There’s a really good EP waiting to be edited out of this.

His seemingly harmless overarching theme of matters extraterrestrial stitched through each of the album’s tracks somehow compromises their effectiveness.

It's not too hard to hear amid the swamp bass and prickly guitars, that this group seriously brings the funk.

Pales in comparison to its predecessor.

Ms. Yamagata has moved beyond the slightly jazzy overtones of her debut EP to grandiose, ready-for-radio singer/songwriter pop for the ages.

A tender, imaginative collection of disparate songs, How Animals Move is less an album than a steady stream of wonderful, unpretentious surprises.

[It's] not just emo, but the purest, most virulent strain of the stuff.

While their sound has become immensely creepier, it has also improbably become more beautiful.

Rather than winning over new converts, AWOO’s main achievement might be to delineate, skilfully but inescapably, the outer boundaries of its creators’ artistic reach.

A great study in songcraft, but not a consistently exciting listen.

The larger scope of the album bodes well for The Raveonettes... [but] it’s a shame that there are several clunkers mixed with such strong material.

I’m tired of being simply “satisfied” by the Sea and Cake.

Above all else, Shakira shows that highly individual, original pop songwriting can co-exist splendidly with commercial interests, and on both of those scales, this album is something of a triumph.

Zoo Psychology is a phenomenal 20-minute experience, if only for its sheer insanity. The songs aren’t consistently strong enough for it to be remembered too long down the road, but it does make for a thrilling listen.

One of the more unique pop albums of the year.

The energy the band packs into their songs is unbelievable.

Challengers certainly gets tastier after you’ve chewed on it for a bit.

Unfortunately, barring the opener, few of Lost In Space’s melodies do their lyrical conceits justice, and worse, many sound as if we’ve heard them before, albeit in a fresher, looser context.

It’s not that this album had to be catchy. But when an uninventive melody is rehashed ten times to the point that you wonder whether literal keys and strings are missing from the band’s instruments, what you get is a diffusion line of a product that wasn’t even selling well in the first place.

Song-for-song, they haven’t made an album this misstep-free since Vs.

So much here rests on formulaic indie tropes.

Just Like the Fambly Cat, even more than Grandaddy's past works, carries the weight of death.

The meandering songs coalesce into an uninspired mass, burying the few good moments within it.

His wheels may not leave the traction marks they once did, but the evidence here suggests the ride isn’t over yet.

When [Love is Hell] works, and it does so only sporadically, Adams creates songs of suffocating closeness and density.

As rap, this hardly registers. As political commentary, it’s too obtuse to make much impact. But as eclectic, genre-bending music with an ear for interesting sounds and a knack for making ambiguous lyrics memorable, cLOUDDEAD’s second effort is uniquely promising and satisfying.

Many tracks hint at the notion that Deerhoof decided to make an entirely different album this time around, but counterbalancing these advancements are decidedly flat resurrections of past glories.

There’s nothing wrong with collaborators -- and Faithfull has picked some good ones -- but the quality seems to be directly linked to who is behind each song.