Caleb Landry Jones’ music inspires a reaction somewhere in the middle: It’s interesting, even fun while it lasts, but you probably won’t return.

The album’s most tolerable songs fixate on the physical, a pulsating goo of slow drums and reverbed descriptions of skin mashed against skin.

By default, Nextwave is less scattered and more consistent: It’s only five songs. But “Ratchet” indicates that Bloc Party could’ve gone way further off the grid if they gave themselves enough time.

Sounds a hell of a lot like Stereolab.

Alice and Friends doesn't produce often in that department [solid hooks], relying instead on the kind of raw energy that fuels a good house party.

Kaleidoscope isn’t going to kickstart Coldplay’s critical reappraisal, nor does it deserve to. But it rewards those of us who’ve stuck around with a few songs that capture the band at its best.

Unfortunately a whole album of similarly DJ-pitched material, all the quote-unquote pop frills shaved off, wouldn't have allowed blog readers to devote the few days their attenuated attentions can muster for He Was King's singles, before the next this-is-kind-of-okay-I-guess electro-pop album arrives to distract them.

After all the sentimental rigamarole, it’s tough to come away from Heartbreak Weather feeling any closer to Horan. He spends too much of the record bouncing between sounds and songwriting concepts to feel distinct.

When Delerium forego the listless Gregorics and stale beats employed by their more renowned contemporaries, they truly shine. The beat-heavy "Aria," for instance, and the salsa-esque "Fallen Icons" are arguably Poem's strongest tracks. But these moments occur only now and then, and are often sandwiched between songs that, while helping you survive the subway's rush-hour crunch, won't meet your needs at any other time-- unless you're about to have a mid-life crisis.

Raw is a perfectly executed version of what Westerners might call global kitsch: a series of evocative tourist postcards showing sunny scenes from Rio and Honolulu.

The main drawback to Worlds’ sound, an impressionistic approach to mass-appeal fare, is that anyone with their ear to the (festival) ground might find these sounds to be relatively old-hat.

They’re modest songs for modest moments, occupying the space between the hookup and the breakup, of getting hired and getting fired, that manageable lovesickness, regret, and anxiety that underlie just about every URL and IRL interaction.

In the end, though, Everything Is Borrowed's musical high points aren't enough to save it from its lyric sheet, and that, going forward, constitutes a real problem for Skinner.

Though not without highlights, Not Your Kind of People contains nothing as memorable as their big hits, and it's heavier on the filler than their earlier albums.

It’s messy and menacing in equal measure, a bar fight that ends in broken glass and slippery floors, but not before landing a few killer strikes.

It’s harder not to fixate entirely on the formal elements of the music, rather than the things that might make it personal. That leads to records where you listen to and admire them from a distance instead of getting immersed in them.

Despite production from current-day heavy hitters like Da Internz and Mike WiLL Made It, he still comes off like a relic from the past, the class clown who never quite grew up.

The songs are defined less by sounds or ideas than by their sanded-down edges: plodding beats from Nottz and J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, histrionic Marsha Ambrosius hooks, putative passings of the torch.

Pocket Symphony winds up feeling strangely transient, accomplished and genuinely likeable but also forgettable.

Most of the cars in The Great Gatsby crash and so does Luhrman's soundtrack.

At its best, the casual atmosphere makes for one of Kozelek’s loosest, lightest collections to date: something to throw on when you don’t have the emotional capacity for his more distinctive albums.

The record is not wondrous, but it’s a light listen with a couple of good moments and a handful of clunkers. The weaker moments reveal his shortcomings as a rapper without being provocative or ponderous enough to provoke a firebomb, or even a raspberry, in response.

Flaws is well-produced, many of its songs nicely augmented by fleet drumming and intricate guitar figures, but Steadman's lack of having anything interesting to say and inability to say it distinctively ultimately sinks the endeavor.

If Wale, Meek, and Pill could find a way to focus on their own strengths, maybe they'd sound more comfortable alongside their new boss. Instead, they all sound like they're trying to become mini-Rosses, and it doesn't work for them.

Harlequin is an odd album with perplexing priorities and a conflicted sense of scale, but just enough sweetness and heart to make you want to give it the benefit of the doubt anyway.

Leray boasted about introducing the younger generation to artists like Busta Rhymes through her use of samples. That’s a nice idea—introducing people to other music through her samples—but that’s basically the only idea she brings to COI.

The redeeming moments are ones which make some unpredictable moves--any shocks are welcome on a record as polite and poised as this.

Wheels starts to lose a bit of steam toward its end, but as with previous Russian Futurists albums, it's over well before Hart's shtick turns monotonous.