The problem with it, beyond a handful of unflattering genre excursions, is a slight but persistent thinness of imagination.

His antiquated fantasies still very much belong to him, but it's still a joy to peer inside them--even if the canvases they're displayed on have shrunk ever so slightly.

Instead of exploring their sound and growing more dexterous over time, Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter have backed themselves into a creative corner on Marble Son--with a sound so austere it becomes tedious instead of heady, tentative instead of revelatory.

It's softer feel also illustrates the dynamic range Cohen has as a songwriter on his first solo outing, one that isn't especially revelatory or inventive, but does offer a solid starting point for the second chapter of his career.

This year, we've seen Taking Back Sunday, Saves The Day, and the Get Up Kids attempting to play catch up with themselves, but here Braid bafflingly jettison the goodwill of their past: the palm-muted verses and squeaky choruses, the one-sided conversations of the lyrics, the antiseptic production -- I'll say it could come from anyone because you probably don't remember who the Pinehurst Kids are.

The music's measured rhythm and plaintive chords may belie those bright sentiments, but if everything lined up perfectly, this wouldn't be Richard Youngs.

This is rock music that has come almost completely unstuck from the blues, with a sleek, relentless drive subbing in for swing.

The EP's lackluster tracklist leaves iTunes Session seeming clunky and unrepresentative--like it's not a full set, but an excerpt from a larger show.

The album's use of analogue synths isn't a regression, but an attempt to find a new way forward.

On Watch the Throne, they push each other and have fun doing it, and the result is a stadium-sized event-rap spectacle that still sounds like two insanely talented guys' idiosyncratic vision. That's worth celebrating.

The element that makes Family of Love sound like the work of an almost entirely different band is the massive leap in production value.

These songs store well more than a half-hour of reward and intrigue-- appropriate enough for a record that had to be made three times.

Native To is packed with well-executed, hummable stuff, but it wears thin quickly.

Lateness never does much to prove Clare and his producers were on the same page (let alone reading from the same book).

This self-fulfilling fatalism is at the heart of innumerable rock songs by innumerable bitter young men, but it is rarely expressed with the introspective clarity that Bachmann displays throughout Icky Mettle.

Many of the album's best songs seem to inspire comparisons with dancing: There is a connection to the idea of dance as liberation here, as Lloyd's blushing sincerity builds up potential energy, the nimble performance acts as a release valve.

Let It Beard's structure, its scope, its knowing nods to an earlier era's excess.

Unlike Dedication 2 or Da Drought 3, Sorry 4 the Wait sounds like the work of a mortal human being. Happily, that mortal human being still happens to be very good at rapping.

The EP's 17-minute run time feels too brief. Luckily, Satin Panthers offers more than enough to tide listeners over until a potential follow-up album.

Even if Lonely Crowd doesn't quite live up to the bar set by Broken Record Prayers-- which was, after all, a singles collection-- there's still something dependably refreshing about a new Comet Gain record.

For die-hards, the most alluring part of the package may be the second compact disc, which features 18 mostly instrumental demos recorded in Gaye's post-What's Going On honeymoon period, when his vast artistic ambitions and abilities were being embraced by the greater public. These somewhat experimental demos--deep, in-the-pocket funk in the vein of Sly Stone, George Clinton, and Jimi Hendrix--clearly laid the groundwork for much of his subsequent 70s material.

Together with the ultra-mellow atmosphere, this lack of cohesion makes the album feel messy, and maybe worse, a little boring.

Through the Green can scan as simple or nostalgic, but either misses the point (and neither is the album a "modern take" on disco). It's an album of execution, of Tiger & Woods sharing sounds that aren't elusive and chasing feelings that are.

Electronic Dream is pretty, but it's pretty like the morning sun twinkling off of a dangling machete blade--you don't want to fuck with it.

It's not that they're not real, it's that the shivering vocal timbres dominate the mix to the point where large shifts in tempo and style are obscured. It's during these moments when I think that Room(s) and its elevation of the vocal sample was perhaps a better idea than an album.

This reissue of Peace Sells, celebrating a quarter century of Megadeth's second but first truly great album, is probably more a sop to those diehards than anything else, but if it turns one curious party into a convert then it's worth it, even in this time of bald cash-grab reissue ugliness.

In execution the whole thing comes off as nothing more than a thinly disguised, crass attempt to smoke latent Oasis fans out of hiding. Unfortunately for them, Beady Eye already beat them to the punch.

Legendary Weapons' greatest asset is nearly two decades of goodwill, but at what point are you just flat-out going to admit that Ghostface has been badly coasting downhill for at least five years?