It's bound to ruffle feathers and turn off old fans, and in a way, going so outright "pop" is one of the gutsiest, risky things a pillar of the scene like Scuba could have done.

This album feels more like a series of genre exercises, a place in which they occasionally work up a palpable tension, but never enough to make this more than an adequate diversion from the resources they're obviously sourcing.

Sounds From Nowheresville makes me want to buy chocolate, try on clothes, take a holiday--anything but listen to this record.

Ghostory is at its best a very pleasurable realization of niche.

This is a record with a handful of standout songs struggling and straining against one another after being crammed into the standard album format.

Corrosion of Conformity does overstay its welcome with a couple of second-rate tracks, but overall, the album manages to both recapture Animosity's feral energy and reach compositional peaks that the 1985 versions of Dean, Weatherman, and Mullin couldn't have accessed.

While the amount of raw material here may be daunting for some, there are plenty of surprising melodic moments to indulge in.

It's not a record that's going to hit you over the head-- it's almost fatally unassuming and more likely to meekly ask if you maybe wanted to spare a few seconds to listen-- but it's one that will offer a surprising amount of replay value if you accept its coy, hesitant invitation.

The lyrical coarseness serves an important function, reinforcing the urgency of O'Connor's performances and creating the impression that she has worked hard and fast to document her emotions at their rawest and wildest.

For a record that sounds like memories of better times, there's a disheartening shortage of hooks or melodies that aren't hitched to lyrics you'd rather forget.

After an iffy start, Toward the Low Sun thankfully picks up a head full of steam in its closing stretch--hopefully, this momentum won't dissipate over another seven-year layoff.

Memoryhouse have a ways to go before they're creating music with as much melodic power or depth of feeling as their dream-pop contemporaries.

They manage to string a staggering number of tightly packed nuggets of melody and texture into 46 minutes.

The music is pretty but still--without many shifts in color or tone, they sit there like flat, two-dimensional objects.

Arnalds' score ultimately isn't as satisfying [Trent Reznor's The Social Network or Cliff Martinez's on Drive], especially in the front half where he's excessively patient and slow to build momentum.

Whereas Too Young to Be in Love was the excited doodles of a crush's name in a notebook, Hairdresser Blues is the discarding of the love letters that came after.

1966 is one more piece to a puzzle that will never be complete--which is of course how Dalton herself would have had it.

For all its violence, Back radiates warmth. Much of the beauty is due to the expanded instrumentation.

More unfortunate are the moments when Schnauss and Peters aim for surprising or affecting and veer straight into kitsch.

All together, it sounds like a poorly organized collection of demos and ideas.

On Man With Potential Pete Swanson's ability to encompass many sounds and moods knows few bounds, if any.

People deserve a two-disc Sparrow comp to bury all other Sparrow comps, but this isn't it (Smithsonian's First Flight, from 2005, is much better, though it falls off before Sparrow hit his prime).

With The Something Rain, Tindersticks provide a wholly convincing reminder that they are, by definition, an incendiary device.

The most disappointing aspect of Go Fly a Kite is that it sounds so satisfied, almost smug, in its complacency.

None of the songs are simple, and they mostly all build to surprising and surprisingly weird heights.

It'd be much easier to love, as opposed to merely like, They!Live's glistening, long-form tech-house soundscapes if there were more bombs and curveballs hidden amongst its lovingly pruned forest glades.

While something like 2007's Cendre benefited greatly from an occasional splash of his cotton-wool electronics, there are very few moments like that here, and frankly, it needs more.

It's to Lambchop's credit that their music avoids comfortable resolutions. Instead, it hangs there, no moral, no judgment.