Despite its slightness, Notes From a Quiet Life is still a landmark in Washed Out’s catalog: a true solo turn and a complete break from chillwave sonics. But having finally acquired all this space, Greene seems unsure how to fill it.

Master and Everyone is a solid collection of rather thin songs that never quite sound intimate; songs that meant something profound to someone-- but always, it seems, someone else.

These slower songs aren't just mellow, they're mundane, and their inclusion leaves Innocence feeling lopsided, a oft-killer rock record with nasty balladry habit.

Talk That Talk tries too hard to send a more one-dimensional message and ends up falling flat: Rihanna's obviously going for sexy here, but her music's at its most alluring when she's blissed out in her own reverie, not taking the time to spell it all out for us.

So really, it doesn't turn out all that different from the most recent Earlimart, Beachwood Sparks, or Jason Lytle records: perfectly okay, not pushy enough to be even remotely unpleasant, and in a way you're hoping it's better.

You don't often come across a modern album that sounds so damn old.

At times, it sounds far less like his beloved Boys of Summer 2009 so much as a simplified homage to Kompakt's more populist acts, electronic's version of a neophyte performing solo acoustic versions of Zeppelin or Radiohead at a college bar.

The individual entries on Grinderman 2 are all over the map quality-wise, from inert and utterly ignorable... to half-brilliant reframings of pretty singular material.

Paradox exists as a conduit between a dreamed history and a fantasized future, a place formed of nothing more than fragments that evoke a past that seems more mysterious than the present. If the end result is as light as a feather or as memorable as a breeze, that’s also the point.

Just as "Viva" did an admirable job of troubleshooting the band's lazy weaknesses while expanding their sound, Prospekt's March offers a truncated version of their svelte and marginally progressive new formula.

Gold comes off as clean, shiny, and over-the-top as Elliott Smith's XO, replete with strings, horns, and female backup singers. I double-checked the credits. Jon Brion wasn't listed.

Hotel Morgen may be beautifully produced, but despite its expert attention to detail, few of these tracks truly engage in the way they seem meant to.

Some of these remixes are truly excellent, and some of them are disastrous.

What’s missing, though, is the central promise of a supergroup: the thrill of hearing established musicians in a truly different context. Minor Victories’ lineup may stem from different circles, but their approaches are so complementary that there’s rarely any tension or surprise.

As so often when it comes to dance-music full-lengths, Bias' good ideas get lost in the sea of makeweight stuff, and his attempt to please just about everyone results in a frustratingly spotty album.

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's business as usual: spastic pounding, warp-speed scalar runs, and various math-rock feats of strength.

Mosquito is not without highlights, but it requires some patience to unearth them, because when this record is bad, it's loudly, brazenly bad.

That they don't treat ambient as empty-headed fluff for relaxation is laudable, but it also doesn't make Ursprung any less of a record for a self-selecting coterie of sound-art aficionados.

He is most effective when he harshly distorts his vocals to create texture, and in the company of others he can serve as a welcome change of pace.

The discrepancy on Bootlegs between studious songcraft and rambunctious execution occasionally sounds distractingly self-conscious, but Lerche still sounds better here for sounding so unguarded and loose.

It's not until Magnificent Fiend's closing trio of seven-minute behemoths that Howlin Rain find traction, though it's the band's willingness to tweak its grand appropriations, rather than the tracks' epic lengths, that helps the songs stick.

Unlike other Bowie live albums, this doesn’t document a specific tour or phase. It’s just a quiet, pleasant footnote to a busy era.

Hints of humor are often symbolized in Scholefield's artworks, but here they have an unbalancing effect, only serving to detract from the portentous musical renderings of the uneasy symbiosis between digital glitch and the natural world.

A lot of bands venture close to soft-rock territory and come out unscathed. Trembling Blue Stars aren't so lucky.

An unbowed creative spirit ran through Perry’s gloriously multifarious career; on King Perry he sounds frustratingly submissive, a passing supplicant in someone else’s court rather than a king on his throne.

There are shards of intriguing ideas buried in the album’s plodding acoustics and garish rock-pop confections, but Fletcher fails to excavate them.

Their spit-polished full-length is a throwback to the sort of CD-era pop rock album everyone remembers buying at least once: The one with the re-recorded single surrounded mostly by less-developed, vaguely similar stuff.