The other half of The False Alarms, while not a complete wash, finds the band sounding lost.

All in all, Fly Zone is an epically audacious record, boiling down to essentially a 13-track demand from Le1f to be allowed access to a mainstream audience without sacrificing a shred of the identity that sets him apart from nearly every rapper a mainstream audience has been drawn to.

All My Relations makes a few nods to conventional songwriting, but, really, it’s just as dense and repetitive as anything the drummer has ever put out.

Invisible Life is the clearest and most dynamic Helado Negro record to date.

Anyone expecting a revival of the Delfonics sound we all know and love very well may walk away disappointed. Taken on its own terms, though, the record works.

It's boldly rendered, and somehow crafts a very human world from cartoon sonics.

Ring’s orchestral and electronic score communicates the narrative’s swing from complacent luxury to riveting despair, showing what happens when worlds collide.

An album about unfit enemies and deserved death that nevertheless delights in its own music-making élan.

All Velvet Changes creates is a disquieting malaise that deflects any attempt to penetrate its billowy, monochromatic, meaningless contours.

A little more stylistic and structural variety could lead to something special.

It’s too bad that many of the other collaborations here feel as generic and laborious as a ProTools tutorial.

It's a wayward journey, which appears to be the intention of the piece, although at times it produces the kind of mixed results you get from opening a novel at a random page and trying to make sense of it.

The pacing is so languid, the dynamics so muted that I doubt this iteration of Son Volt would last very long in a real honkytonk.

He doesn’t appear interested in total formlessness, instead reaching a place that gets as close as he can to all-out loss of control then just about pulling back. Getting there is a thrilling white-knuckle ride, like peering over the ledge for 30 minutes but never jumping off.

Mala is Banhart's best record in nearly a decade--largely because it's his loosest and funniest.

The band’s songwriting chops are evident on Between Places, and it’s refreshing for a debut to err on the side of being too ambitious, when so many new indie bands nowadays suffer from the opposite problem. But the content of these songs doesn’t quite earn their epic execution.

Musically, The Next Day isn't as radical or dreary, as it bounces around from style to style, casually suggesting past greatness while rarely matching it. The production is clean and crisp, almost to a fault, leaving little room for the off-kilter spontaneity that highlights Bowie's best work.

Deathfix gets its expansive, laid-back feel from the relaxed conditions under which it came together, but that's also the source of its occasional directionlessness.

The bursts of bright energy and amateurish enthusiasm on Golden Grrrls shine on wondrously for several minutes, but after a while the limitations of stunted musicianship and repetitive songwriting take over.

New Moon follows through on that promise but inevitably discovers that, when you do open your heart, blood gets spilled.

Soft Opening maintains a sort of oddball consistency in this regard, but is ultimately so aimless, messy, and at times beyond tedious, it hardly matters how many hands were in its pot.

While the beauty doesn't flag in the second half, the forms do start to repeat, with "Edge" recapturing the wistful blur of "Wonder, Inc"; "Constant Apples" the regressing mirrors of "Goudanov". Even so, Sweat manages to glimpse some striking new vistas from within her familiar straits.

Too often Mowgli feels like a series of exercises, its mantra-like repetitions eventually rendering themselves somewhat directionless. Other times, things simply don't pan out at all.

2011's A Thousand Heys, was a solid take on 90s American indie, but a bit too beholden to its influences. Ores & Minerals fixes that and adds a lot more.

It’s that blazingly honest, hyper-personal quality that places Cerulean Salt in the tradition of Elliott Smith, early Cat Power, or Liz Phair's free-flowing Girlysound tapes--the work of a songwriter skilled enough to make introspection seem not self-centered, but generous.

It’s a little preachy and confessional, but there’s truth in most of what Nash sings about on Girl Talk, at least for the ladies in the room who are still figuring out how to be capital-A adults.

All the thick atmospheres and heavy sentiments have a gravity that's stronger than mere attitude. Yet despite that heft, Go Easy is pretty entertaining, too.

Vol. 3 is at its best when Smith is at his boldest.