While the closer may not immediately resonate with a listener coming down from 25 minutes of introspection, it succeeds in ejecting you from the album, almost as if Slow Pulp is rolling the credits and yelling, “show’s over, folks.” It puts the preceding melancholia into perspective, no longer dire.

Beast is contemplative and forgiving, a means of burying one relationship to commit to another, and Ritter nicely evokes the excitement and resignation of such a transition. On the other hand, distance is distance, and much of the album is too cool, too levelheaded, too past tense.

This is rock music that has come almost completely unstuck from the blues, with a sleek, relentless drive subbing in for swing.

May stand as the band's most focused disc to date.

[No quote available.]

Ballads were a staple of H.E.R.’s initial five EPs, and she again uses them frequently on Back of My Mind, for better or worse. Nearly all of them are simple and pretty. ... The choices she makes—from the glossy R&B production to favoring vocal riffing over a good hook—feel altogether safe, like she’s protecting a legacy she was born into.

The strangeness and slightness of Instrumentals 2015 is admittedly refreshing in our age of overdoing it, and it does fit with the whisper that is Pearce's overall career arc, but when placed next to Flying Saucer Attack's best music, it still comes off like a faint echo.

It's not all great--'You Want History' can't overcome rhyming "mystery" with "history" or its leaden coda, for example--but it is at least as good as their debut, if not just a tick better for its relative dynamic and tonal variety.

White Rose Movement's "electro-clash" 80s sound basically candy-coats Nine Inch Nails industrial and metrosexualizes the lyrics, making Kick pretty redundant.

Most of the songs on Mind Control are worth a few spins, but nothing on here quite matches “I'll Cut You Down” from Uncle Acid's 2011 album Bloodlust.

It is an alluring collection that hints at greatness but halts at achieving it, instead teasing listeners for its sequel.

Connected is far from being the first record to make a virtue out of spinning in place, but there's a discipline and control here that's rarely heard, a feeling of two musicians utterly dominating their craft.

Lupe's dexterity remains his greatest asset.

There are albums born of a burning need to create and express, and there are albums that exist simply because the artist had the spare time and inclination to make them. Magic Sign never pretends to be anything other than the latter.

Intellectually sophisticated but prone to using primitive musical effects to convey such messages, Warwick’s results vary wildly after that.

The fact of the matter is that Lineage isn't the first record to sound like Lineage.

Early Buck albums had all the professionalism of a late-night weed experiment, but Terfry is growin' up and it shows.

Luckily, you don't have to write genius lyrics to make reliable, stadium-ready rock. The tics of weirdness that made this band so initially affable may be gone, but they're now a cut-rate pop act instead. Nothing wrong with that.

It's not exactly Sic Alps Mk. II, but there are some clear similarities. The record's eerie psychedelic pop strikes a similar balance of order and chaos, with songs that rev up only to be subverted by detours into dissonance and static.

The first disc, a June 2005 concert at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, starts out lifeless, with little variety in Smith's voice or Shields' metronomic guitar. Halfway through the hour-long performance, things pick up, as Smith yells fervent imperatives over shimmering waves from Shields' amp.

Spanning an obnoxious 82 minutes, the record goes through several musical and thematic phases, but the overall atmosphere is bitter, petty, worn-down. It confuses loyalty and stagnation, wallowing in a sound that is starting to show its limits.

Another brisk half-hour of barbed power-pop tunes that sting so sweetly that it’s only after the fact you consider you might need a tetanus shot.

You'll find something to latch onto in every song, but you won't always walk away from Negotiations with its choruses in your head; it's a more consistent record than its predecessor, but more orderly, too, and the highs just aren't quite as high.

Japan had to go through the period of growth that resulted in Quiet Life, straining against the limits of their abilities as songwriters and musicians in order to move beyond them. As heard in the context of the group’s history, this album, however imperfect, feels rich with possibility and promise.

Dog Whistle functions best when Show Me the Body are able to capture the vitality of their live sets, as well as the sheer noisiness of New York itself.

Newman’s fastidious, occasionally fussy writing ensures a level of quality control as he tinkers around the margins, even if his bandmates never quite catch the spark.

Shine's lingering impression is that of several talented cooks crammed into a tiny kitchen, each crafting something delicious with little regard for the meal as a whole.

To Dreamers is one of Stoltz's most satisfying efforts to date, sounding bolder and more invigorated than nearly anything before it. Yet, when Stoltz sneers "Do you want to rock'n'roll with me?", exactly who's doing the asking gets a little lost in the tune's glammy shuffle.