Apokalypsis turns out to be a kind of book completely different from what its cover promises.

Like many other major pop albums of the 2020s, it would have benefited from a careful edit and a more varied track order.

With their new album, Maxïmo Park avoid both utter disaster and absolute success by playing it safe. Nice and safe.

Hypnotic Nights continues with the Weezer worship introduced on 2011's We Are the Champions, but answers the fuzz-pop frivolity with equal doses of motorik groove and psychedelic drone.

Perhaps in the end they are simply too smitten with the idea of Smith as a beautifully doomed artist to create anything beyond a loving, reverent, and therefore sheepish tribute.

The idea is clever, and very Beck: a mix of the modern and the antiquated so fluid that you start to see how they're not that different to begin with. The execution feels out of his hands, and really, out of everyone's--just another project whose purpose seems lost in the labyrinth of production.

With so little added to the originals, you have to ask: Why do this? 'Cause it's good fun.

The constantly-disruptive feel of Hexadic makes it perhaps the most consistent Six Organs albums to date.

Wuthering Drum is a work seemingly unconcerned about giving you what you want, but what it does provide is almost enough.

The Adventures of Bobby Ray is a curiously lonely affair, the sound of a singular talent being drowned in a tidal wave of cheerful banality.

If Eyes Open lacks the vivacity of its breakthrough predecessor, it remains an assured example of a band still paying more than lip service to the notion of rock music as a vital pop form.

What ultimately saves Snowflake Midnight from following The Secret Migration up the band's collective keister is the song positioned to serve as its climax, 'Dream of a Young Girl as a Flower.'

Like all of his albums, Major Key is a mixed bag, fitting for a maestro who traffics in a blend of chest-thumping and humility that’s both as comical as it is prophetic.

Festival Thyme shows there's still enough fight in them to earn a reprieve.

The highlights of Ampexian suggest that if he did want to use the moniker for easier listening, the results would genuinely beguile, rather than demand your full attention and hope for the best.

OK Bear is a good album--it won't blow you away, but I get the sense from listening that Enigk is confident enough in his music not to need to blow you away.

The first half of Boys has all of the action, and the second side can't help but drag a bit.

Between the innocuously rambly music, Fite's toned-down vocal mannerisms, and this pencils-up-the-nose persona, Ain't is a record that's hard to dislike, but nearly impossible to imagine loving.

All he has to back himself up is the production. Yet even that is so safe. He waters down the cutting-edge sounds of the past and, in the process, flattens his Southerness to the point that he feels like he’s from nowhere.

The shadows its shape casts may not always create flattering silhouettes, but there's both comfort and anticipation to be found in knowing that Silver's constantly tweaking the lighting.

Trick is nice with atmosphere, but largely a non-entity when it comes to hooks.

Little Pop Rock's acid-casual serenades... could've featured on any Mary Chain album from Darklands onward. And that's a comment on both the songs' lack of deviation from the JAMC's Sunday-morning-Velvets songbook, and the songs' consistent quality and unhurried charm.

It's a cushy listen, if not only always distinctive, particularly since the shorter tracks often amount to a cooled, deep-blue gelatin that holds the previously released singles together.

Rather than stampeding recklessly forward on the heels of cataclysmic frontman Lee Spielman, Trash Talk have re-directed their energy into mountainous, pile-driving riffs that hit with a lowdown, deliberate force.

Little of Kintsugi gives the impression that Gibbard’s motivation to reboot Death Cab is matched by legitimate inspiration.

This is sparse, windswept music, full of warm, circling guitar plucks, gathering echoes, and long, slow fades.

Exquisite as a great deal of Lifetime of Love sounds, it is not an album especially rich in emotional depth or apparent meaning. Its merits, not to be shrugged off, are nevertheless mainly superficial—the slight but definite virtues of a decidedly minor record.

The spirit was willing, but the editorial hand, which could have redeemed the project by jettisoning the filler, was weak.