Changing of the Seasons feels like the record where Brun's lack of range catches up to her.

It’s a fully-formed offering that seamlessly balances her more rugged raps with pristine pop songs (sculpted in “Body”’s image) and tender slow jams.

Broken Equipment often sounds like a band weary of having to make the same points they’ve always made but then doing it anyway. They shine best when they write about love, when their vocals go beyond sing-speaking, and when they blast the overdrive on their midtempo punk riffs.

In Dreams isn’t at all a crash-landing, but it is a soft one, as Duster settle into a perception of themselves rather than fly above it.

Coldcut acquit themselves well, in the sense that they pull off all of their various generic sleights of hand. But, as per usual, whatever off-hand virtuosity Sound Mirrors displays, there's no center here.

The Narrow Garden features some of the most sunny and flowering music that Kang has created, seamlessly joined with a couple of sinister threnodies.

Throughout Static, Big Ups come across as a band in complete command of their sound, fronted by a guy on the verge of losing it.

While Marble Skies doesn’t always quite get there, the planets it frantically orbits while awaiting touchdown are worth the journey.

It’s not so much that no one else could make this ridiculous album, more that no one but the Orb would even think of it. Abolition of the Royal Familia is a testament to their sadly singular talent.

For how clearly smart, ambitious, and upsettingly tuneful Cameron is, it’s a pity that he uses his talent for these exercises in sophistry, music that feels so vacuous and fleeting that it becomes one with the very modernity it seeks to lampoon.

Haines’ dynamic vocals often bail out the more inelegant lyrics. But it doesn’t help when her bandmates seem to be on autopilot, working with a distracting series of references to the band’s influences.

An Invitation adds a new chapter to that story, told in an unmistakably American idiom fusing Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and Copland, spotlighting Inara George as a sophisticated new voice and confirming Van Dyke Parks, at 68, as an inexhaustibly vital national treasure.

The results are perfectly pleasant but rarely inspiring, hardly sterile but at the same time too smooth.

More than any Markers record before it, the trio seem to be communicating deep within the subconscious, tapping into soul that's been hiding behind the noise for years.

Presumably, this paring down is not a permanent stylistic shift so much as a creative exercise--a chance for Crutchfield to revisit the simple roots of her songwriting practice. In its completion, she has demonstrated just how few colors she needs to paint vividly.

On Marauder, there’s a new kind of emptiness, of hearing an Interpol album that doesn’t really seem concerned with doing better than “good enough.”

Poliça now appear in search of a middle ground that combines their visceral songwriting with Madness’ inventive textures. At their best, these songs offer hints of that forward trajectory.

Twenty-five minutes of these three on autopilot still hits more often than not, ultimately making this disc a mixtape-y More Fish-style companion to Cuban Linx II-- hardly necessary, but not inconsequential.

A lot of the music on Happy To You, their second full-length, sounds excellent. Beats sparkle, synths crest and unfurl with purpose, horns come in at just exact right moment.... [Yet] too much of the time, too much is missing.

She’s not an ostentatious player, although she certainly has the chops; she seldom solos and usually avoids the fussy filigrees that demonstrate technique as much as they serve the song.

etric's clunky riffage and hi-hat beats are replaced by simple piano figures and subtle adornments (strings, feedback, breathing organ) that draw out Haines' most stirring vocal performances to date, and the muted milieu highlights her natural, sensuous whisper, lending a sympathetic thrust to these broken-down anthems for a thirtysomething girl.

Though Thompson's plaintive wails and the brawny playing of the rhythm section give the impression of relentless and differentiable activity, they're holding patterns all the same.

If the bulk of the album is for the car, the bar, the social occasion, then moments like ["Today"] are for headphones, bedrooms, intimate and solitary states. The presence of both increases the breadth of this assured LP, and establishes ILYBICD as being no longer a band to watch, but a band to listen to.

If you're willing to make the time, though, Blurry Blue Mountain will repay your attention.

A few of the songs on this collection are recognizably "singles" in tone and form--"Ugly Man," "Wait Let's Go," "Always Flying," "Devil Again" all have at least three chords, run four minutes or less, and have "ba-ba-ba" choruses. But most of them head directly into that kinked-up corner of the song that repeatedly pulls at Dwyer's imagination, the spot where the song's narrative action swings shut and the groove hinges open.

The takeaway here is that, two albums in, Cold Specks have the graceful part down pat--but there’s room for more expulsion.

Exposion isn't so easily characterized--and the group comes off as more versatile, more than DIY Nuggets throwbacks.

They don't stay in one place for too long, but the body of the album can be distilled to an essence of the glassy, ten-lane stare of Last Exit with Ed Banger's egg-frying EQ.