Lindstrøm may have timed these tracks to fit on a vinyl record, another sign of putting material concerns over creative vision, but there’s a good 15 minutes of so of beauty within those grooves that just might make a believer out of you.

By drawing this deeply on both the physical and sonic landscapes of their forebears, and with too many go-nowhere solos blotting out its songs, Fain winds up feeling stuck in time.

After the strong, finger-picked Buckingham solo feature of “In My World,” however, the rush of hearing these two pop-rock titans team up starts to wear off. ... Granted, successful moments are sprinkled throughout the whole album.

It’s hard to grasp who Childish Gambino is supposed to be. So even when he’s genuine, I have a little bit of skepticism on my mind.

The album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms.

Working on a Dream works hard on sound, but sleeps on actual songs.

It's a good album, and without the pressure of making it under the Roxy Music name, Ferry has made a confident and remarkably fresh-sounding record simply by doing what he's done best for over three decades.

Levitate leverages rave nostalgia to get to a deeper truth: Free your inner child, and your ass and mind will follow.

Don’t Get Too Close, the more adventurous but marginally less successful of the two, scores the interior world of our hero’s adventure in a very-now merger of emo, rap, J-pop, memecore, video game music, and angsty boy-girl duets.

Giving too much credit to Taylor's influence and direction, however, undermines the Morning Benders' stylistic transition, one any band would envy and many listeners will love.

This album’s equilibrium-upsetting aural eclecticism comes into sharp focus: even if you’re not a working mom trying to function on four hours of sleep per night, the buzzing busyness and hallucinatory disorientation of Cosmic Logic are liable to make you feel like one.

Bolstered by a gimmick and a catchphrase, the album is by-and-large Jeezy qua Jeezy, and the new fissures aren't enough to keep pundits gabbing.

In Slim Twig’s incessant and overbearing winks to the camera, he’s lost sight of his own potential.

That sudden stop is the only moment on Something Dirty that could be called a gimmick, but it feels oddly right. A fade-out would be too easy--better to bluntly suggest that there's more music beyond that final frame, and encourage the rumor that this version of Faust is far from finished.

It's rarely boring, and often full of promise, but it's a direction that calls for further tweaks, experiments, and exploration to get the balance just right.

There's nothing even the slightest bit innovative about Gunz n' Butta, but it does give us Cam, Vado, and Araab, three guys with great chemistry, doing what they do. It's a one-dimensional affair, but that one dimension is pretty awesome.

What is frustrating are the infrequent but genuinely interesting moments of creativity and cohesion, which suggest that if Marching Church had taken their time and laid off the improv a little, there might have been something special here.

While such transformations are pleasant, if not exactly commanding, they do manage to slyly deconstruct the "real" songs into the most basic building blocks, which are very specific to this setting.

Her blasé delivery might seem impenetrable at first, but there is warmth and wit to her work that rewards those who are patient enough to hear its message.

These songs are bolder and more brutal, less interested in florid wording or oblique metaphor; they express feelings of alienation and self-loathing with discomfiting clarity.

What at first seems rather silly actually proves to be quite purposeful.

What For? is so passive it leaves your system the moment you’re done with it.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about it of course, but the album is consumed by the already menacingly "not intrinsically bad"-ness of their canon.

No single passage lasts very long, which gives even the prettier moments an unstable feeling, like everything might at any moment crumble into a void of distortion and noise. Throughout, her lyrics are venomous and apocalyptic.

Love Is Here isn't bad, and its prospect for radio play is far more appealing than, say, Train. The four just don't have the depth of their admitted influences.

Timms has made some perplexing choices in song selection.

Power is, to say the least, hardly the collection of hard rockers that No Kill and Different Damage were. But with its lilt melodies, Davis' downplayed role, and the band's admission that, hey, a bassline here or there couldn't hurt, Power boasts a cohesion and distinct identity missing from Q & Not U's two previous albums.

Cam's flow is a thing of beauty.