Rather than shroud themselves in mystery, Belle and Sebastian would rather blow their own cover and, for all its inherent inconsistencies, The Third Eye Centre provides a clear view of how a band that once made music fit for a library is now more liable to get kicked out of one.

Impressive as it can be in small doses, Waterfall as a whole plows ahead like a WWI-era tank, heavy and lumbering and powerful but pretty much limited to a single direction.

The lack of anything like a pained or ecstatic voice in Call It Love can make its emotional core tricky to access. Instead of reading it in her voice, you have to read it in her lyrics and the environments in which she’s chosen to nestle them. That doesn’t detract from Call It Love’s prettiness.

While in•ter a•li•a has plenty of motion and heat, it needs friction and resistance to light a spark.

As good as the record sounds and as capably as he immerses himself in assorted flavors pop, there remains an odd sense of distance to Conn on record.

Dub Trio are on to something, but they've yet to fully grasp it.

Way is a humble first step in what sounds like a glorious new trip, where the really well played guitar becomes something else entirely.

LNZNDRF is a fine-if-flawed testament to the company's Thatcher years, but it could have been tremendous if they had kept it strictly instrumental.

Her pop exists to exploit and sand off edges, packaging esotericism for the masses. It’s just that on Madame X, she is not merely dining out on other cultures; she’s whipping around drive-thrus.

While Lost Friends’ slow-building ascents and soaring choruses function as necessary release valves for the unrest bubbling up from Joy’s lyrics, over the course of 12 tracks, a certain identikit quality takes hold.

In Spektor’s catalogue, Remember Us to Life balances comfort food for Spektor fans with the maturity and wisdom you'd expect from a singer-songwriter passing the 15th year of her career.

Saturdays=Youth meaningfully diversifies M83's catalog while retaining Gonzalez's indelible fingerprint.

It all sounds cleaner and more accessible than anything they've done in the past, but that might actually be part of the problem.

If Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid has that lovable ten-solid-songs consistency, it's less a matter of lacking filler and more a matter of writing a lot of inoffensive but uninspiring tracks that all wander down the same avenues.

The results might be a little thin on actual "essential" moments, but they're working in the right direction.

Phosphene Dream is a step up, if only for the little bit of variety that the tighter arrangements and genre-hopping provide.

[Self Made 2] exists to force-feed Hot 97 playlists.

While that title may suggest a navel-gazing bedroom-auteur beatshop, Record Collection proves a surprisingly gregarious album, varying up the sounds and styles and making better use of cameos by his famous friends.

Rad Times Xpress IV illuminates how well that music lends itself to more experimental renderings while the songs seemingly engineered to hold onto RTX's denim'n'leather constituency yield surprises.

Adiós doesn't add much to Campbell’s legacy--the comeback records of recent years formed a fitting final act--but it’s a pleasant postscript, a wistful reminder of the joys a great musician once gave.

As good as "Danger! High Voltage" is, the rest of this album is simply not worth it.

Go Plastic exhumes the corpse of stuttering, fast-paced percussion and arbitrary programming that was bled dry and buried in a time when the Y2K bug still signified economic collapse and nuclear meltdowns.

The resulting clash can be momentarily compelling, but lacks the nuance and character and to really pull it off, which all leaves Seachange huddled on the cusp of something significantly worthwhile, but still a few wild, miscreant swings away.

An album that emerges as a solid, infectious effort, but eventually collapses under its own weight, unable to keep all its stylistic efforts coherent.

While Demolition forgoes the overproduction and even much of the shameless rock-god posturing that plagued Gold, Adams hasn't yet found his way out of his songwriting rut.

It is this excess of ambition over achievement, as opposed to any real consistency, which makes FutureSex/LoveSounds more of an album than Justified was. Songs which sound puzzlingly self-indulgent in isolation-- most obviously, the smirking, tenuously tuneful first single "SexyBack"-- are cloaked in a compelling intensity and purposefulness when played in succession.

Let's chalk it up to growing pains and watch how early learnings further develop into an adult style.

With Niggas on the Moon, though, it's hard to shake the feeling that Death Grips might benefit from a change in aesthetic and conceptual focus.