Human Highway work best in this inviting, flickering-campfire headspace, and for an amiable if ephemeral 40 minutes, Moody Motorcycle offers a pleasant soundtrack to the dwindling days of the summer.

What elevates I Predict a Graceful Expulsion above pure comfort food, however, is how it subtly tugs against the big, major-network-drama payoff for which it feels custom-built. There's a naggingly elusive quality to the songs that troubles as much as it soothes.

On Totale Nite, they manage to use small-scale elements--jangling guitars, cheapo drum machines, toy keyboards--to project the urgency of bands with louder screams and bigger amps.

The Human Fear isn’t provocative enough to revitalize their reputation, but it certainly won’t do it any harm.

Early Buck albums had all the professionalism of a late-night weed experiment, but Terfry is growin' up and it shows.

Throughout the album, glimmers of invention and humor are allowed to shine through.

Under and Under dispatches the charge of repetition and "samey" songcraft very quickly.

Its style is limited, but the band manages to spread out within it, discovering their own idiosyncratic little vocabulary without ever exhausting it.

The problem is that the production on ununiform struggles to match the raw, naive ingenuity of Tricky’s early music, instead suggesting the rather basic electronic beats of 2014’s Adrian Thaws.

Byen feels a little safe and complacent by comparison. Perhaps because he has spent the past decade upending his listeners’ expectations, this largely successful attempt to string together a cohesive set of nu-disco tracks has the odd effect of making him seem kind of predictable.

It's a little disappointing that none of the band's stylistic shifts have let them bloom into much more, but as furrows for ploughing go, this one's still pretty fascinating, and still all theirs.

Even with its imposing length, Spirit Counsel is arguably the most accessible entry point into Moore’s boundless experimental canon.

Laughing Gas suffers from the same issues as its predecessor without introducing any new ideas. Even Tatum’s usually enjoyable melodies feel bloodless.

A strange, slow fog settles in over the course of the record, which comes to feel like an album-length exercise in torpor, clouding over some unabashedly gorgeous turns by Mockasin.

It’s not a conventionally sequenced DJ mix, either: Segments of seamlessly beat-matched tracks (almost certainly Kode9’s handiwork, given the style of them) abruptly give way to left turns and trapdoors.

It’s a confused album that sounds like it wants to sit on the shelf next to do-it-all pop savants like Jeff Lynne or Todd Rundgren, yet retreats to the safety of Antonoff’s alt-pop impulses before anything spectacular really develops.

Badu keeps the proceedings here buoyant and relaxed with that supple-lipped scat of hers, stretching out scant syllables at her lounging, loopy leisure.

There's a striking physicality to these songs, and Guy Fixsen and Ash Workman's production makes every tambourine beat hit with the clarity of a shattering window.

Too much of it drifts into generic 1960s-nodding garage-rock territory.

While Junto is at least happy enough to lift spirits, it feels like they've left it to others to reintroduce anarchy to the dancefloor.

With Love is like a pocket book of poetry, a series of short thoughts only tangentially related. Zomby is the elegant menace, capable of beauty and great affect but too stoned or disinterested to fully commit.

Klaxons' lyrical pretensions, alas, can be a reminder why the best house and trance music often emphasizes atmosphere over meaning.

We might not learn a lot of specifics about him, but there’s a lot of honesty in his music if you look for it.

What the Temper Trap do devastatingly well is drape post-office-party mistake-hookup tackiness in the lofty imagery of global struggle....Elsewhere, the Temper Trap's pairing of sweeping portentousness with mundane douchebaggery is trickier to overlook.

The album is presented as a consumerist critique, intentionally blurring the line between artist and product, but the quality of the songs varies too widely to pull off an actual concept album.

Yes, girl in red is capable of another skin-deep album about crushes and self-doubt. But it would be far more interesting to see her attempt sincere emotional depth.

Unfortunately there aren't a lot of opportunities to get caught in that lovely crossfire on Re-Arrange Us, a record that, for all its lush bells and whistles, finds the pair sounding as bare-boned and sparse as you'd expect a two-person band to be.

It's just that it feels so characterless and anonymous.