Not fully realizing where their strengths and weaknesses lie makes Sam's Town, despite the drastic makeover, roughly equivalent to Hot Fuss, a mediocre album surrounding a few towering singles.

Like its unexpected stylistic kin My Morning Jacket's Evil Urges, Seeing Sounds finds its creators partaking in the subversively phallocentric narcissism of staring at their CD collections, confusing music listening with music understanding rather than enjoyment.

Contrary to what some have claimed, They Were Wrong is listenable, and intentionally so: the band frequently finds ways to successfully straddle the fence between form and noise... though most of the time, it's admittedly impenetrable and alienating.

There are a lot of reasons this album doesn't gel, not least that Liam Gallagher now sounds like a singing anti-smoking campaign, and the brash, snotty arrogance that once sold "Cigarettes and Alcohol" and "Champagne Supernova" is crushed out by his gruffness.

Natalizia recorded Banjo or Freakout with Nic Vernhes at the Rare Book Room in Brooklyn, and Vernhes' naturalistic production style deepens the expanses in Natalizia's sound while maintaining its clean lines and immersive chill.

The truth is, if Head Carrier had arrived as the umpteenth Frank Black solo album, little about it would seem amiss. But coming from a band whose legacy was built on shock-and-awe transgression, Head Carrier feels overly pleasant and pedestrian.

These many mismatching, criss-crossing threads create an incredibly convoluted 77-minute slog that is as tough to listen to as it is to digest.

Even at 46 minutes, Preparations is wearying; it's the same Prefuse tricks once more, with less feeling.

With more experience, the group could perhaps one day drum up a more cohesive, compelling vision, something that reaches out and grabs you. For now, though, the band's grasping at straws.

To some extent, WYWH can get by on vibe, but really, a listener can do much better, even without going further back into the Concretes catalog.

Like the YouTube culture the "Pork and Beans" video depicts so well, the song--and this album--relies on a high quantity of short-lived pretty good ideas to distract from a shortage of great ones.

Blake is fighting the respectable fight on Enough Thunder, though the EP's totally bass-less tracks show that he needs dubstep as much as dubstep needs him.

These clusterfuck all-the-cooks experiments, more often than not, add up to way, way less than the sum of their parts.

After confidently striking out from Delorean’s cocoon of reverb on Apar, Lopetegi has returned but the rest of the band hasn’t, giving Muzik a curiously unbalanced, deflated mix.

Sadly the two best (read: different) tracks come at the end, a shame because you'll have probably put on something closer to actual music by then.

A treacherous, crashing disaster.

If Sia spent more time at the piano, and/or hired Robyn to write her a couple of tracks, the results could be marvelous.

Instead of crashing rock and roll and electronica head-on, his integration is a more subtle mix. He's not a pioneer by any means, but Volume Two is testament to his more nuanced approach. On this, his third album, Warren allows the guitars and "real" instruments an equal say, and ends up with music that sounds incredibly intelligent in light of many other clumsy cross-breeding musicians.

Encore is a fourth fascinating record from Eminem, but it's also easily his weakest and, in many ways, tamest album to date.

Let’s Try the After may be inspired by forward movement, but it feels directionless, preoccupied by searching without clarifying what was lost.

The album isn’t bold enough to commit in any one direction, offsetting whispery synth-pop with saccharine country ballads.

After six albums, Cabic has yet to build a discernible and discrete identity for this band. It remains the ongoing also-ran from a loose freak-folk confederation that’s splintered in a dozen surprising ways.

It's to his credit that he never seems too in awe of his most obvious antecedents, instead simply choosing to flex his own capabilities within the tight constraints that musicians like Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Moebius have operated within for decades. Still, it's a shame Manley didn't choose to filter more of his own ideas into the myriad eulogies on offer here.

Swoon ultimately delivers the exact same results as its predecessor mostly because it's written in nearly the exact same way. The problem all along for the Silversun Pickups isn't that they sound too much like the Smashing Pumpkins. They just sound way too much like themselves.

Young People still find their way to some incredible moments, but the paths that take them there are a good deal less inviting.

The most innovative and intriguing aspect of Pulaski is not its music, but ultimately its not-quite-definable form.

Patrick Watson doesn't do foundation work exceedingly well. Yet this is not to say that there aren't moments on Wooden that suggest songcraft was the foremost urge.

In Dva, Emika may be aspiring to a larger scale of pop, but for the most part this only serves to amplify her flaws.