[An] album that, like its predecessors, is as accomplished as it is stunted, waddling wadlessly towards its intentional exile on Cute Island.

Though their minimalism might sometimes sound like straight distillation, the tunes still hit, and hurt.

No peaks, no gorges, just a steady oscillation between adequate and inspired.

At best, this record is Suicide resurrected as a novelty act; at worst it could pass for an extreme deodorant commercial with swearing.

The problem with Fear Yourself is not that it sounds big, rather that it sounds condescending to the man it's supposed to be all about, and more importantly, by.

Looking like Michael J. Fox clones decked out in garage rock gear, The D4 present aural amnesia with the lyrical complexity of an even less non-ironic Andrew WK.

The album starts to wear thin by the homestretch.

The Listener is ultimately such a strange record that it's hard to really classify; Giant Sand fans are going to love it, naturally (all twelve of them likely already own it), but people new to Gelb and his accomplices might be left scratching their heads.

I just always felt comfortable in my thinking that one Toad The Wet Sprocket was more than enough to fulfill a specific emotional and intellectual niche. Am I wrong?

The sparse and largely unobtrusive music, and Jurado’s wanting vocal range place the emphasis on storytelling, one his strongest assets. The results, however, are a mixed bag.

It's as much the arrival of The Jicks as it is the rebirth of Stephen Malkmus: The band has become a grounding force he can push and pull from, a safety net allowing him to take risks.

All eleven tracks on Bad Timing are gems that balance a knack for brain-lodging choruses with the grime and stylistic drift of Exile on Main Street, begging a record collection's worth of comparisons with nary an instance of outright thievery.

They've still got angst to spare, but their wit has been ground down by 'maturity,' or whatever you want to call it, into a bitter thing that saps a lot of that reckless energy.

The songs, interludes, pacing and sequencing are all as they should be, helping to make Quicksand/Cradlesnakes Califone's best record.

Though Mull Historical Society is an act one could easily file under "pleasant-enough pop," at 13 tracks (plus a bonus disc!), MacIntyre's strictly 80bpm velvet-lined melancholia will test the patience of any Anglophile.

In short, if your favorite bands aren't played between Audioslave and Foo Fighters on modern rock radio, Cave In probably isn't one of them.

Burn, Piano Island, Burn balances so perfectly between commercial appeal and untainted creativity that it's as if the band have been digitally inserted atop a mountain no man could conceivably climb.

Like The Clash before them, The Libertines draw primarily from decades of rock tradition-- blues, dub, a healthy whiff of the English countryside, and a few gorgeous rock riffs straight from the brainstem of Chuck Berry-- and fuse them into an unruly and triumphant monster of an album.

Skimskitta isn't particularly strong or potent, but it's relaxed and smooth enough to induce a very mellow, mild buzz.

With a bloated 60+ minute runtime and some truly misguided dabblings with e-bows and saxophones, Log 22 presents Bettie Serveert at their most self-indulgent. And it's not pretty.

It's an unrefined, poorly calculated mess.

Awful as it might be, Oskar is not easy to dismiss because awfulness has always been a part of Momus' gambit.

Diamonds on the Inside's breathless Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock whirlwind is tiring, at best.

Beans twirls and stretches his language, depicting the life of a poet-rapper, heavy on non-traditional boasts and battle rhymes. But he lacks the gulping, deep tone of former APC cohorts Priest and Sayyid, which means the beats usually usurp his rhymes.

The band's new sound is nothing short of painfully, achingly banal.

Her voice, raspy and harsh against the gently ringing acoustic guitar, makes you expect a gloomy, even maudlin disc. But that can distract from what makes it great: its ambiguity, the way she expresses herself in such strangely personal terms yet never settles on an emotional tone.

The songs are frustratingly stagnant-- albeit beautiful-- exercises in lap-pop textures.

Wonderful Rainbow delivers what Ride the Skies most lacked: Musical diversity.