up only by Khan's vocal work. The Sexwitch interpretations lose vital elements from the originals like horns, organs, and bells.

It's another merely fine, expectation-meeting entry into Boratto's discography, a stopgap until the next knockout single comes along.

They've developed a larger musical vocabulary, but the results can be cumbersome.

Caleb Landry Jones’ music inspires a reaction somewhere in the middle: It’s interesting, even fun while it lasts, but you probably won’t return.

Madness is a spacious and satisfying record: what it lacks in standout moments, it makes up for in coherence.

Blake is fighting the respectable fight on Enough Thunder, though the EP's totally bass-less tracks show that he needs dubstep as much as dubstep needs him.

Their voices complement each other so naturally and so gracefully that it’s easy to forget how much craft there is in these songs, and how much ingenuity they put into their vocals.

Roll with the Punches never falls, or even falters, exactly; it’s just a series of punches, whether of the clock or in the air, landing with consistency and specificity and only occasionally drifting into anonymity. To paraphrase Morrison himself, it doesn't pull any punches, but it doesn't push the river.

Free Your Mind manages to be Cut Copy's most homogenous and it's most "message-based" record yet, and in doing little other than turning on, tuning in and dropping out, there’s precious little separating it from the vapid electro-pop to which Cut Copy used to be an alternative.

His vocals are becoming more textural and less the main focus. That actually works, as Crown has his smartest writing in years, keeping his youthful demons alive, if not running amok. He may have matured, but we don’t want to him to grow up.

A fairly nice little slab of French Anglo-pop, and pleasant reading accompaniment if you can reach the skip button from where you're sitting.

The group's clearly more concerned with making great sounds and creating a distinctive vibe than they are with making lasting statements.

While the album isn't arranged chronologically, listening to it as such reveals the series of intuitive leaps between lo-fi bedroom folk that emphasized monotonous gloom and cacophonous samples to comparatively laid-back country biased toward majestic arrangements and electronic beats.

If Ida's sound is like a river, the emotions the band conveys are simply stagnant.

Younger’s familiarity with her harp opens up many avenues, but Gadabout Season settles for following what’s by now a familiar path: that of the skillful and charming contemporary spiritual jazz record content to linger in the background.

There are a few key moments of guilty pleasure, and the overall aesthetic of the record is appealing on the surface. But underneath the scratchy record sounds and the canned Casiotones, Fountenberry hasn't got enough substance to sustain him for ten minutes, let alone the length of an entire album.

It might be subject to less scrutiny had it not followed Interstellar, but then again, it might not be subject to scrutiny at all, and simply filed away with any other competent and unexceptional dream-pop.

On the whole, Ounsworth’s candor gives New Fragility a necessary charge as he leans into balladry.

Despite the lyrical punch, Yours Conditionally is hamstrung by Tennis’ drums. The keys and bass on the album are unfailingly warm, but the shabby percussion is one-note, almost the work of a different band.

Though repetitive, the record is consistently engaging, with plenty of distinct highlights.

After the Balls Drop manages to make the most of these potential shortcomings, offering listeners a charming, warts-and-all portrait of the group.

You can’t knock Czarface Meets Metal Face too much for sounding like a period piece, since that’s so clearly the intention. Czarface has always spoken directly to a specific audience, one that values familiarity over progression. And if what you’re looking for is a hip-hop album that sounds like it could have been recorded 15 years ago, Czarface Meets Metal Face certainly delivers.

Pierson hasn’t lost any of the force or heat that’s characterized her vocal work for 40 years; if anything, she’s acquired the ability to enrich otherwise pedestrian line readings with a resonance that feels born of a life well lived.

Often he feels like a genre director hired for his reliability rather than excelling in his field. Still, there are advances here, a sense that Hill's VHS collection may have expanded beyond the horror section, a step up from pan-and-scan into something approaching widescreen.

While their formerly peppy mode could be exhausting, it's difficult not to yearn for a bit more razzle-dazzle on Heza.

Occasionally the devotion to six-string mayhem overwhelms the songwriting, and unless you really get off on reams of guitar raunch, Major Stars on CD may still not be for you.

If Birthmarks is Woods’ restless attempt at self-birth, her true emergence feels yet to come.

It's more of a disappointment than a failure--at the very least, it might serve as someone's introduction to These New Puritans.

Though Shigeto has absorbed a host of positive qualities from his fellow beatmakers, he seems caught, between a more purposeful, narrative form of music (like that of Four Tet, and the calmer compositions of Flying Lotus) and the abstruse, diffuse form that’s endorsed by the Leaving Records camp.

Thankfully, Marching Church’s sophomore effort scales back the melodrama and ramps up the discipline: Rønnenfelt and company are focused on verses and choruses and dynamics, rather than self-indulgent noodling--and in the case of this album, a little bit goes a long way.

The overload of nostalgia keeps the album from feeling fresh. As thrilling as those vintage Squarepusher records were (and still are), it wasn’t necessary that Jenkinson make another one.

On Seven Psalms, the speeches are the main event: The fact there is music playing at all seems largely incidental. Cave is a much more reliable narrator this time around, ditching the previous album’s flashes of mania and hilarity in favor of solemnity and sobriety.

She [Alexis Krauss] directs this show, and the space she occupies helps the lyrics stick.

On Sorry 4 the Wait 2, he's enjoying being Lil Wayne again, for better or worse. It also feels like rapping is once more a choice rather than a contractual obligation, which, at this point, might be the single greatest compliment one can pay Lil Wayne.

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.

We know from songs like “Alpenglow,” from Range of Light, that he’s able to express real emotional grit in his songs. Carey gets there occasionally on this album, as when he restates his marital vows on “True North.” Too often, though, Hundred Acres is content to be pleasant.

At its best, One Nation sounds like a beat tape left to crackle for a decade in somebody's garage, a kind of post-Chronic spin on one of those far-out late 70s dub-inflected collaborative krautrock LPs. But other times it feels like a series of conceptual curios that seems to think holding the listener at arm's length might even be too close.

Unfortunately, these tracks don't have the charm of their more traditional jangle-rock, and at times the disc suffers for it.

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.

Like a lot of Vedder's experiments, the spirit is easier to admire than the final product. The ukulele might be a great campfire instrument, but sometimes what works best at the campfire should stay there.

There is a very good album here-- you just have to work for it.

As with prior Matmos efforts, the ambition here is bold, both in the base concept and its execution.

By drawing out the minutiae of Belief System’s rigid conceptual framework, Woolford loses the spontaneity and audacity that made this music so thrilling in the first place.

On Jettison, Tanton quietly sits down, picks up his guitar, and, without fuss or self-importance, transforms himself into a singer-songwriter. Surely that is a statement worth making.

Vermont is a side project that sounds like one, a pastime for Plessow and Worgull, a minor curiosity for their fans.

Between the spirited music and Hütz's delivery, you're not likely to walk away from Pura Vida feeling uninspired. But if you want to really hear what Gogol Bordello is saying on Pura Vida, a little history with the band is going to go a long way.

The songs of Help Us Stranger often succeed only because they succeeded before, decades ago, as better songs.

In truth, Discovery rarely invokes its predecessor's slap-bass funk, and few other tracks resemble the obviously single-designed "One More Time." Instead, Daft Punk focus on fusing mid-80's Kool and the Gang R&B beats with post-millennial prog flourishes and more vocoders than you can shake at Herbie Hancock.

The question for the producer going forward is whether any of these strong, statement instrumentals are more restricted by or benefit from collaborative effort. Because sometimes he's better off dancing on his own.

Dimensional Bleed introduces a bit more subtlety than Death Spells, with bookend tracks “Hexsewn” and “Blood Memory” in particular making use of minimalistic sound design that goes far beyond “rock band adds synths” stereotypes. These quieter moments are Holy Fawn’s most unpredictable.

While Wasting Light features a host of worthy set-openers, few prove to be as sticky or memorable as any number of their previous singles.

An album that turns out to be a lot more idiosyncratic than its coffee-chain marketing plan suggests.

It's a well-crafted record that's lyrically dwarfed by the old emoting masters.

Their career arc since 2001’s Beautiful Garbage suggests that wobbly songwriting is as much a tic as their masterful studio expertise. The cult still thrives, and we’ll happily settle for Let All We Imagine Be the Light—until the next album.

Normal Happiness is a slightly-above-mediocre release from an artist who never dared to be mediocre; just inconsistent.

Not to get all protectionist here, but it seems pointless to import so many 1960s-mining indie rock outfits to America when we've got plenty of perfectly good 60s-mining acts right here at home. Yet Norway's I Was a King offer a welcome twist on the same ol'.

Sometimes erstwhile obsessiveness can lead to revelation, but beyond the fancy engineering, I don't see much of that here.

At more than three hours long, Music for Animals is difficult to digest in its entirety; there’s a fine line between patient and dull. Frahm’s extended track lengths are presumably meant to foster immersion, but after a while, they come to seem indulgent.

72 Seasons, at a marathon 77 minutes long, delivers everything you could possibly want from a Metallica album in 2023, and so much more on top of that. Too much more. Like Hardwired, its predecessor—the same length, incidentally—72 Seasons is both a thrill and a slog.

Mercy is studiously lovely, like a brochure for paradise, and over its course it begins to feels like a sunset in Grand Theft Auto V: beautiful, but a replica.

The Brooklyn-based foursome spends a lot of time here style-pinching, connecting dots already drawn by contemporary indie acts. And yet Miniature Tigers are often able to pull it off.

Though Non-Fiction only occasionally rises to the high songwriting standards of Ne-Yo’s seamless 2008 album Year of the Gentleman, it does correct some of the faults of his last record, 2012’s R.E.D., where the R&B songs and the Euro-dance songs played as if they’d been written for entirely separate projects.

Obviously, Twista's not breaking down any walls with his wordplay on Kamikaze, but along the way he kicks over a few garbage cans while letting Kanye West, Toxic and the rest of his production crew move some crowds and elevate their status, one slow jam at a time.

Too often, she jumps to John Hughes-isan climaxes without laying the foundation that would grant them the proper emotional heft. But Kristi shines as a guitarist and a composer; even the sternest skeptics might be forced to headbang once the power chords crash in on a particularly distorted chorus. Beabadoobee needs to punch up her script, but the set is perfectly lit.

There's a proficiency at work on Feel Good that's undeniably impressive--it's an album full of musicians who can play and they approach this stuff with an endearing alacrity and a willingness to let Syd do more this time around that will pay dividends on future records. She's still got room to improve where lyrics are concerned.

SOL has less gravity when it steers away from its majestic solar themes and tries to put its abstract sensations into words. Eskmo's vocals, while delicate, still feel intrusive.

The problem is that Melidis’ ear for busy atmospherics and his desire to say something deep don’t quite mesh; this music is like that huge spinning wheel on "The Price Is Right"--efficient, colorful, deadening.

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 the lyrical themes may lack potency, Thunder Follows the Light highlights Lee’s knack for composing beautiful melodies.

On My Way is a far less goofy effort than 2002's Sha Sha, and suffers remarkably for its comparable lack of inanity-- no longer powered by the youthful glee of his solo debut, Kweller's hooks sag and fade, contrived and loose.

Strip the clever vocal snippets away from Vibert's productions and you're left with those choice drums and goofy melodies, but there's little beyond that to mind.

There are isolated moments here and there, but even when when they strike an appealing note or two, the Free Nationals never come across as more than a backing band missing its leader.

Fortunately, Winehouse has been blessed by a brassy voice that can transform even mundane sentiments into powerful statements.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Being is most compelling as a pop album when it’s not trying to hook you; the rest is promising, but perhaps could do with a little more dementedness.

This a pop album, produced like pop and structured to grant instant gratification. And yet, this presentation throws the flaws of Tokyo Police Club’s dullest songs into sharp relief.

Transatlanticism dulls the edges of their usually acute divinations.

The strangest thing about Loose isn't its irregularity, but the simple fact that this doesn't sound like Nelly Furtado at all.

And while, at times, Momus constructs a bitingly clever post-modern take on folk music, Folktronic has an unfortunate tendency to choke on its own concept, rendering the album a bit hard to swallow.

There's not a lick, hook, or lyric on Echo Kid that won't give you a feeling of deja vu, but the execution is strong and the music is pleasurable enough that it hardly matters.

PS I Love You mire tentatively between jams and songcraft--there's some truly ingratiating melodies scattered throughout the first half, and Saulnier's lyrics have substance and weight, but too often they fail to coincide simultaneously.

Haas has a problem: Let that cartoon tech-metal ramp up (or camp up) just a step too far, and it turns into something kind of, well, uncool-- crossing the line from lovably brutal Germanic electronics into something sub-Rammstein, a kind of mallrat military-industrial metal that doesn't really square with the guy's skill set.

Despite real moments of fun, the project ends up feeling shy of its influences, stopping short of a full buy-in.

Even if the concept falls flat, though, T.I. vs. T.I.P. still warrants a listen, if only because T.I. seems constitutionally incapable of releasing an album full of uncompelling music.

Walls is still a likeable and engaging album on the whole, but it's hard not to be a tad worried that An Horse's debut album began with a song where Cooper fiercely and endearingly sang, "And like that good Hole album/I can live through this," while its follow-up ends with a song where she mewls, "Ian Curtis said it would tear us apart."

The-Dream's deft "That's My Shit" is a return to that just-right poise of the serious and silly.... The rest of The Crown EP does not thread the needle quite so gracefully.

The band plays with tremendous power, verve, and energy, but the results feel leaden, even after dozens of list For all of its dense conceptual underpinnings, The Ark Work comes up curiously short on new ideas long before the album ends.

The writing, at least, is often remarkable. ... The accompaniment for these curious lyrical snapshots, though, never rises to meet their idiosyncrasy—it is often bland enough to distract from them.

In its effort to reach the masses, Special has the unfortunate fault of both trying too hard to hit the zeitgeist—like the nonsensical Tesla metaphor on opener “The Sign”—and striving for pure blahtitude. ... In fact, when it comes to happiness, some of the most satisfying songs on Special—the ones that come closest to finding inner peace—are also the most subdued.

Although Empire tries mightily, they collapse underneath too many ideas before the record is even half over.

Stepping confidently into her “rock era,” Miley offers a genuinely pleasing, though sometimes hamfisted record that staves off the awkwardness and missteps that plagued her previous albums.

[“XanaX Damage” is] a flash of greatness bogged down by poor execution, which could stand as a theme for the EP as a whole.

Middle-aged rap has rarely sounded more grown, with all the mixed-blessing perspective that comes with it. Anonymous Nobody is kind of a downer, but sometimes that’s what you need, especially when the optimism’s just below that melancholy surface.

L-event isn’t a world away from the Exai material. It's not passive listening.

There’s no denying METZ’s ability to summon a white-knuckled, visceral disgust where tension and release are indistinguishable. It slaps, but it doesn’t leave much of a mark.

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.

Framing Pretty Ugly as a broken-beat album helps account for its pleasures, but can't entirely absolve its pitfalls, perhaps because much of what is true for funky remains true for broken beat, namely, that the flight into syncopation should not be heedless.

Broken Equipment often sounds like a band weary of having to make the same points they’ve always made but then doing it anyway. They shine best when they write about love, when their vocals go beyond sing-speaking, and when they blast the overdrive on their midtempo punk riffs.