As with their other work with Michio Kurihara, False Beats and True Hearts is a slow bloom, an album whose rewards can become fully apparent only through thoughtful immersion.

The Redeemer ends up somewhere between sarcasm and sensitivity, but can't dig deep enough in either direction to provide something that's worth returning to.

While nearly every track on Nausea finds Vallesteros trying to grapple with these issues [feeling displaced and connected at the same time], he rarely wrenches out any insight or personal detail.

Much like the producer’s former offerings, Dame Fortune tries to be everything all at once, making for a good listen with occasional lapses.

The hooks aren't quite as catchy or well-written on Murder For Hire 2 as they have been in recent months.

Trading the timbral menagerie of an expanded chamber ensemble for something more barren and monochromatic, Moore is occasionally forced out of his comfort zone into abstraction and dissonance. These forays can feel like a significant artistic leap, but complacency flattens some of this music.

There’s enough proof here that Post has the voice, demeanor, and goodwill to easily ingratiate himself into the Nashville scene.

Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? tries to make a masterpiece from spray paint, but for every cool mural, there’s a splatter of obtrusive tags.

While Right Words achieves a baseline level of quality or at least competency with the exception of “Goodbye Friends and Lovers” and "Love Illumination", they lack the conviction to take most of their lesser ideas to the realm of being unpleasant rather than kinda boring.

Sophisticated as all this is, bits of it still flop, and other bits seem like they've gone overboard on the sophistication.

Where the music in Good Evening manages to mostly please without much compromise, the visual documentation of said music bends over backwards to make itself palatable to only the most fervent of fans.

It arrives at this whole in a sneaky way, and it manages to avoid feeling like a concept album, or like anything else Mouse on Mars, or anyone, have done.

The new album is hardly a huge leap from Elephant Shell in most senses, but it does find TPC reaching out, growing more comfortable, and letting loose.

None of these covers is quite as transformed as “Jezebel”, so nothing on Strange Weather delivers the same subversive charge. Partly that’s due to her choice in material, which for the most part is recent and more indie-oriented.

If Abandon was the sound of a young man in flux, then Pleasure is the sound of settling.

Wilson first walked away when he felt the band’s songwriting had become too formulaic. Closure/Continuation is admirable in its attempts to reject that formula, but in the end, it also proves just how good they were at it.

Quever has extended his transition into dreamy territory really well.

Aqueduct's most relaxed numbers are the strongest, where guitar, piano, and synth fuse in rare harmony.

While it’s laudable that Jenkinson is always moving, never resting, Elektrac feels a bit of a sideshow: a flexing of technique with little to display but its own shiny spectacle.

Lewis’ singing is one of the few novelties on AudioLust & HigherLove. The rest is all breezy grooves and cabana jams, frictionless and blemish-free.

In short, it's familiar without feeling rote.

Rocket Juice & the Moon feels like a decent record, but an unfocused, meandering one.

It helps to show Pains not as period fetishists, but instead a group of indie-pop aesthetes who seem to be able to operate comfortably within several different subdivisions of the genre.

Like the rest of his comedy oeuvre, Heidecker pulls no punches. In Glendale arrives as a fully formed beast, equal parts parody and confession of our universal lameness.

Laminated Denim gives us two linear, conventionally structured, vocal-driven songs that carve out their own lane in the Gizzard discography, somewhere between the ceaseless propulsion of their signature strobe-lit rock-outs and the blissful melodicism that defines their occasional forays into pastoral whimsy. ... The two pieces on Laminated Denim stay true to their original mission: They each make 15 minutes go by in a breeze.

They're sounding less and less relatable, leaving us pining not just for the days of a little grunge trio from Seattle, but for the relentlessly catchy and charismatic Dave Grohl of the Foos' still-fantastic self-titled debut and the better half of "The Colour and the Shape."

Mirror Mirror smacks of a band struggling to be taken more seriously, but simply settling on a more stone-faced form of pastiche isn't the way to do it. All they've really done is trade a Halloween party for a history lesson.

Even with all of the bands he punches the time card for, it's starting to become very clear that, with Is Growing Faith, his solo efforts are the ones that reap the most rewards.