Too much of it drifts into generic 1960s-nodding garage-rock territory.

After these frontloaded highlights [Andrew in Drag, God Wants Us to Wait], it doesn't take long for Love at the Bottom of the Sea to become a rain-boot-worthy slog through water-logged mid-tempo material.

Tyga isn't a gifted lyricist, but he has a few key things going in his favor: a workmanlike ability to ride a beat, a solid singing voice, and a great ear for melody.

Milk Famous falters by creating an Uncanny Valley effect by adopting the most easily replicable aspects [of Spoon's sound] without maintaining any sort of human element or offering anything that's identifiable as their own.

The Clearing feels lovingly erected, fashioned bit by bit.

The communal, freewheeling looseness is one of the album's greatest assets, as you feel as if you were a party to the making of the record in Eagle Bay, too.

The production isn't a disaster, but most of the stylistic flourishes can feel gimmicky or, at worst, like dry history lessons... There's also the tugging sense that Springsteen and Aniello are trying to cover up some of the album's lackluster songwriting.

Never Ending Nights contains just enough detail to save it from pastiche and in doing so offers a glimpse into Willner's influences.

A Victim of Stars doesn't offer much to anyone already immersed in that world. For everyone else this is an engaging scratch at the surface of a wide-open mind.

Most tracks here make no bones about aiming straight for the radio. Choruses are airy and open, melodies are sticky and straightforward and tend to lodge in your head with or without your approval.

It all amounts to a constructed world that sounds outré at first but winds up being a startlingly astute reflection of our own as you settle into it.

Open Your Heart is smartly sequenced to metabolize genre and morph like a masterful DJ mix, subtly rationing out its true peaks even while seemingly going full-throttle throughout.

In the end, One Second of Love is enjoyable but slight: its stronger moments render the weaker ones particularly forgettable.

Until that last song, fun persists in the album's absurdly infectious hooks without being marred by concepts or meaning.

It's bound to ruffle feathers and turn off old fans, and in a way, going so outright "pop" is one of the gutsiest, risky things a pillar of the scene like Scuba could have done.

This album feels more like a series of genre exercises, a place in which they occasionally work up a palpable tension, but never enough to make this more than an adequate diversion from the resources they're obviously sourcing.

Sounds From Nowheresville makes me want to buy chocolate, try on clothes, take a holiday--anything but listen to this record.

Ghostory is at its best a very pleasurable realization of niche.

This is a record with a handful of standout songs struggling and straining against one another after being crammed into the standard album format.

Corrosion of Conformity does overstay its welcome with a couple of second-rate tracks, but overall, the album manages to both recapture Animosity's feral energy and reach compositional peaks that the 1985 versions of Dean, Weatherman, and Mullin couldn't have accessed.

While the amount of raw material here may be daunting for some, there are plenty of surprising melodic moments to indulge in.

It's not a record that's going to hit you over the head-- it's almost fatally unassuming and more likely to meekly ask if you maybe wanted to spare a few seconds to listen-- but it's one that will offer a surprising amount of replay value if you accept its coy, hesitant invitation.

The lyrical coarseness serves an important function, reinforcing the urgency of O'Connor's performances and creating the impression that she has worked hard and fast to document her emotions at their rawest and wildest.

For a record that sounds like memories of better times, there's a disheartening shortage of hooks or melodies that aren't hitched to lyrics you'd rather forget.

After an iffy start, Toward the Low Sun thankfully picks up a head full of steam in its closing stretch--hopefully, this momentum won't dissipate over another seven-year layoff.

Memoryhouse have a ways to go before they're creating music with as much melodic power or depth of feeling as their dream-pop contemporaries.

They manage to string a staggering number of tightly packed nuggets of melody and texture into 46 minutes.