There are still hints that Johnson still knows where his talents lie on Life Has Not Finished With Me Yet, but they're the faintest hints.

It unspools pleasantly and unhurriedly, possessing the sort of sparkly glow that often comes with rejuvenation.

One of the joys of Django Django is that even though it's rendered in two basic colors-- natural and synthetic-- the scenarios it conjures are significantly more multifaceted.

Mature Themes is as vital as anything he's ever recorded.

Remember the old Chris Rock bit where he ate broccoli and cheese for the first time as a kid and thought he'd want nothing but that for the rest of his life? Replace "broccoli" with "Jesus" and "cheese" with "Mary Chain" and you're getting close to the charmingly monomaniacal focus Stagnant Pools bring to their debut, Temporary Room.

They're the opening band you actually kinda enjoyed even though you showed up too early by mistake, the album you half remember liking when it was playing in a friend's car.

Believe You Me comes off as a collaboration between two dyed-in-the-wool daydreamers, finding both harmony and intriguing incongruity in their respective visions.

That first half [of the album] proves the less successful, though at the same time the opening three-song run may be the best thing Deacon's ever recorded... It's the second half of America that promises and more or less delivers something great and new for Deacon.

White's gift on Big Inner is taking sounds created by actual southerners and turning them into figments of his musical imagination, which he bends and shapes into bottomless columns of ethereal soul.

Even if it doesn't quite match the heights of Everyone Must Touch the Stove, Enterprising Sidewalks gestures towards the more obscure corners of the band's (and the label's) back catalog.

They click best as a mass of finely tuned parts. And in the latter three tracks... it really comes to the forefront, sounding so second-nature that you take the complex interplay in the underlying grooves for granted.

Despite his chart success with Drake, many of 2 Chainz' pop maneuvers feel tone-deaf.

As likeable as the album is, there's no saying it won't get out-maneuvered by the next garage band that bashes out a half-hour of blue-denim melodies.

Produced by Rancid's Tim Armstrong, the music here is predominantly a pitch-perfect versioning of 1970s reggae.

If there's anything wrong with Positive Force, it's that it's better suited as background music than bearing up to intense listening; while the guitar lines on most of the songs here are deliciously difficult to whistle, they're all essentially fairly similar.

Aside from the loose DOOM-in-England motif, there's not enough of an overarching theme that Jarel's serviceable-but-indistinct production can pull together.

Even with its generous supply of candy-coated riffs and easy-flowing melodies, Hot Cakes still goes down like lukewarm Eggo waffles: comfort-food familiar, but sapped of the frisson that made The Darkness special.

The split between Perry and Gerrard's singing parts remains distinct not only vocally, but for the different subjects each explores. That could be a stumbling block in other hands, but always seems to bring out the best where these two are concerned.

This Time mostly serves as a reminder of why he's troubled more than why he's great.

It's ultimately debatable whether or not Four is the "real" Bloc Party, but revisionist history isn't supposed to be a duller version of the real thing.

For 30 years Swans have challenged the boundaries between beauty and ugliness, music and noise, catharsis and abuse.... The Seer is the album that transcends them.

As a front-to-back experience, but album doesn't exactly stay with you.

Poor Moon turns out to be a wisp of a record, intentionally light and certainly promising but also oddly--and perhaps ironically--weightless.

A Thing Called Divine Fits might seem the Platonic ideal of indie rock collaboration, but the most memorable moments have Boeckner's signature.

It may actually be best to just pretend that H.N.I.C. 3 ends after the 10th song, because up to that point it's a pretty good, if slightly uninspiring, mixtape.

You could reasonably argue that this is Fake's most well-rounded record to date; the bigger question is whether such small refinements to such an established, well-trodden genre should merit attention from anyone other than diehards at this stage in the game.

Throwing discordant elements into the mix to see what comes out is firmly in keeping with the spirit of the times, but the desire to create another fork in the road, to not just slavishly replicate what came before, is what makes this album (and post-punk as a genre) such a consistently fascinating area to re-explore.

Bubu music is ancient; En Yay Sah offers a powerfully modern, cosmopolitan introduction to its complex and vibrant rhythms.