Lucifer is just their third album, and yet it's unmistakably drenched in their specific brand of patience and calm.

"Left Alone" is nothing short of a vocal masterclass. It has the singer going from the verses' rap-like cadence to the hook's curlicue jazz stylings to the operatic long notes of the bridge-- notes that slowly curdle underneath their own exasperated weariness.

The pity of The Lost Tapes' overambition is that it could easily be condensed to a single, first-rate album of genuinely new-to-record material.

This sh*t is intended to be the soundtrack to fun, and listening to the individual tracks is indeed a lot of fun. Color bursts from the edges of every track, and most carry no interest in subtlety or dynamic range. The production pops like a seismic charge.

It's just satisfying to see a band trim the fat and wind up even bigger.

I'm hard-pressed to find a song that's more interesting at its three-minute mark than it is after 10 seconds: 2:54 exposes a band that knows how to make a good first impression but not a lasting one.

The productions shine, mixing taut electro rhythms with those swirling strings. There's a sense of scale to the album that is really attractive.

These 12 songs feel like whimsical larks, and Jackson's considerable charm should be able to put them over just fine in a live setting. But the record can also be too whimsical for its own good, and for most listeners, Jackson's Belle and Sebastian songs will be enough.

While Womack does his best to step up to his alien surroundings, he can't help but sound like an out-of-place guest on his own album.

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 three slick, glitchy tracks on You Know You Like It also pull from the left-field sounds associated with the LA label Brainfeeder and the Knife's creepily synthetic vibe, but a large part of their appeal comes from their glistening pop sensibility.

Bint's mostly relaxed and easy approach teases out enough pleasant moments on Into the Trees but rarely offers a resolution.

It offers no new narrative or stated focus and thus represents nothing more than the second gleaning of tracks from the cloistered minimal wave universe. Still, there's something undeniable here.

SGP's ability to create a quarantined universe explains why Mysterious is often absorbing rather than oppressive.

The fans who'll get the most from it emotionally will be those who are already invested in its singer and his honesty.

Freak Puke represents a band that's always in motion doing what it's always done: trying a crazy idea, releasing and reveling in the results and, before long, likely moving along to the next instantaneous notion. That's the spirit that's always made the Melvins great, just as it does on Freak Puke, if only in bits and pieces.

It's a pretty and intimately rendered collection of folk songs, but those moments of jarringly direct, piercing emotion are few.

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

The result is idiosyncratic pop-rock appealing to geeky outsiders and scene lifers that's perennially in short supply, largely by design.

That they don't treat ambient as empty-headed fluff for relaxation is laudable, but it also doesn't make Ursprung any less of a record for a self-selecting coterie of sound-art aficionados.

Under the cloak of Triple F's blatant crossover appeals, he slyly exceeds expectations by making a record better than it really needs to be.

The songwriting is as strong and intricate than on 2006's classic The Warning, even if it takes a few listens for the finer points to sink in.

There's a cocky strut to tracks like "Don't Hustle for Love" and "White Cloud" that suggest this is a band striving to make a connection with a far wider audience. On Dub Egg they fall just short of those ambitions, creating a transitory album that builds on what came before but doesn't feel like the finished product.

For all the good-natured vibes this record gives off, it's hard to ignore that Do Things is also a limited collection. It's easy to suspect Dent May's ambitions are as simple as to craft a record that finds itself endlessly stuffed into car stereos this summer.

Some of Banks' best lines are elegantly self-aggrandizing and enemy-deflating, but she's just as capable of executing those moves in more straightforward terms.

There's a gritty, lucid vein [in the album's songs] running just below the top layer of haze, the words' bite stinging all the more for their burial under all those dank guitar tones and harmonies as dark and delicate as black lace.

It's a shame that Falkous is playing to the cheap seats on The Plot Against Common Sense.