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.

Seeming short at 40 minutes, it's a slight album, and it's marred by Blueprint's slavish devotion to his own goofy song-concepts.

Together with the ultra-mellow atmosphere, this lack of cohesion makes the album feel messy, and maybe worse, a little boring.

Never has that rift between Pollard the songwriter and Tobias the arranger been more transparent-- and more problematic-- than on the formless, often dull The Crawling Distance, a particularly blank batch of Pollard tunes dressed to the nines in Tobias' perfunctory sheen.

If you somehow like everything about early Bright Eyes’ music except for the lyrics, it’ll be your favorite record of theirs. If, more likely, you’re a hardcore fan that was somehow unaware of its existence or didn’t shell out for the 180g white vinyl in 2009, it equally balances Yuletide memories with nostalgia for a time when Saddle Creek’s roster was still operating as a vibrant, and prolific artistic community.

Pacific Daydream, in spite of its name, mostly just gives you a feeling of being nowhere.

Every part of Life Processes seems meticulously calculated with such antecedents in mind, laid out in every detail and implemented exactly to referential specification.

Colonia is mostly careful to use its expanded palette of sounds for subtle shading rather than gratuitous effect.

Housing only a couple of keepers, Fluorescence might initially feel like another letdown after the end-to-end excellence of Citrus, but that overlooks the challenges Asobi Seksu are up against.

Lambency's lack of contrast and its vacuum of irresolution are only symptomatic of the record's holistic problem: there's not much memorable to grab onto.

As it stands right now, though, it's a nice bit of gauzy, gray-hued racket to throw on when you've only got so much attention to give.

Talk That Talk tries too hard to send a more one-dimensional message and ends up falling flat: Rihanna's obviously going for sexy here, but her music's at its most alluring when she's blissed out in her own reverie, not taking the time to spell it all out for us.