Only swatches of the lyrics are intelligible ("Look at me," "Feast your eyes," "All is yours") but that's part of the enchantment of magic: A fleeting glimpse of something that might have been transcendent, leaving our minds to fill in what we didn't quite see.

Whatever Other People's Problems is trying to say is lost beneath the fact that it's so sonically muddled and abrasive, and lyrically imprecise.

In the end, what's really impressive is that the mousey quality of their music doesn't work against these nimble, cosmopolitan arrangements. If anything, it makes the songs richer, gives them more of a backstory.

Music that, while often pleasant, lacks the power of not only his best work, but also most of his successors' stuff.

Like Coldplay's two previous albums, only more so, X&Y is bland but never offensive, listenable but not memorable.

Cunningham's perplexing persona has always been overshadowed by his ability to confound us with his records; Ghettoville, disappointingly, shifts that balance.

Fans of handclaps, who don't mind that Berlin sings as many lines about doing lines as he does protest lines, marching lines and battle lines, will have fun pretending to be epic along with these Velvet Ramones.

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.

Perhaps praising Heumann's improved writing plays like faint praise, but it's as significant a step in the right direction as tightening the instrumental belt is in the wrong direction.

This self-titled album gives the impression that they're constantly aware of holding back. Such restraint is ultimately unwarranted: Diane is a strong enough presence as a singer and as a songwriter that she can more than hold her own.

For all its imposing scale, though, it lacks some of the dramatic finesse of classic Prurient. Fernow’s poetic lyrics, spoken or shrieked, have been a key hallmark of the project, and without them, these abstracted noisescapes lack the narrative character of his best work.

Just as the album looks like it’s about to settle and prosper in this zone, in comes “Piano Interlude,” and the tone of August Greene shifts messily.

Even when an experiment comes up short, mistakes and failed attempts allow us to see others as the messy, raw, difficult humans we know ourselves to be. Truth or Consequences is more like a Valentine’s Day card—pleasantly sentimental, at times gratifying, and all too easy to forget.

On Exit Wounds, the Wallflowers finally turn into the classic rock band they always ached to be.

Turn It On! plays to their strengths.

Initially, it’s thrilling in the way that any spectacle is. You admire the creative largesse, and there’s no doubt a strong 12-song album here. But at 79 minutes, exhaustion sets in by the midway mark, and the whole of the album takes on the feeling of someone trying to cap a broken water main.

The Errant Charm doesn't entirely succeed in that regard, but it remains a pleasant listen, perhaps just a bit too subliminally so for its own good.

An unexpectedly varied and satisfying listen.

With few exceptions, Small Craft on a Milk Sea's 15 songs fall roughly into one of two categories: ambient and active.

The busy arrangements and serious frontloading make Born Under Saturn’s 54 minutes a demanding investment, and the effort it takes to simply get any sort of visceral pleasure out of it makes it feel twice as long.

For the wary or outright dismissive, however, The Resistance is also a very smartly sequenced album.

Beak> is as full of odd, compulsive energy as you'd expect from something cranked out in two weeks, made by a guy who probably had creative fuel to burn, considering that his day job took 11 years between their second and third albums.

From the title on down, the new CD tries hard to conjure an ambiance of languid sin-- opium, absinthe, vintage porn-- but that aesthetic is just a few steps from your average bachelor pad with a zebra throw and ceiling mirrors. In fact, that's where copies of this album will inevitably spin, a soundtrack to excruciatingly banal seduction.

They don't have the lyrical complexity of the bands that they will be compared to (from a young U2 to the aforementioned Frightened Rabbit), but they do have the energy and that's a promising place to start.

it's still not quite as successful as the Orb's classic material, and a little too subdued, lacking both the goofy sampleadelic grandeur and the ear-grabbing pop pulse of the Ultraworld era. But it's still the most focused and listenable Orb album in years.

Both tracks feel like small pieces of a larger piece we don’t get to hear; there’s a wispy, vaporous, interlude quality to each, like we’re in a place where something just happened or something is about to happen but the present moment is all suggestion.

During Lupercalia's first half, he continues to prove himself a fine craftsman of major-key melodies, and this is his most confident and convicted vocal performance yet. But like most of Wolf's records, he eventually gives into sad songs and waltzes as Lupercalia progresses, and studded with the same overproduction tricks of cluttered strings and processed samples, "The Days" and "Slow Motion" don't offer much in the way of contrast outside of tempo.

Certain elements of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, if given the right amount of attention, can be enjoyable to luxuriate in.