Getting Closer is fashionable and curious, but there's an extreme lucidity to it that is off-putting, forgetting for a moment a handful of dud tracks.

Georgia’s willingness to experiment is promising, but it’s unfortunate that Euphoric takes such a predominantly safe journey. As on Seeking Thrills, some songs also succumb to vague lyrics that resemble placeholders.

The record gets interesting when it lets ugliness in. .... Butterfly comes up short because it mistakes scale for character. Its drops and hooks have been engineered for maximum lift instead of maximum surprise.

We're left with some pretty pictures for our refrigerators and some worthwhile domestic jams, but little to be excited about.

ATUM doesn’t necessarily suffer by comparison to past albums. Its highs are more modest. The ferocity is long gone. But in its own ponderous way, it is generous.

There's little on Lioness: Hidden Treasures that sounds throwaway, or like it should have never been released; but there's equally little that sounds absolutely essential.

Housing only a couple of keepers, Fluorescence might initially feel like another letdown after the end-to-end excellence of Citrus, but that overlooks the challenges Asobi Seksu are up against.

Moments of Ufabulum, particularly the middle stretch, are all but impossible for me to remember after a dozen plays.

It's "Sam Baker's album" by name and ownership, but it's also another beat tape in a very crowded field, one where it's easy to get lost amidst the increasingly innovative producers working now.

It's a tantalizing glimpse of how great solo Harvey can be, but unfortunately, a good deal of the rest of the album is simply unmemorable.

A worthy, but occasionally frustrating album...

If every track on the album had the unforced lyrical clarity of "Little Houdini", Sage could have the album of his life on his hands here. But Sage is still the type of guy to name an album Li(f)e and a song "Polterzeitgeist", and the album comes packed with yeesh-inducing lines

Lacking both the demonstrative lo-fi sprawl of its predecessor and the hermetic perfectionism that often marks long-gestating albums, Jackleg really does sound like the Baptist Generals made it first and foremost for themselves.

There seem to be so many questions stirring inside SOAK, and yet Before We Forgot How to Dream douses them in so much prettiness that they lose their spark.

As put-together as Good Grief’s presentation is, and as ingratiating as its songs are, the record suffers from a distinct lack of identity.

The duo clearly have good stories, but need to expand the range of emotions they use to tell them.

While there are a few livewire moments that recall Meatbodies’ most exciting work—the triumphant riff from “Touchless,” for example--Alice doesn’t exactly come out swinging. It’s a more sedate record; mellow grooves and acoustic strumming make up its core infrastructure.

The Future Bible Heroes' first outing since 2002's uneven Eternal Youth does offer up slightly more catchy melodies and deadpan quotables than Love at the Bottom of the Sea.

This album peaks when it finds room to tilt at larger topics and tinier ones within a few short seconds of one another.

Throughout the record there are subtle hints of growth—both personal and musical—but they’re often dragged down by the redundancy of her thematic concerns.

You'd be forgiven for expecting little more than fan-bait out of a release that gathers the band's between-album singles and rarities. But the big draw of Wooden Shjips is the way they go about streamlining multiple strains of psychedelic rock with the single-mindedness of a band more interested in refinement than experimentation, and there's plenty of refined material on Vol. 2.

For the most part, it settles somewhere unusual, if not original.

While some of these songs can feel regressive or at least undercooked on their own, they’re reframed by the open-hearted sadness that takes over the album’s second half.

It's great that the band can slow down and still hold attention, and one hopes Obits will dig deeper and find new thrills in old traditions in the coming years.

Ventriloquizzing places undue emphasis on David Best's sing-spiel to move the action along.

There's a cocky strut to tracks like "Don't Hustle for Love" and "White Cloud" that suggest this is a band striving to make a connection with a far wider audience. On Dub Egg they fall just short of those ambitions, creating a transitory album that builds on what came before but doesn't feel like the finished product.

While All Hell felt imbued with danger and intrigue, on Me Moan, the people pulled off to highway shoulder are never in any real distress upon closer inspection. They just stepped out to check a map.

There is nothing original or novel about Telekinesis' music, but somewhat counterintuitively, its by-the-books professionalism is what makes it so effective.