Sometimes the fervor gets to be too much for them: the grating but mercifully brief "Blood for You" is little more than the junkyard clang of the rhythm section and Sollee's stuck-pig shout, and the verses "Cradle on Fire" seem to get away from Sollee, who loses the melody somewhere in the back of his throat. But there's few moments when they don't seem to be throwing everything they've got into these performances, and that furious intensity drives them past both rough patches and easy comparisons.

The opener is as intriguing as it is unexpected. It's just too bad, then, that the rest of the album continues to ask similar questions, but never again with the same vigor or innovation.

The Stimulus Package would work better as an album if Free had a little more help directing his skills, or if he just decided to rap hard on every song instead of tying himself to concepts. But even the goofiest songs here are still fun listens, and a few tracks come close to capturing his old brilliance.

With Tasty, Kelis has left the roller-rink, returned from outer space, and she's back on her own two feet on terra firma-- unfortunately.

Its twelve songs–the vast majority of which extend well past the five-minute mark–fall into two categories: galloping nods to Ride the Lightning, of which the first disc is primarily composed, and doomier mid-tempo cuts à la Sabbath, which make up the bulk of the second. The LP’s highlights--“Hardwired,” “Moth Into Flame,” “Atlas, Rise!” all fall into the former camp, front-loading the record with fire. The second disc, by contrast, is a slog through nondescript, uniform chug, devoid of dynamics or instrumental nuance.

Everyone on the album sounds engaged and happy to be in the room.

The variety of genres and sounds that emerge within her compositions give Lipstate’s work a multitextured feel, but in moments I found myself wishing for more concision in the way such ideas are digested.

The whole album feels like a good enough time if you throw it on in the background, but as a follow-up to a deeper body of work that rides on fascinating ugliness, why not hope for something that actually commands your attention instead?

Yours Truly is a very safe record. Mostly written by two of R&B's most mawkish hawkers, Babyface and Harmony Samuels, it’s built on cliché and tradition, and written professionally to a fault.

Ferree obviously loves his source material, and the way he weaves in the references throughout is ingenious. But something about the pleasure he takes in his obsession cloisters it away - he can't quite make his subject matter in a way that transcends Bobby Driscoll's life and death.

Wedded to the percussion-and-singer-plus-accompanist format, Barnett sounds marooned. It’s her least interesting album.

Euphoric Recall falters when the band forgets that her voice is the main event. ... Braids may still be searching for a distinct identity. But what Euphoric Recall makes clear is that Standell-Preston knows her voice better than ever before.

The songwriting lives up to the production value, pleasant but lacking much purpose.

Acetone manage to take enough twists and turns on their dusty trail to stave off outright boredom, and they certainly have a talent for doing as much as they can with a fairly limited formula. However, as York Blvd progresses, the album's dreamy torpor becomes stifling, and the songs, while never anything other than pleasant, fail to distinguish themselves from one another.

Despite underwhelming stretches, the album retains enough moments of personality to breathe life into even ordinary lines.

The majority of the tricks, however, come off as cosmetic distractions, attempts to hide that Hawkins' songwriting hasn't grown since Permission to Land.

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.

On the plus side of the ledger, you can understand what the hell Oberst is talking about most of the time on Upside Down Mountain, which makes it an immediate improvement over Cassadaga and The People’s Key, two albums that somehow managed to be cryptic and pedantic at the same time.... But elsewhere on Upside Down Mountain, he wields populist observation like a politician, trying to utilize his homespun wisdom from an elevated plane.

Watch Me Dance doesn't reconcile the clash between retro and modernism, but at least it does the past a decent amount of justice.

Sometimes he hits pure signal, and sometimes it’s just background noise as he gets to wherever he’s going next.

Cloudy and labyrinthine at times, airy and placid elsewhere, People cuts a pretty wide swath, an approach that feels a bit more mature and confident than the bending over backwards he sometimes had to do to reach the disparate genres on his earlier solo records.

The intimate yet anthemic closer “Price of a Man” sounds like a full realization of the resonance the band reaches for throughout the album, but most of the preceding songs lack the tension or texture needed to make the payoff feel earned.

[Tormenta's] eccentric angles and willingness to take risks show up the slightly humdrum nature of much of Cracker Island, an album that walks a very thin line between playing to the band’s strengths and relying too heavily on old tricks.

Ghost is nowhere near his best, most consistent, or most durable album, but that's ultimately not even the right way to measure its modest accomplishment. Instead, it's a surprisingly upbeat retirement album, one that never stoops to self-pity and very modestly reminds you of past triumphs.

Overall, White Hot Moon is likely to please existing fans of Pity Sex--its 12 tracks largely find the band continuing to leverage what worked on Feast of Love. That said, White Hot Moon isn’t quite as catchy as that record.

It becomes clear that for a distressingly large chunk of Temporary Pleasures, the duo has forgotten to do much of interest with the backing tracks in favor of roping in a rolodex's worth of singers and rappers and hoping the songs write themselves.

Atlantis strives for a patchwork cohesiveness, with equal parts neo-soul, reggae, rap, and rock, bound by a vaguely spiritual message and partially elaborated water-related extended metaphor.

10 tracks of the kind of fierce, instrumental, no-bullshit techno that was as left-field popular in 1988 as 1998 as 2008. It's often witty, with a kind of robots-running-amok charm, and always attention-grabbing, at least in small doses. But friendly it ain't.