Although How Animals Move has solid arrangements and melodies, Parish is at his best when he mixes hard work and detail with spontaneous, rough-edged playing. It's not that the slow stuff doesn't work; it's just not as exciting or even as inventive as his rock music.

Humble and resigned to a fault.

Deep Fried Grandeur has a certain shelf life, but then again, the spirit of its origins was all about bright, short-lived sparks. You savor the brief chemistry, and then part ways, remembering it fondly. Above all, Deep Fried Grandeur is just a joy to visualize.

The moments that work best are when the instrumentation and vocals distill singular, cohesive emotions. Her most literal lyrics are often the strongest.

The album suggests a full story, but it still seems paradoxically fragmentary. After its slow burn fades, after our hero has returned home, what’s best about Conquistador might be the sense of possibility it poses.

With a sense of organizational purpose and of local music history, the first disc depicts Cash an artist hungry for success and willing to sell venetian blinds to get there....The portrait of Cash on this second disc is, unfortunately, fuzzy and poorly defined. It showcases everything we know about him and very little we don't know.

Little Dragon have clearly mastered their style on this album; hopefully next time around they will deliver more songs worthy of their sound.

Sun Gangs is less a break-up record, and more a "relationship" record, in that it has the ups and downs of a love affair, with moments of joy, boredom, and viciousness sandwiched in closely next to each other. And while that makes for a challenging and complex listen--Andrews has certainly proved to be adept at wringing bitterness or misanthropy from bruised melodies--one can't help but hope that his next relationship is a happy one.

The Sun Came Out, whether intentionally or not, is an album for singers, but often it's the music that elevates the songs and prevents even the slickest moments from falling into the AOR mire.

No one's perfect, I guess, especially when they're trying to go from one-note to every note in the space of a single record. Sadly, though, that means that the dancier stuff, though I want to like it so much, is Wild's main casualty.

Hudson can definitely do tweaked, but he has work to do before being transcendent.

An album that retains the precise brutality of London Zoo but feels labored in comparison.

The title track, which closes the album with a missive for those young girls, is anchored by his personal anxieties, making for some of Cole’s most affecting writing to date. ... At its lowest points, 4 Your Eyez Only rehashes Cole’s worst tendencies.

Despite its three-disc bulk, it exhumes too few buried-but-necessary takes and does little to illuminate what Isis did, why they did it, and what it all means.

Freedom Wind includes three of the four songs on the Explorers Club's original EP, and it partly fulfills that record's promise.

On their debut LP, Mind Chaos, Hockey seem to be having a little fun with it, keeping things casual, cracking jokes at their own expense. You'd be surprised how well it works.

They've still got angst to spare, but their wit has been ground down by 'maturity,' or whatever you want to call it, into a bitter thing that saps a lot of that reckless energy.

Connection is the first time that Ceramic Dog has made dissent sound like just a collection of recordings, instead of a prickly, teeming world of its own.

As he tries to return to the ponderous themes of such vague nonsense as love and hate, Acey weighs the pacing of the game considerably.

It's all remarkably pleasant for a CocoRosie album--you leave it not with the feeling of having weathered an intriguing, baffling ordeal, but of having listened to something recognizable as an album.

False Priest is billed as a more collaborative effort, both on the production end with musical savant Jon Brion and in the spotlighted duets with divas Janelle Monáe and Solange Knowles.

Where disco went far beyond mere escapism in the 1970s, Casablanca Nights only gets you out of 2011 for a few sweet minutes.

Joy’All has an amiable listlessness: It’s loveable, but I wish there was more to love.

Hynde responds to the drummer’s studio return not just by writing the band’s tightest rock record in ages but by thrusting the group’s interplay to the forefront. By doing so, she makes an effective case that the Pretenders are indeed a rock’n’roll band, not a singer-songwriter in disguise.

Timms has made some perplexing choices in song selection.

Their influences are all immediately recognizable and their songs all hummably predictable, and yet their Merge debut, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On, reveals the band to be confidently inventive and assured in their collective identity.

By burrowing down into a few key sounds rather than stiffly approximating a dozen-plus, the intermittently funky, unshakably finicky Wave 1 is a mostly welcome return.

Beyond the Pale contains plenty of sharp songwriting, but despite the intrigue of its premise, it may have benefitted from a more thorough commitment to making a proper album.