The consistency of Solex material is potentially the agent of its own downfall. Play Solex vs. the Hitmeister after Low Kick and Hard Bop and you might think that they were recorded at the same time, rather than four years apart.

It's here, about halfway through this four-disc set, that most people will turn off Join the Dots.

All Yr Atal Genhedlaeth lacks is the unifying ambition of the great SFA records.

At the end of the day, though, I'm a bit puzzled over why the world needed an album of Sinead O'Connor reggae covers.

But if this introduction presents a retreat from the heavy metal parking lot, the rest of Western Xterminator returns to the usual spot and sets up a permanent trailer-home in it, with the 70s-Stones sleaze of Herrema's former band all but vanquished for a full-on 80s headbanger's ball pitched halfway between Sunset Strip flash and New Wave of British Heavy Metal thrash.

Given the exploratory transience of Six Organs' catalogue, Shelter from the Ash feels too much like work, too much like what had to happen.

In its own combustive way, it's weirdly memorable.

Like the other white rapper he will never escape comparisons to, Cage exhausts the patience of even his faithful followers at times, and Depart From Me almost reads like a plea to whoever might be left checking for him in 2009.

The 10 songs on Too Young to Be in Love are exuberant snapshots of rock music's earliest years, bursting with teenage romance and allusions to oral sex, but they are also very faithful ones.

Unlike Beach Fossils' compartmentalized distance, though, Brown Recluse sound bright and direct throughout Evening Tapestry, like light shining through their sleepy fog. Sort of like a dream? No-- better.

The band works via accumulation, gradually building up to moments of muted drama, yet LaCount's leads wreck that momentum.

h parties click together because they're willing to let genre be an afterthought, yet they still avoid succumbing to a rootless, stylistically overreaching identity crisis.

Meek has made the move from mixtapes to the majors with a solid vision.

Much of Curiosity finds Wampire a bit too comfortable and self-satisfied within their washed-out aesthetic, and the premeditated haziness of the recordings--and obvious attempts to weird them up, through squeaky synth settings and effete vocal tics--ultimately undermines the duo’s songwriting ambitions.

With their third release, the five-song Small Sound EP, Tennis complicate the easy breezy beautiful schtick with some positive results.

By burrowing down into a few key sounds rather than stiffly approximating a dozen-plus, the intermittently funky, unshakably finicky Wave 1 is a mostly welcome return.

A handful of tracks on Volume X are decent placeholders that do nothing to expand or appreciably reinforce the band’s aesthetic, but “Ice Fortress” stands out to represent everything Trans Am does right.

Egregiously melodramatic missteps aside, Creatures exists as a reminder that out there in the between of electronic music are swirling, delirious spaces that are yet to be explored.

As a whole Lucky 7 sounds a lot like everything else Statik Selektah has done up to this point; the album is neither offputting nor particularly exciting, and it's hard to feel strongly about at all.

The best Jeezy music often exploited how far he could go with memorable ad libs and punchlines, a triumphant kind of simplicity. Here that gets muted to muddied results.

Dälek took hip-hop into new stylistic realms before. This time, although Brooks and company may not have specifically intended as much, on Asphalt for Eden, hip hop ascends into the noosphere.

Woptober slogs towards the end, but it moves too quickly to feel like a chore to sit through. It has all the markings of what we’ve come to expect from Gucci’s music only this time—rather than drowning in his addictions—he’s found a way to integrate drugs and violence into his new outlook.

Musically, it is hardly satisfying, as the fleeting enjoyable moments are swallowed up by a great deal of frustrating mediocrity.

The Ornaments are yet another in a long line of floppy-haired guitar bands flying the flag of a purer pop past, but they’re also, unmistakably, one of the better, least pretentious ones. Sometimes it pays to be grateful rather than cynical.

One of the most radical departures in Segall’s catalog and a significant breakthrough for the band, exposing and refining the complex mechanisms behind their murky sound.

The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, maximally bloated with 15 (15!) additional songs. Those that stand out mostly do so for the wrong reasons.

The only problem is that the rambling approach that let Smith get these things out has kept the results from being all they might have been.

Adams' 1989, for all its sincerity and technical execution, is ultimately hollow because it's nothing but context.