The box is scattered, as expected, but the songs collected go a long way to indicate that, contrary to popular belief, Pollard has a measure of control over his songwriting.

Houdini sounds like an attempt to escape from the predicament of the sophomore album, making more nuanced use of orchestration and sticking with a comfortingly sweet and naïve tone while also expanding its perspective.

Lonesome Dreams' instant knock of familiarity will prove comforting for some, but it gives these tracks something of a plug-and-play feel. Many songs are dramatically assembled, and all of them move, but when they move in pretty much the same ways as another, spryer band, it's that much harder to get caught up in their attendant drama.

Unsurprising, and not much of a main course, but a tasty and satisfying side dish nonetheless.

Unexpectedly, though, some of the record's best moments come when Byrne strips away the rhythmic accessories and relies on basic orchestral backing... And yet, the majority of the album still relies on primal, swinging grooves.

Like Japanese toys-- The Dream Workshop, and the Furby and Tamagochi before it-- Tortoise obviously spend hours in the lab honing the science, but the finished product comes with a one-time novelty factor.

Unfortunately, these high points are surrounded by plenty of semi-coherent nonsense about the wanderings of their fictional protagonist soldier boy.

There is no doubt Peace Is the Mission will suffer some criticism from dancehall purists, those exhausted by EDM and people who hate Diplo (a hate that he has certainly worked overtime to earn), but their maturation is palpable across the album's nine tracks.

The Ponys make good records, and Turn the Lights Out is no exception, but I'm still waiting on the great one I've always felt they'd had in them.

The samples and some of the lyrics feel a little too controlled, on-message, and conceptual, which is unusual since her songs often tease out the dark emotion in mundane, everyday moments. As a result, No Elephants often feels hermetic and occasionally impenetrably austere.

While exactingly played and produced, Speakers Corner Quartet’s songs don’t always push forward stylistically; a few tracks, like “Can We Do This?,” built around Sampha’s familiar coo, feel like songs you’ve heard many times before. But there are moments of breathtaking originality.

Living Thing sounds like a noble but flawed attempt by Peter Bjorn and John to test the fortitude of their songwriting using the most barren and broken of arrangements. But more often that not, it sounds like they settled on the drum-machine presets first, with the lyrics and melodies thrown on top as afterthoughts.

The problem with it, beyond a handful of unflattering genre excursions, is a slight but persistent thinness of imagination.

Americana doesn't so much amount to a caustic commentary on the modern-day American condition as capture a bunch of old pals trying to rediscover their chemistry by sloppily jamming on some standards.

On the whole, it's more entertaining than resonant.

Earrings Off! is filled with these sorts of growing pains, ones that hopefully point to brighter pastures sometime soon for this promising band.

It’s disappointing that these songs don’t have the bones to stand on their own, especially since a precedent for truly great Major Lazer songs exists.

Each composition is fleshed out as well as it can be, the end result still a kind of Appalachian wallpaper music that after further inspection and subsequent listens, leaves the record sounding much more flimsy than urgent. What impression it leaves doesn't last.

while Surfing occasionally fails and does so loudly, but there's something thrillingly unfashionable about how Klaxons take aim at their grayer peers with a tommy gun full of glowsticks--they don't always hit their target, but it's a gloriously fun mess all the same.

They still have the riffs, but without the snap of a snare drum to keep things in line, the chiming guitars become repetitive and amorphous.

While they may have shed some of the quirks that made them unique, Invisible People is far and away Chicano Batman’s most accessible record, with big, clean hooks to match definitive statements. A decade into writing songs together, they sound stronger than ever.

This is a record where inspired ideas are constantly battling for oxygen with dubious ones.

While Theater isn't quite as dire as the above may indicate, like every other Ludacris record, it doesn't grow on you--in fact, it actually contracts.

Whereas many modern film soundtracks are glorified compilation discs with a seemingly random track selection, the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World soundtrack is very thoughtful in its curation and stands as a very accurate interpretation of O'Malley's fictional world.

After nailing the rapid-fire EP format with tracks that constantly threatened to disintegrate themselves from the inside-out, TPC psyche themselves out on their first full-length, over-cooking songs made from otherwise spectacular ingredients.

It's a precision attack, and as lofty and lovely as these tunes can sound, even their note-perfect nature seems to hold the listener at arm's length. But the real distance in the record is generated by Kurosky's lyrics, a series of clipped phrases and red herrings loosely compiled in the shape of story-songs, rich in imagistic detail but short in the personals department.

It would be a tall order to expect them to rival Frost's raw power, but these remixes don't unearth much fascinating stuff, and the EP turns out (mostly) competent but wan.

While the result is a 12-track standard edition full of potential hits, the brunt of it rests on interchangeable tempos from existing, already-charting singles.