Try listening to Brian Eno's Music for Airports in choppy RealAudio. Hear that? Digital clicks, random bursts of static, and underwater compression swim over icy electronic drones, numbing your mind into a state of paralysis. Now imagine spending $12 for it. That's the Oval experience in a nutshell.... As always, Ovalprocess isn't bad for what it is, but it's certainly not clever anymore.

While there are some musical highlights--like the 8-bit ambience of the Ricky Eat Acid-produced title-track--the album is constantly in pursuit of a voice it never finds. Which highlight Smith’s writing, some of the worst in rap this year. His lyrics are crass and half-baked and insulting to one’s intelligence.

Too much of it is an ill-advised cultural safari that’s too weird to fly but too monied to fail. But where it succeeds, Reincarnated forces you to forget the principal ridiculousness of the enterprise, and that is no small feat.

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.

As a whole Lucky 7 sounds a lot like everything else Statik Selektah has done up to this point; the album is neither offputting nor particularly exciting, and it's hard to feel strongly about at all.

Hatfield has nothing new to say besides "You don't know what it's like to be perfect," and it might explain her perfect-person tendency toward carelessness-- guitar solos, grating vocals, overdone crabbiness-- all signs that point to thinly veiled midlife crisis rock.

Occasionally, the dull roar manifests in some solid rock songs.

He's grown up, alright. With the energy Jay brings to most of these tracks, you'd think 30 was the new 60.

Most of the seven tracks crammed between these fine bookends, including two undistinguished instrumentals, run together in a modal drone, lacking urgency or emotional inflection.

Temples are clearly skilled technicians; they probably could’ve produced this record in their sleep. What’s frustrating is that the project begins and ends at talent. These songs are hollow; you could listen to Hot Motion half a dozen times and feel nothing.

If it seems unfair to judge Hyperion’s weaknesses against the work of Lévy’s supposed peers, it’s equally frustrating that he hasn’t yet given us a real idea of who he is as an artist.

Rex Orange County isn’t Frank Ocean; he stacks vast emotional weight on predictable, inoffensive songs until they buckle like wire shelving. Pony is simplistic, clueless, subtlety-free.

YOKOKIMTHURSTON is not so much a decibel-bursting showcase for the Queen of Noise and her unruly understudies as a conversation between intimates speaking in tongues and tangles-- a voyeuristic glimpse into a private, discomfiting exchange.

More unfortunate are the moments when Schnauss and Peters aim for surprising or affecting and veer straight into kitsch.

Musically, it is hardly satisfying, as the fleeting enjoyable moments are swallowed up by a great deal of frustrating mediocrity.

All This Sounds Gas might not have been such a weak effort if Kannberg's lyrics actually had anything to say, but nonsense prose has never meshed well with lush, jangly alterna-rock.

Psychic Lovers does try out a few different hues within its fairly limited palette, but they mainly just add to the confusion.

The duo’s sense of freedom and unwillingness to mimic the tropes of conventional songwriting are to be admired, even if they’re not necessarily traits that will convince anyone but ardent early-Reich fans that drumming records are worthy of a place on their shelf.

Smith comes across similarly disenchanted and tempted by the prospect on Songs for Imaginative People, where he's torn between celebrating and bemoaning commercial excess.

For how clearly smart, ambitious, and upsettingly tuneful Cameron is, it’s a pity that he uses his talent for these exercises in sophistry, music that feels so vacuous and fleeting that it becomes one with the very modernity it seeks to lampoon.

There is not a single moment of shock or freshness on Delta Machine, and it's enormously frustrating to hear what was once a band of futurists so deeply mired in resisting change.

Fortunately, even if the band's lack of cynicism often veers to the opposite extreme, the Harlem Shakes' handshake-and-smile approach is hard to outright dislike.

The undercurrent of menace and sadness that defined Massive Attack's best music is largely absent, replaced with a drowsy, half-formed gloom that, if anything, suggests resignation instead of dread.

You see, as Swords, mopping up of the stray B-sides and bonus tracks from the comeback years, suggests, Morrissey now has a dilemma: Following group glory, solo vindication, political notoriety, sullen exile, and dramatic revival, what on earth does he do for an encore?

The worst I can say about Dedication 4 is that there isn't one moment where I wouldn't rather be listening to the often mediocre originals. There are a dozen or so good punch lines scattered on D4, enough to make it fun enough for one listen

While Animal Feelings has good instincts, it is still too cerebral and impressed with its own production flourishes to actually be fun.

In short, it's fun and functional, yet disposable.

Performing as Nudedragons, the group took the stage at the Showbox in Seattle this past April and played a set that showed as much love to Louder Than Love and Ultramega OK as any other album in their catalog, giving each portion of their career equal respect without resorting to simply playing just the hits. Succeeding at this sort of task is easier said than done, but it would've been nice if Telephantasm at least tried.