It’s rarely bad, just safe, doing more to remind us of the old days than to embrace the musical crossroads he’s at. That feels like a missed opportunity to fill in the blanks that are still there.

However disparate its geographic points of reference, Temper is an artistically consistent, tonally temperate, record--depending on your taste, maybe a little too balmy and dispassionate.

Despite the burst of creativity that inspired it, No Rules Sandy lacks urgency. The songs that do sharpen into concrete images evaporate rather than carry their metaphors forward.

Although Good Arrows is aimed in the direction of a synthesis between the band's two predominant elements, the result misses the target by just a bit.

It's generally a meditative set, and only on the album's final track, "Exit the Acropolis", does Dozzy return to the sound with which he's most closely affiliated: Tapping out clicks like 808 hi-hats, and weaving three or four layers of mouth harp into enveloping contrapuntal pulses, it's the perfect approximation of Berghain-styled techno.

A handful of the beats skew generic—closing tracks “The Way,” with its sleepy Wreckx-N-Effect sample, and “Race,” in particular, play like car-commercial music—but To What End avoids defaulting to a rapper spitting with a backing band.

There’s a gauzy thinness to the sound, an inescapable two-dimensionality that occasionally hinders Lynne’s mission. Still, this is a fine addition to their catalog, perhaps not as consistent as 2001’s Zoom but much better than these late-career revival albums tend to sound.

It’s clear that the artists are well aware of the risks of throwing themselves too eagerly into the wine-dark churn, but here, O’Rourke isn’t quite capable of reining in Fennesz’ more impetuous inclinations, and by the end of it, you find yourself craving a quiet patch of warm, dry land on which to catch your breath.

The Documentary 2 solidifies him a grade-grubbing student of hip-hop, one with far more resources and drive than natural talent, but a student all the same.

With that title, Songs for Singles practically announces itself as a stopgap release, a breather after the breakthrough. If it doesn't shake the earth the way Meanderthal did, it's not really supposed to. But the EP does show that this band remains in fine working condition, and another full-on album from these guys would be a welcome thing indeed. Until then, this will do just fine.

Whether he’s full of joy or howling into the void, he pushes his songs to their edge, which helps to deliver on the promise shown in his earlier work.

Late Night Feelings is not the first recent record to treat the sadness of women as a healthy response to all manner of hurt. It is, however, a worthy entry in this still-developing pop pantheon, authentic and honest in its rendering of many shades of feminine sorrow.

SremmLife 2 collects all of the quirks in the margins of its predecessor and develops them; more than anything else, SremmLife 2 is the ultimate middle finger to grouches who think this brand of rap can’t be complex.

On first listen, his second album as Death Vessel may seem passive, even flat-- just competent, non-descript folk-rock. Give it time, though, and Nothing Is Precious Enough For Us proves more intriguing.

On the closing title track, she attempts to wind her own emotional experiences together with her father’s. ... it introduces the album’s most interesting material right at the end. If she had threaded it more steadily throughout, the album would have been a more keen statement than the respectable pop offering that it is.

Raw Data Feel might be the most confident album Everything Everything have ever released, but in a way that feels deeply hubristic. If this album were a person, it’d be that pompous, motormouthed philosophy undergraduate who treats seminars like extended soliloquies.

As an album-length wallow in bad feelings, it's an impressive thing indeed. But I prefer Jesu when their music is about connection rather than isolation.

Gun finds songwriter's songwriter McCaughey slightly stuck in his own unique, nuanced niche.

Kudos is considerably more laid back and vibe-heavy. The guitars still jingle-jangle, just with a little more economy.

It is hard to parse all that's disparate here, and in searching for its most personal form, Son Lux unwittingly dipped into the uncanny valley of digital music trying to become human--something a little too perfect to believe.

The album suggests a full story, but it still seems paradoxically fragmentary. After its slow burn fades, after our hero has returned home, what’s best about Conquistador might be the sense of possibility it poses.

While Waiting on a Song is casual in execution, it’s extremely intricate in construction, with each disco-string sweep, brass-section stab, and razor-sharp acoustic strum deployed with push-button precision. At times, the album feels less like a traditional singer/songwriter affair than a business card for Auerbach’s studio.

For all its faults, The New Abnormal might capture how the Strokes are feeling: not ready to fade out, not primed for a comeback. Right now, they’re just way too tired.

Wand excels at delivering heavy and murky sounds, but they're a bit late to a conversation that their peers have already dominated.

While Millions of Brazilians is easily the most potent and concentrated effort Dianogah has yet to produce, it still lacks tonal variation.

He's playing the same old marshall vs shady real-or-fake game as usual and its as interesting and complex as it ever was.

What prevents Inevitable from arguing for Three Mile Pilot as one of the lost treasures of 90s indie is that they sound too much like themselves; it's a weird situation when a band who achieved success amongst a small, intensely dedicated fanbase in their infancy could return from a 13-year hiatus without having become increasingly beloved in the interim

Maritime's musical development has become a compelling narrative of its own, each subsequent record in many ways both improving upon and elucidating the last.