Drug Rug have allowed a bit of the drawl of their early work to carry over here, and even when they're playing it fairly straight, there's something slightly twisted about their melodies.

Those at this taping presumably got their money's worth, but other than the few excised morsels that leaked after the show (a long anti-Radiohead screed and a defense of Chris Brown's attack on Rihanna), we don't know what was cut. Alas, those who pick up this record get an abbreviated, neutered version.

They're the opening band you actually kinda enjoyed even though you showed up too early by mistake, the album you half remember liking when it was playing in a friend's car.

The Black Album launched Metallica to superstardom because of its approachability, but in its attempts to offer something for everyone, Blacklist spreads itself too thin.

If This Island failed musically but still got Le Tigre's message out, it could be counted as a minor success. But at this critical juncture in their career, Le Tigre seem tame.

She shows greater range than expected, but the clatter of Johannes' busy production too often obscures her charisma and renders her odd punk melodies sadly lifeless. She's better than this perplexing project.

As evolutions go, Ode to Ochrasy makes for a particularly awkward adolescent phase, the sound of band that is outgrowing their loud-fast-rules roots but still too timid to sever them completely.

EAR PWR were once a band that refused to tie a tie or recite the silly rule--it could be annoying, but at least they were being themselves. Here, they prove how hard growing up can be.

But ultimately, Loyalty to Loyalty leaves a weird aftertaste, and it's not just because the penultimate 'Relief' tries to prop itself up on Willett's falsetto harangues and stuttering slap-bass, before 'Cryptomnesia' ends the record collapsing into a rumpled heap.

The album simply flickers out like a candle, with the faint promise of another visit to this setting.

Joey too often comes out looking like someone who’s already grown weary of the system, an 18-year-old curmudgeon, a sharp contrast with the energy that 1999 promised.

Inside/Absent is a nice listen, but doesn't hint at anything greater to come-- a frustrating flaw for an album already unexcited with itself.

These eight tracks serve as a swift, sinister reminder of why Cathedral mattered at the start and why they intrigued for so many years in the middle.

Overall, it’s hard to see where his strengths are, and on some deeper level, I can’t imagine a situation where listening to this album is appropriate for anything else but falling asleep at your desk.

In a way, it's comforting to know what you're getting: Four or five songs you'll treasure, four or five you'll tolerate, and a pretty good band sticking to their guns.

On Tyranny, that guy has simply worked too hard, and that sense of needless toil bleeds through in every bum lick, brick-walled sound, and garbled burst of noise shoved onto the record.

Belladonna sounds technically flawless-- every marimba strike and fret run has a specific texture that's almost miniaturist in its realistic detail-- but it's all in service to vocal-less songs that are ponderous and dull, whose strict adherence to an overriding motif hems them in.

The upside is that it sounds warmly familiar, a reminder of why we missed them in the first place, but the downside is that the album gives very few indications of what Fink and Taylor have learned during their hiatus.

It may not go down as one of Neil’s definitive works, but Earth achieves something Young hasn’t been able to accomplish on record in a while: he's made an album worth spending some time with.

Hanna mostly wins in the sea of Hollywood action soundtracks, but it's marginal as a Chemical Brothers album (I prefer it to their dry, overstuffed mid-decade works).

Nearly the entirety of Apparitions feels covered by some haze that's equal parts car exhaust and glitter.

As disorienting and overwhelming as any of Kozelek’s defining albums, Common as Light patiently reveals more of the artist to anyone who’s still paying attention.

Like much of X&Y, Magnet is exceptionally unobtrusive, music to ignore.

There's little on Lioness: Hidden Treasures that sounds throwaway, or like it should have never been released; but there's equally little that sounds absolutely essential.

Their slickest and most formulaic pop constructions to date.

The oddest development of Angelheaded Hipster is that most of the 20-plus participants opt to inject angst and torpor into Bolan rather than revel in his pomp and frivolity. ... Sadly, Willner’s last great tribute album tells us little about its subject.

They're not teenagers anymore, but you'd never know it from listening to them. That's not exactly a compliment.

For an album mostly preoccupied with cataloguing past relationships and the mistakes that did them in, it follows that Feel. Love. Thinking. Of. would manifest those feelings with nostalgic sounds, some welcome, others less so.