Where Living With Yourself found McGuire sticking to moody, simple melodies, Get Lost inches up the volume a little.

Replica Sun Machine is an exceedingly simple thing--with tunes so familiar-feeling to be easily ignorable--but it's presented with a false sense of intricacy, gussied up and disguised as something more than it really is.

It's an interesting middle ground the band reach here, touching upon many previous bases while not favoring entirely the guitar tomfoolery or the smirking electro-rock.

It's difficult to overcome consistently lame, often meaningless lyrics-- especially with Suede's classic rock focus on singer and melody-- but they cope.

Significant artistic development of any kind probably would've been a bad idea for this band-- they were, as the saying goes, small but perfectly formed. Still, it's also not quite satisfying to hear 40-year-olds come back to what they were doing half their lifetime ago and approach it exactly the same way.

This EP sounds like more than the sum of its parts. Maybe it's the realization that Gnarls Barkley will never top "Crazy" or that the Shins may never re-form, but there's an intriguing sense of desperation on these songs, as though both Mercer and Burton are realizing that this band could indeed be their lives.

The songs here are absent of feeling or inspiration, but even creepier, they feel absent of intent.

Daughter of Cloud accurately depicts an artist who has pushed his artistic license to its very limit. It also makes a convincing argument for the virtue of accepting some of those pushed-aside limitations.

Each track offers something worthwhile, yet none raises any question as to why it ended up here.

So Wildlife isn't exactly bursting at the seams with earworms, but it's a worthy achievement for taking a poignant, powerful emotional state and carrying its thread for 42 minutes.

ADULT. still do a convincing showroom-dummies impersonation, but they’ve never sounded more human than they do here.

There is of course a huge market for their kind of angst-ridden emo, and in many ways--particularly lyrically--this album sounds like it's been lifted straight from the emo handbook, which may well satisfy many listeners. For the less committed, however, the lack of the band's usual wit and musical inventiveness will be missed.

The Cave Singers' mild, moseying tunes aren't without their minor charms, and they're unfailingly good at conjuring images of wide-open fields and dust-caked lanes, but nobody wants to walk down the same road all the time if they can help it.

Generally speaking, the choruses on Rise far outshine the meandering verses, as the band snaps into a more simple and straightforward groove that highlights the trademark Kirkwood drawl.

I Am Gemini is Cursive's weakest record by a disheartening margin.

Mendes spends nearly every minute bowled over by the power of love. It’s nice to see his cup overflow so bountifully, but the near-constant awe quickly grows tiresome, especially when conveyed through clichés like, “Your body’s like an ocean, I’m devoted to explore you” and, “You’re my sunlight on a rainy day.”

The rest of the album is stuff he's done before and better.

From a production standpoint, the record sounds great, but at its core, it comes up empty, lacking a solid foundation of good songs to rest its adventurous studio trickery upon.... It's the most frustrating type of album there is-- one that's full of promise and shining moments, but never fully delivers.

Green Imagination does awkwardly stumble into some redeeming moments, but never without a slog through the banal first.

What an utter mess.

Outer, fittingly enough, projects its energies relentlessly outward, broadcasting its emotional content in a way that too often feels heavy-handed.

El Rey has its share of surprises, mostly in the vein of its particular subject, which is the cruelty older men visit on younger women, and vice versa. But mostly it's merely another Wedding Present record: witty, randy, guitar-heavy, and not quite satisfied.

Likability has got Kylie Minogue this far, and it pulls her through again--even the weak tracks on X have a sparky enthusiasm that makes their magpie modernism sound less cynical.

This uniformity of tone and tempo understandably causes You & Me to wilt through its middle stretches despite its relatively brief running time.

Time is a delightfully shambling debut that succeeds in spite of obvious trappings.

Feathers seems less a continuation of Logic than a valuable complement, cheerful and heartfelt as the latter was somber and stylized.

It's overproduced as hell, filled with all manner of electro doodads and backmasking effects, but it also boasts an immediacy and pop smarts heretofore unheard from the band. Unfortunately, that directness applies to the lyrics as well, and they simply cannot be ignored.

Unfortunately, too many of the songs highlight Starfucker's shortcomings, leaving them introspective, detached, and even timid. If this three-piece can learn to have as much fun in the studio as they do onstage, these fuckers might actually become stars.