It’s all gleaming and immaculate from a distance, sharp and shattered if you get too close.

It’s fitting that this slightly convoluted, sometimes generic offering largely delivers on its promise, much like the larger comic world it now occupies. A fun, rap-centric album is now Marvel canon. In their first roles as bit players, the TDE roster delivers a product benefiting the whole. Their effort is one befitting the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and its blackest entry.

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

Ugly sounds like something far less interesting: the sort of generically angsty guitar music that only a ’90s major label executive could love.

Julia's impressive discipline rarely gets in the way of its ability to affect; it's all so deeply felt, it's impossible not to feel it, too.

Coming from such a creative bunch, the straightforward character of Crystal Fairy is surprising, but the strong, pre-existing rapport between its two pairs of players helps.

Street Worms, their debut album, is a grand introduction. Viagra Boys manage to mock everyday negative qualities--boasted virility, misplaced classism, and blissful ignorance--with sincerity and ambivalence.

The 12 compositions that make up Information have evolved his sensual, liquid style into one that distills the contradictory logics of the digital age—it’s tense, airless, and paranoid without losing an inch of his comic swagger or mischievous irony, a sensibility cultivated by bone-deep cultural exhaustion.

These are unsparing accounts of tough subjects, but Edwards navigates each song with tenderness and humor, allowing her to tear apart old idioms (“Love is blind/Whoever bought that line must be a real sucker”) or invent new ones (“Love is simple math/I can be a total pain in the ass”).

Though there's less breathing space on Thursday, and fewer melodic hooks, it still feels of a piece with House of Balloons.

Jameszoo's work is strongest when he tones down the overt jazz and instead parses the genre for specific sounds and ideas to embellish his electronic experimentations.

Her lyrics as well as her performance may strike some listeners as overly literary, but there is method in these mannerisms. That unwieldiness becomes one of the album’s most appealing traits.

It still might not--but fetch at least harmonizes more disharmoniously with the tenor of the times.

In its best moments, In Between sounds both mellow and intense in ways only the Feelies can pull off.

Honest surges with the self-assurance of an artist finally coming into his own.

Case is a singer first and a songwriter second, and The Tigers Have Spoken is afflicted with the same malady as Blacklisted: Many of its songs are too short, clocking in under two minutes.

There is a sense of limbs and lungs stretching, followed by the triumphant punch through to a higher plane.

It's not just a collection of hits; it's an album, one that gives the project's familiar nocturnal foreboding a new sense of grandeur.

Pleasure features a number of songs that stretch towards the five-minute mark, making more sense as part of the whole rather than individually.

Unsurprisingly, this is heavy listening.

Even if many of the album's lyrics find Fallon looking back in anger, American Slang ultimately proves The Gaslight Anthem are not afraid to move forward.

A twelve-track exercise in mannerism that omits an essential element of what long made the Clientele so captivating. His wake-up call from pleasantry arrives too late to make much of Miracles.

Unfortunately, few of these tracks wield the same impact as his tried-and-true hip-hop productions, and more often than not, feel like attempts at being everything to everyone.

With Tasty, Kelis has left the roller-rink, returned from outer space, and she's back on her own two feet on terra firma-- unfortunately.

From hip-hop to no-wave, jazz-punk disco to house music to electroclash, sleek funk to crusty noise, there's a lot to cover, and Soul Jazz does the job admirably, touring the biggest landmarks and some of the interesting diversions not on the map, but nonetheless co-existing side-by-side.

While Chance is fond of joking, this album is no joke. As In Search plays out, it becomes increasingly clear that the record’s scatterbrained eclecticism and frantic energy is less a product of eccentricity-for-eccentricity’s sake than a manifestation of the very real anxieties fuelling this endeavor.

The songs are moody and dark, with clear moments of guitar solo-driven catharsis.

Abendrot never feels dishonest, just occasionally overwrought in its desire to achieve the stakes and transcendence of similarly inspired records like Holy Ghost or Goodness. Fortunately, You Blew It! just as often let their guitars speak for their behalf and Abendrot can be heard as the completion of a directive started by their last two albums: grow up, dude and keep doing what you’re doing.