Taken as a whole, Life doesn't really depart from "Hands Across the Void" (itself not exactly a cheery record), but rather refines and builds upon it, besting the previous album's runtime by a factor of 1.5 and boasting, as a bonus, a number of melodies that stick like tar in spite of their spareness.

Though each track is named for where it was recorded, there’s not much to distinguish one stop from another, and though you could connect the locations into a journey, these tracks don’t form an arc but play as if stacked atop one another.

This is a bedtime record, in both the complementary and dismissive senses of the word: it invites you to relax and soothes like a warm cup of tea, but can cross the line into powerfully soporific territory.

Stewart's increased output and dearth of exploration gives Archives an unflattering offhandedness, and it also dilutes the potency of Vapor City, like putting together an album is just another item to mark off his to-do list.

The evolving identities of Lee Ranaldo might be a valiant pursuit, but they have made for a problematic tone on Last Night on Earth.

Nothing Fits is the band's first release to be recorded in an actual studio, and the result is a shorter, more focused record, but hardly a cleaner one.

Their weakest record to date, one that lacks the subtle power and distinctive personality of their best work.

The deeply uncool Comedown Machine smacks of effort.... Still, the limitations of Comedown Machine's protracted diversity all come back to Casablancas, a man with wide range as a listener and extremely narrow range as a musician.

This is the one that puts them firmly and officially up there in the top tier of the dance-music crossover-album crowd, up with the Daft Punks and, umm, Basement Jaxxes.

The intensity rises and falls with the rolling hills, but the vistas remain the same, and the horizon never gets any closer. Despite the uniformity, there are clear highlights.

With Coolaid, arguably Snoop’s first real hip-hop album in half a decade, we find his reinvention back into “Rapper Snoop” to be a bit wobbly.

As welcome as it is to hear Hekt reflect on her burgeoning identity, the most commanding songs on Going to Hell explore personal feelings in service to a community.

With Boyhood [the Richard Linklater film], you grow invested in the characters as they evolve over 12 years; you can enjoy the flow of Lacuna just as much, but in the 11 songs here, you just wish there was some character to begin with.

Considerably tamer than their stadium-rocking, chart-topping previous albums, Just Enough Education to Perform sounds less like a band voluntarily growing into their new-found maturity, and more like a pet's first, forced visit to the castration clinic.

Marjorie Fair's shiny Beach Boys-meets-Pernice Brothers act suffers primarily from well-intentioned overproduction.

If Young’s recent work has felt like a series of hard-headed dives into his pet obsessions--more interesting for simply existing than for actually listening to--then The Visitor is more all-encompassing, and as a result, more centered.

Dior stays vague and vacant throughout the album, invested in his feelings but short on interesting ideas.

A narrative concept album that runs a mere 29 minutes and is both more musically ornate yet somehow also slighter than anything Girls attempted, a deeply personal work whose arch presentation serves to keep you at an emotional distance.

The shift in perspective necessary to "get" it, though, does work on that level: at the least, it's a fitting testimonial to British Sea Power's partially effective relocation of a classic film into a modern aesthetic scheme.

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.

On Time Is Over One Day Old, any emotional extreme or attempted musical shift just ends up sounding like stasis.

After these frontloaded highlights [Andrew in Drag, God Wants Us to Wait], it doesn't take long for Love at the Bottom of the Sea to become a rain-boot-worthy slog through water-logged mid-tempo material.

The album aims for instant gratification and achieves it so efficiently that it can’t help but burn fast.

The five tracks here differ from their predecessors only by degrees, so if you liked the previous records there's little here to find too upsetting, but as an EP it feels like a stopgap ahead of the next Com Truise album.

Otherness isn't just less immediate than other pop music; it's less self-aware, and way less fun.

Night Moves rely on the sound that got them signed rather than pushing themselves in a new direction, and the results are not as exciting as they could've been.

A fragmented 12-song album that trends toward the same path that he already spent five albums exploring.

V for Vaselines leaves a lasting pop smear.