It's one of those odd albums where nearly every track sounds good, but it's all so singleminded and monolithic in its approach that taking it in as a whole almost feels smothering.

They’re crafted artifacts that never quite captured his live charisma. Still, his weathered, yearning voice provided a focal point for Brenneck’s retro fantasias and helped freshen them. If anything, this farewell helps preserve the singer’s charms by illustrating how his revivalism wasn’t pure.

It’s a lot to tackle in seven songs, but there’s a depth and richness in both texture and songwriting that show glimpses of a new direction, one that might free them from their own drone-rock noose.

He’s trying to tell a story here, but he’s just not much of a storyteller—his bars keep the narrative going, but he doesn’t offer enough arresting imagery to make his scenes come to life.

Home for Now isn’t necessarily groundbreaking; there are plenty of bands working with similar fusions of indie, pop, and electronic music, but the album shows them clearly moving forward in their abilities and ambitions.

This is a transitional record, an in-betweener, one that Lidell may eventually look back on as a door to something else. The good news for all of us is that even when he's down, he's not out.

A front-to-back listen through Patterns of Light can feel like a tour through all the places where pop radio and esoteric thought crossed paths during the ’70s, and a tribute to the ways both music and physics strive to explain a universe that can sometimes feel stubbornly unknowable.

While Kommunity Service only hints at what a true synthesis of those artists could be, at times the implication is enough.

Even though the 3xLP/2xCD set jumps backward and forward in Stereolab’s timeline, the result is a fairly comprehensive portrait of their development from their initial motorik nihilist assault to the pop molecules of their later work.

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.

A little like a greatest hits, a little like a soundtrack, and a little like a collaborative art project, Black Mountain's 51 minutes of music for Year Zero serve as a reminder of how good this band has sometimes been and as a tease of the music they might still make.

Again and again, Woodstock promises a protest but delivers a party.

It's not that they're not real, it's that the shivering vocal timbres dominate the mix to the point where large shifts in tempo and style are obscured. It's during these moments when I think that Room(s) and its elevation of the vocal sample was perhaps a better idea than an album.

It feels personal rather than global, and as gnarly as it is, it’s not quite extreme enough to work as a visualization of the horrors of war. It works much better as a record of a man of the wild wandering through the modern world, anxious and a little amused.

There are plenty of signs that UUVVWWZ are on track to become a better band, but "Castle" is the song that will make you impatient for them to hurry up and get to their next level right away.

Empty Estate tries to guide Wild Nothing towards a more physically charged sound, and it’s not always an easy transition.

Muddy mixing can’t entirely sink her compositions—lead single “Days Move Slow” is among the best rock songs of the year—but several other tracks take on water. It’s heart-wrenching to imagine how much better these songs would be, how much more worthy of showcasing Bognanno’s maturation as an artist, had she presided solely over production.

For an album where most tracks don’t extend past three minutes, and from a band with such a breakneck spirit, Visitor feels a little too languid.

Strange Pleasures works on a much more modest scale, content to subliminally scoot its way in, to serve as connective tissue between the Cocteau Twins and Chromatics on a mixtape, but not as the main attraction.

This mix might not help the Rapture pass every test of the best club DJs, but when it comes to maybe the most important one--the ability to make clubbers push their way to the booth and breathlessly ask for the title of that amazing cut they just dropped--they've done their studying.

As engaging as that bluster is at first, over the course of ten songs Whatever Forever begins to grate not unlike a person who tries too hard to look nonchalant when they would hold your attention longer if they just opened up a bit more.

Emerald Sea is audibly crafted with tremendous skill and love, but its uniformity keeps it from soaring, no matter how many deities fly through the upper reaches.

Poliça is a group with too much collected talent for that; as in life these days, one only waits and hopes the clouds will clear.

Memoryhouse have a ways to go before they're creating music with as much melodic power or depth of feeling as their dream-pop contemporaries.

Heavy on ballads and low on energy, Banhart sometimes comes in danger of scrubbing away any remnants of his once-magnetic personality. Occasionally, though, Ape approaches sparse brilliance.

They've certainly got the pure sound of it nailed down. More than most mini-genres, goth demands ambiance-- the mood is everything, and on this front, Violet Cries succeeds tremendously.

They really leave no space for Palumbo, and while there are distinct choruses, there are no hooks. There are more memorable basslines than vocal melodies.

Where The Eraser sags is in the middle, with tracks 3-5 falling particularly flat. Like too many of Radiohead's new songs, they contain a single weak idea dragged on interminably.