The songs are dense and trebly, swirling and mutating but rarely growing, and too often staying way past their welcome. There are plenty of worthwhile ideas, but a seasoned producer could strategically shave 20 minutes off the album while losing little.

Cramming together brash rock snottiness with meek country hollers is hardly uncharted territory (not that it matters), but BRMC's particular mash-up still makes for a strangely intriguing party.

Maus has made more profound and mysterious records, but never one that has taken this much delight in its own ridiculousness.

With a Cape and a Cane sounds merely like a solid indie rock record on a passing listen; give it a few more spins and you will be rewarded.

Rather than shroud themselves in mystery, Belle and Sebastian would rather blow their own cover and, for all its inherent inconsistencies, The Third Eye Centre provides a clear view of how a band that once made music fit for a library is now more liable to get kicked out of one.

Impressive as it can be in small doses, Waterfall as a whole plows ahead like a WWI-era tank, heavy and lumbering and powerful but pretty much limited to a single direction.

The lack of anything like a pained or ecstatic voice in Call It Love can make its emotional core tricky to access. Instead of reading it in her voice, you have to read it in her lyrics and the environments in which she’s chosen to nestle them. That doesn’t detract from Call It Love’s prettiness.

While in•ter a•li•a has plenty of motion and heat, it needs friction and resistance to light a spark.

As good as the record sounds and as capably as he immerses himself in assorted flavors pop, there remains an odd sense of distance to Conn on record.

Dub Trio are on to something, but they've yet to fully grasp it.

Way is a humble first step in what sounds like a glorious new trip, where the really well played guitar becomes something else entirely.

LNZNDRF is a fine-if-flawed testament to the company's Thatcher years, but it could have been tremendous if they had kept it strictly instrumental.

Her pop exists to exploit and sand off edges, packaging esotericism for the masses. It’s just that on Madame X, she is not merely dining out on other cultures; she’s whipping around drive-thrus.

While Lost Friends’ slow-building ascents and soaring choruses function as necessary release valves for the unrest bubbling up from Joy’s lyrics, over the course of 12 tracks, a certain identikit quality takes hold.

In Spektor’s catalogue, Remember Us to Life balances comfort food for Spektor fans with the maturity and wisdom you'd expect from a singer-songwriter passing the 15th year of her career.

Saturdays=Youth meaningfully diversifies M83's catalog while retaining Gonzalez's indelible fingerprint.

It all sounds cleaner and more accessible than anything they've done in the past, but that might actually be part of the problem.

If Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid has that lovable ten-solid-songs consistency, it's less a matter of lacking filler and more a matter of writing a lot of inoffensive but uninspiring tracks that all wander down the same avenues.

The results might be a little thin on actual "essential" moments, but they're working in the right direction.

Phosphene Dream is a step up, if only for the little bit of variety that the tighter arrangements and genre-hopping provide.

[Self Made 2] exists to force-feed Hot 97 playlists.

While that title may suggest a navel-gazing bedroom-auteur beatshop, Record Collection proves a surprisingly gregarious album, varying up the sounds and styles and making better use of cameos by his famous friends.

Rad Times Xpress IV illuminates how well that music lends itself to more experimental renderings while the songs seemingly engineered to hold onto RTX's denim'n'leather constituency yield surprises.

Adiós doesn't add much to Campbell’s legacy--the comeback records of recent years formed a fitting final act--but it’s a pleasant postscript, a wistful reminder of the joys a great musician once gave.

As good as "Danger! High Voltage" is, the rest of this album is simply not worth it.

Go Plastic exhumes the corpse of stuttering, fast-paced percussion and arbitrary programming that was bled dry and buried in a time when the Y2K bug still signified economic collapse and nuclear meltdowns.

The resulting clash can be momentarily compelling, but lacks the nuance and character and to really pull it off, which all leaves Seachange huddled on the cusp of something significantly worthwhile, but still a few wild, miscreant swings away.

An album that emerges as a solid, infectious effort, but eventually collapses under its own weight, unable to keep all its stylistic efforts coherent.

While Demolition forgoes the overproduction and even much of the shameless rock-god posturing that plagued Gold, Adams hasn't yet found his way out of his songwriting rut.

It is this excess of ambition over achievement, as opposed to any real consistency, which makes FutureSex/LoveSounds more of an album than Justified was. Songs which sound puzzlingly self-indulgent in isolation-- most obviously, the smirking, tenuously tuneful first single "SexyBack"-- are cloaked in a compelling intensity and purposefulness when played in succession.

Let's chalk it up to growing pains and watch how early learnings further develop into an adult style.

With Niggas on the Moon, though, it's hard to shake the feeling that Death Grips might benefit from a change in aesthetic and conceptual focus.

It's not all great--'You Want History' can't overcome rhyming "mystery" with "history" or its leaden coda, for example--but it is at least as good as their debut, if not just a tick better for its relative dynamic and tonal variety.

While, the Black Heart Procession does an excellent job of musically embodying October's primary mood, they'd do well to remember that it's a month made more bearable by the occasional flash of Indian summer.

What’s Wrong With New York? isn’t inventive or texturally weird enough to geek the analog synth heads, and its hooks aren’t massive or sticky enough to work as pure pop either. The embrace of pretentiousness and artifice comes at the expense of real emotional complexity and memorably witty writing.

For Grizzly Bear fans and Department of Eagles devotees alike, Archives 2003-2006 is a document rich with revelatory moments and educatory touchstones--but as an album, it functions even better.

In Beal’s attempt to exorcise old demons, the LP comes off way too moody and far too methodical to resonate long term.

As long as British Sea Power continue to exist on their singular plane, it's easy to admire and probably overrate them for their ambition.

It unspools pleasantly and unhurriedly, possessing the sort of sparkly glow that often comes with rejuvenation.

Most of the time, they do a pretty good job.

Even if it’s stretched thin and unsatisfying in spots, Four is our most distinct glimpse of Harvey yet.

Trap or Die 3 offers real reminders of Jeezy’s greatness, then, something Church in These Streets couldn’t claim. But some of these songs just sound terrible.

Largely, Revelations leaves us waiting for the subtly brilliant moments its title suggests.

Though Antarctica positions itself as an assessment of worldly chaos and isolation, it’s never clear whether the stance is earnest or apathetic. Even Albini-tier fidelity can’t make this formula sound fresh.

Actual Life 3 has moments of brilliance and will certainly connect with big festival crowds. ... But music that focuses on reality tends to work best when it is doggedly cinematic or highly relatable; Actual Life 3 is neither, instead frequently slipping into mundanity.

While a few songs here could be Chromeo canon, Adult Contemporary too often feels like a glossy recreation of their earlier sound that’s missing the idiosyncrasy and baked-in humor.

Auder’s music pulls in multiple directions at once, until the most emotionally authentic presentation wins out.

It’s the easiness of Monuments that truly make it an outlier--whether Corgan constructed a masterpiece or just sounded labored, it was obvious that a ton of effort went into Smashing Pumpkins

B'Day sounds like an entire album of third and fourth singles, which is still better than an album of filler.

Best Behavior is a strong record on its own merits, perhaps more so if you feel a sort of investment in Dinowalrus after hearing %, but it leaves something to the listener's imagination in order to make it truly exciting in addition to something sturdy to build upon.

Sure, they could use a few relatable sentiments to go with their outstretched sound, and the Clinic thing's just gotta go. But few bands this young are operating on quite this scale, and fewer still have the brass--and the patience--to pull off a big, glitzy, complex record like Zeroes QC.

This Is Not a Safe Place is not, in the end, the classic Ride Mark 2 release that its first three songs so casually tease. But it has enough joy, verve and invention to suggest that Ride could get there one day.

His proxies fare a bit better, though there's another problem: There's way too many of them, and none of them stick around long enough to establish themselves.

What really makes this album special is the ways in which the Evangelicals pull off big-stage spectacle on what still sounds like a public-access cable-show budget.

Beyond the Lightless Sky doesn't meet recent high-water marks set by the Body, Rwake, Baroness, or Thou, but it does seem like the next stepping-stone for Hull.

Taken as a whole, the album is exactly the sort of hastily tossed-off, forgettable project that legacy acts will sometimes tack onto can't-miss releases such as this. It's a shame they did.

Overall, Sugar at the Gate is a compact record from a band chugging along smoothly, unspooling sweet rhythms like it is finally their job.

They have never shied from commixing independent sounds. In Moon 2, they have captured this utopian sort of jostling, where two people banging into each other make a great noise, and there’s a productive coincidence around each turn.

Ra Ra Riot sound overly self-conscious, the rural environs of their recording space failing to provide the warmth, empathy, or exuberance of The Rhumb Line.

Within and Without is an excellent demonstration of what happens when, even after the buzz-band cycle has faded, you continue to investigate a sound on your own hushed, ambitious terms.

Even as he shifts from his typically elliptical songwriting to more structure-bound forms, he never sounds overly fussy. It makes Former Lives a brisk listen even when the songs themselves aren't particularly innovative.

Django is perhaps the first Tarantino soundtrack that feels, uncharacteristically, a little too nail-on-the-head.

For all the album's modest ambitions, it doesn't lack for variety.

Though compositionally The Ridge feels less exploratory that Neufield’s previous work, it is still a moving document of her engaging, virtuosic playing.

With songs that play like a grab-bag of genres and lyrics that have little of the humor or self-awareness the band displayed in the past, it's hard to muster the patience to uncover anything deeper.

Adios sounds more like Hola. Nearly 15 years into his career, Branan sounds like he’s finally found the right balance between audacity and subtlety, between humor and heartbreak.

As it stands, Barbara feels like a meticulously carved treasure box to which one has lost the key—magnificent to behold, impossible to unlock.

Tasteful, tentatively adventurous post-Britpop record that would’ve gotten sandwiched between Elbow and South on a “next Radiohead” listicle 20 years ago.

Like their namesake, Melted Toys’ willfully warped nature can get in the way of their utility.

Sadly, Roots & Echoes' air of studious refinement sullies even its more cerebral material with schmaltzy gestures.

Range Anxiety goes by in an instant, makes minimal demands, and is remarkably enjoyable for its simple pleasures. It may not have the heft to move you, but it’s gentle and never unwelcome.

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.

There's a lack of thought and care, a feeling that this band is still figuring out what it wants to be while not treading on too many toes in the process.

The exuberant overload of Blueberry Boat will thrill and transport you with the ineluctable force of a great children's story, one whose execution matches its imagination.

The Finns' latest is glossy, emotional, and sure to satisfy longtime listeners-- as well as any Stereophonics or Aqualung fans paying their respects.

There's room for Smoke to grow into this new guise, but Wraetlic is too satisfied with its own dissatisfaction to serve as anything more than comfort food for those predisposed to melancholia.

Move Way, dBridge's new EP and his first for the evergreen R&S label, puts a strong focus on his efforts to maintain the structural integrity and rhythmic impact of drum and bass while pushing its forms outward from the template-driven repetition he's spent his post-Bad Company career trying to counterbalance.

So although Labyrinthes further establishes Malajube as French Canadians worth following, this time you may not make it far enough to save your brother from the Goblin King.

If It Feels So Good When I Stop expands his abilities as a writer, it'd be at least interesting to hear a record of his that does the same for his skills as a musician.

Tiptoeing around already familiar ideas, the album’s first half never finds new footing.

At its best, Wolf manages to make the inroads toward accessibility that Goblin wouldn’t and pulls it off without sacrificing too much of Tyler’s refreshing capriciousness.

She has an urbane sophistication that sets her apart from the likes of Ashanti and Nivea.

Woon's managed one assured and beguiling hybrid of UK bass pressure and slick blue-eyed soul.

On Falling Off the Lavender Bridge, Hynes offers a comfortable (and more interesting) marriage of lush Brit-pop and Omaha-flavored country-rock.

It's a contemplative work setting the stage for Mould's upcoming memoir, whose hooks will for once have to connect without the almost comforting bark of his vocals or buzz of his guitar behind them.

Lantern’s risk-taking is daring and giddy, but its favored mode, and Hudson Mohawke’s best, is hooky, crowded, rap-conscious electropop.

While Acousmatic Sorcery is interesting and occasionally even great on its own, it ultimately it feels very much like a hyper-creative and gifted artist trying to figure out what he's doing.

Writing from the heart does not automatically imbue lyrics with depth. Never is it more apparent that the factory approach is not allowing Cara to fulfill her potential than on “Scars To Your Beautiful.”

Bainbridge’s production is always tasteful and seldom bad, but is only great when heightened by its guests. On Something like a War, those guests are generally pretty good; sometimes they are very good.

What the album actually does is present a calming looseness-- nothing shocking or obscure, and better for it.

The production is muted, minor-key, and consistently beautiful, conjuring the familiar Future Moods: rain-streaked neon signs, drug-induced stupors inside of clubs at 3 a.m. If you are content to live inside this lonely little world Future has made, he is still keeping it nice for you. What you won’t find on The WIZRD is the sound of Future stretching or surprising himself.

Buried under the fluff somewhere is a good album.

Atlantis strives for a patchwork cohesiveness, with equal parts neo-soul, reggae, rap, and rock, bound by a vaguely spiritual message and partially elaborated water-related extended metaphor.

They're like a combination of Where the Wild Things Are, a fever dream, a pagan woodland ceremony, and a notebook doodle. The music is worth taking in, too, over and over again.

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

It's her mastery and attention that is ultimately what, I suspect, makes her work so consistently complex and worthwhile.

For all the champion horsepower in their stable, Gone Is Gone just never really gets going.

Eastman’s music has steadily accrued new champions over the past decade, and it’s gratifying to see another high-profile inclusion of one of his vital works. But in general, this confusion is endemic to the project, which is full of excellent performances of strong repertoire without a lot of obvious common ground.