With the impressive level of control, it’s understandable when it starts feeling like Adams is holding on a little too tightly.

Goodbye contains both the best and the worst of Schnauss’ output until now.

Outwardly, We Are the Pipettes is fun, sweet, and attractive. If you hang around, it starts to feel brittle, frigid, bitchy, and weird.

The lyrics here lack the self-indicting punch that made MEC so unflinchingly great.

It doesn’t always work, and the record has a scattered second half that undercuts the sonic unity of the first, but the best moments here are as starkly affecting as any of Garnier’s past work.

As much as a lot of the tracks are just bluster + accent + guitars, there are some melodies hidden along the way and the bluster + accent + guitars here are better than those pimped by the likes of The Others and Kaiser Chiefs and so on and so forth.

A bit jumbled together and disorienting, but overall just about as rejuvenating as anything.

Lies for the Liars is a funny, befuddling, and altogether unexpectedly enjoyable record.

Hey Hey is an impressively cohesive collection of pop songs.

There’s a lingering sense that the product at the center of all the hubbub remains something less than its lofty reputation.

Blemish is not sadness or happiness; it is strange observation and relapse.

Certified may be a cinematic holding pattern but it’s a holding pattern in a place--both geographically and artistically--that we can’t hear enough of.

What Hey Venus! ultimately is, is a good record of classy pop/rock songs, arranged and produced well, shot through with a degree of personality and skill, and almost completely lacking in the inspired, eclectic madness which made "Radiator and Guerilla" so damn good.

Has only a slightly spottier ratio of hits to misses than their best albums.

It has some nice tracks, some experiments and more than a few keepers, and, yes, it’s almost exclusively a fan-only proposition.

In small doses it’ll absolutely cure what ails you. Unfortunately, taken in one album-sized chunk, the effect tends to wear thin—a doubly damning criticism since Dancing With Daggers is only ten seconds shy of being thirty minutes long.

Approaching this album, I was skeptical. I was convinced it would be one of those albums with three good songs (the singles) and a load of filler. But it’s actually a solid, quality album with a smattering of great tunes and loads of shuffly beats that will make you lose control of your feet.

The Mix-Up doesn’t present anything innovative, nor is it any sort of triumphant career coda; it just sounds good.

13&God represents less a marriage of rock and rap than it does a meeting of weird with slightly-less-weird.

The pandering that characterizes the first half of the album leaves no hint of the hidden gems that follow.

It's a smooth, cohesive ride that never lapses into boredom.

News and Tributes is a solid album, and its high points are worth listening to over and over. Unfortunately, some of the weaker tracks were given primetime slots.

The album achieves a great deal of its success from the relaxed collaboration, but it does suffer from it, as well. Reid and Hebden interact so casually that they don't find the friction to really propel great improvisational music.

While the "darker follow-up to the breakthrough album" angle was an unavoidable cliché for Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday does their part by giving the more aggressive workouts a stronger sense of purpose.

It’s an intriguing and thoughtful and occasionally lively record, but it’s not the rollicking, randy good time some folks would lead you to believe.

Before The Dawn Heals Us is a very twilight album, a very urban record. It never quite achieves the variegated subtlety of Dead Cities..., but it doesn’t reach for the same frosty rural pastures as that record either.

A fairly enjoyable album as long as one doesn’t saddle it with expectations of being the next Sister Lovers.

Van Pelt teases enough sonic frontiers and has enough madcap charisma to mildly triumph where others would have failed.