Unfortunately, A Long Hot Summer starts slowly. In fact, when you cop this album, do yourself a favor and skip the first five tracks.

The disc feels more like an Insomniac Records sampler featuring Viktor Vaughn than a proper Vaughn release.

Ultimately, The Equatorial Stars is direct, engaging and modestly unsettling.

There's something admirable about a record that proves it's possible to remove grit from adult contemporary pop.

Whiskey Tango Ghosts stays satisfied, to the point of sounding undifferentiated.

But Homesongs is not simply a procession of trembling troubadour tunes. For each turn of boxwood fragility, there's also one of bold and confident songwriting.

With their staid textures, the songs tend to blend into one another, sounding at best like a spiritless hodgepodge of About a Boy's weaker moments.

While the fragments themselves are never short on energy, they are short on substance-- Terrorbird simply doesn't equal the sum of its parts.

Sometimes bludgeoning, always regal, Blue Cathedral is a calcified, hippified holy place.

Marks the first time the band's sound has taken a step backwards.

In its punchy production and eagerness to mix hard rock with boppy little guitar leads and cheeky catchy choruses, Kiss & Tell is a direct throwback to that fertile crossroads between thickheaded 70s AOR and the pop/new-wave nexus of the early 1980s.

Simply put, this album sounds absolutely huge, its relentless attention to detail eclipsed only by the stunning emotional power it conveys.

Kings of Convenience would do well to assimilate more of Øye's electronic leanings into their original sound, rather than merely mining sad troubadours past for inspiration and leaving these tracks as sparse source material for the obligatory remix album.

With one part arched eyebrows and droll wit, and one part melancholia and sharp social observation, the Sisters' debut is bursting with golden moments.

As much as Ladd continually references the past, from Dr. Livingston and Picasso to Minor Threat, Funkadelic, and De La Soul, he moves the air with a beat that's entirely his own, the sum of too many parts to reflect any one too prominently.

It's not innovative, but it's deliberate and economic, with no filler and an inviting dose of Sly Stone-derived soul.

One could hardly expect a three-disc set of Low's castoffs, demos and flipsides to dazzle.

DEP is still struggling to re-establish a unified and compelling sound, and their newfound penchant for melodic exploration seems out of place amid the album's most inspired thrash moments.

An extremely listenable, laughable album, a futuristic freakshow of deep, stirring melodies and innovative beat arrangements.

The exuberant overload of Blueberry Boat will thrill and transport you with the ineluctable force of a great children's story, one whose execution matches its imagination.

The band's sound benefits greatly from DeLaughter's realization that not every instrument always needs to be playing at once.

A batch of songs guaranteed to be huge hits as soon as we're all sucked into a giant time warp and plunked back down in 1974.

Not a bad album, yet contains too many mediocre tracks to be comforting.

The bicoastal milieu of Out of the Shadow is apparent: It reflects both a lush, sunny "California Dreamin'" temperament, and Gotham's grimy, melancholic disposition.

Its majority carelessly regurgitates the painful cliches of "enlightened" hip-hop's critical and commercial darlings, while the band falls back on their organic hip-hop sound as a gimmick and piles on guest appearances to disguise their lack of creativity.

Doesn't extend the sound of the band's debut so much as inflate it.

Invoking Disintegration is ridiculous, but The Cure is remarkably more thrilling a listen than the band's most recent guitar-heavy predecessors.

It's essentially a one-trick sound, but here, they do a better job of adapting it to their post-dated needs than they did on previous albums.