There are few fiery guitar freakouts, folk-influenced melodies, soaring space-rock bridges, or psychedelic flourishes here; instead, the empty space is mostly filled with serviceable falsetto funk and glassy-eyed yacht-pop.

You get the feeling as you listen to the entirety of Lost Themes II that someone let their finger linger far too long on the butter button at the movie theater concession stand.

While the album isn't arranged chronologically, listening to it as such reveals the series of intuitive leaps between lo-fi bedroom folk that emphasized monotonous gloom and cacophonous samples to comparatively laid-back country biased toward majestic arrangements and electronic beats.

Much of Hyphenated-Man has that kind of blunt, unblinking tone. It sounds like Watt is using Bosch's figures to confront some hard truths, but he does so in a spry, often joyous way.

Mister Pop stays the course for the rest of its relatively compact 10-song, 34-minute length, reshaping the Clean's core components into poignant bossa nova instrumentals ('Simple Fix'), propulsive Krautrock-outs ('Tensile') and, as only they can, bizarro fuzz-organ jigs that resemble White Light/White Heat-era Velvets auditioning for "Riverdance" ('Moonjumper').

The paradox about them is this: With two people, Om sounded expansive; with more, they sound comparatively weak. The music is unmistakably theirs, but the intensity of it feels lost in the arrangements.

[Producer Nick] Raskulinecz brightens the band until the mystery and suspense disappear, turning these evil thoughts into baubles that sound safe enough for big money and rock radio.

As it is, it feels like dead patches make up almost half of Chopped & Screwed. Shelve it next to the Knife's Tomorrow, in a Year as an effort that hearteningly shows an inspired artist staking out bold terrain, but one that only fitfully delivers the impact of the artist's previous, pop-focused work.

It’s not an essential release in the Men’s rapidly growing discography, but as a rare snapshot of a band constantly in motion, Campfire Songs is sensible at least.

hile he become incrementally more skilled over the years, not much else has changed. Throughout I Decided., Sean conflates the passing of time with growth and progress. Nothing on I Decided., however, suggests that he has gained perspective worth sharing or to which he should devote a whole album.

Someone Else's Déjà Vu would've benefitted from Knapp making a stronger claim of ownership to his lofty visions.

His process of filtering out the bad has failed him on Adrian Thaws, leaving an album that bears both his names but offers less of himself than ever before.

Most of these tracks have hooks aimed straight for your jugular, but "Can't Lose" shows the band could go even farther with a little restraint.

Ultimately, it's the unbearable triteness of the lyrics that does Long Knives Drawn in.

After the limp meandering of Afterglow, We Are Science is unquestionably a leap in the right direction.

Unfortunately, Hold on Love's more serene moments only weaken the lure of their more intricate and involved songs, ultimately underscoring the group's true strengths.

Classics is charming and sleepy in a '60s samba sort of way, filled with whispering percussion, light electric guitar solos, and string arrangements worthy of the silver screen.

But the album ultimately feels like a status update, never really probing or conveying why freedom is so important to Offset.

The album could use a little more of Fitzgerald's fiery extremes, and a bit less of meandering disappointments like "You Looked Good to Me" or "Dancing in the Stacks", but at its best it's a clever piece of musical storytelling by a band unintimidated by genre.

Nothing is a long album, with one cut coming in over the six-minute mark, and when it is sludgy, it is exhausting.

While Kasher’s platitudes are presented as hard truths forged from experience, most of the time, it just sounds secondhand, scripts written by someone whose worldview has been shaped mostly by Cursive records.

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.

Ambitious production can’t quite cover the fact that none of the songs on Run Fast Sleep Naked have a conceptual core.

An uneven album so preoccupied with giving every single type of fan exactly what they want that it might as well be crowdsourced.

Worlds Apart is an aspiration, an apology, the sound of confusion.

The surprise is that it's as cohesive as it is, with remixers and remixes alike plumbing the same lines of soft-edged, computer-processed home-listening lullabies.

The joy of watching them not fly off the rails made even the weaker shows worth hearing. But in turning that experience into a scrapbook, Remember kills the magic.

Earth Has Doors feels like the diametric opposite of "fiddling around."