A handful of inspired moments prevent Exodus from fully succumbing to mistakes and whiffs. Swizz seems to be having fun behind the boards.

Don’t Be Dumb is not a blockbuster, and it’s all the better for it.

So Sewn Together is gently rustic, occasionally (a bit) heavier than you might expect, and ready for any adult-leaning-but-alternative-friendly playlist. It's also pretty bland, and at worst banally melodramatic in ways that suggest the unfortunate arrival of the Meat Puppets power ballad.

Compared to the last two albums, Zonoscope has precious little guitar crunch, which makes it hard to even call Cut Copy a dance-rock band anymore.

Unlike a truly original record like Ether Teeth, For Good is hardly groundbreaking: it’s an album of warped, melancholic indie-pop that slots in nicely next to acts like Sparklehorse, the Eels, and Radiohead. That’s hardly a bad thing, even if Fog’s current incarnation is a far cry from its more experimental beginnings.

Dave Matthews Band sounds best when it’s weird; the bummer on these songs is how bored the band sounds. But even as a cadre of producers smoothes out the band’s crunchiest tendencies, glimpses of the DMB’s ambitious musicianship shine through. These outliers aren’t always successful.

Ultimately the success of Half of Where You Live lies not in Gold Panda repeating old tricks, but in how he's expanded his repertoire to include new sounds, and his aesthetic proves sturdy enough to accomdate them.

Doom Abuse is most enjoyable when its superficial slapstick is at its most pronounced, which is most of the time.

It's a soft but sinister set of songs-- the Bay Area's answer to the Velvet Underground's self-titled record. Where Sic Alps were once wasted and wobbly, they are now stoned and serene.

On Untitled you get to decide whether you prefer Nas thoroughly exploring half-assed concepts or half-assedly exploring thorough concepts.

If Ida's sound is like a river, the emotions the band conveys are simply stagnant.

Blanck Mass is all about Power excavating new domains while still working within that great glut of voluminous space he's already mapped out.

Ontario Gothic is certainly part of a great story; but as a perfectly satisfying half hour of modest and common dream-pop, it's not much of a story on its own.

Too often the rawk they bring feels terribly labored.

Haven is no parody, nor is it a carelessly made record--it's simply a late entry that tugs the same strings, only to lesser effect.

Jacuzzi Boys is a collection of well-recorded, well-constructed, boring songs.

By aiming for the textbook definition of a big-picture pop album, Antonoff has ended up with the epitome of a vanity project: an album that revolves entirely around one person, made more enjoyable the less you expect from it.

It’s the textbook definition of a low-stakes mid-career rap album, a place for one of the genre’s icons to show he’s still in decent fighting shape.

The parts of Shiver that strain to be fun and fresh can’t seem to break orbit from the grandiose mass of Sigur Rós, and the album leaves a sense of oppressive profundity in its bulky wake.

Even more streamlined, pop-minded, and high-spirited than their 2004 self-titled debut, it's as if they're single-mindedly attempting to depose the world's problems with a rigorous dance and good times regimen.

Sure, the band is rooted in American folk, but they're also adventurous listeners and composers, and Outside is unclassifiable in the same way records by northern contemporaries Beirut and Man Man are unclassifiable-- folk music, it turns out, is a broad and fluid thing.

Each of her songs has a steely core built from lyrics that examine heartache and vulnerability.

Mars is too amiable a vocalist to express pure disillusionment, but he’s great at communicating discomfort. Bankrupt! doesn’t so much ruefully reflect upon Phoenix’s whirlwind, globe-trotting lifestyle as drop you right in the middle of it.

Pre-Human Ideas is a step toward breaking the barrier between disparate environments--mountains and websites--all by creating something using a simple computer program. Meditate on that during the organ prologue and epilogue here, and better know Phil Elverum.

Deathfix gets its expansive, laid-back feel from the relaxed conditions under which it came together, but that's also the source of its occasional directionlessness.

Ultimately Skeletal Lamping registers as a misstep, but not without loads of silver lining.

Few groups do wistfully melodic trad-rock any better right now. Smith Westerns haven’t only not burned out, they’re a budding institution.

There's a range of hooks and ideas at play in Splazsh that few others have approached, much less made coherent.