His music has lost a large degree of the vitality that it once held.

Out Hud’s shift to house-pop may not be the group ‘coming into its own,’ but it does throw aside the burden of influences that S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D. had attached to it.

Overall, it’s a story of too many ideas.

If this is what treading water sounds like, I'll take it.

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

Where Chesnutt has long been thought of as the banjo-on-his-knee godfather of freak-folk, this record shows his skewed vision is beginning to radiate far from its nearly-naked, southern gothic roots.

It’s the sound of two very talented musicians getting their proverbial creative ya-ya’s out, temporarily sullying their good name to lay ground for something potentially even more exciting.

The album’s stagnant celebrity worship stifles their ironic, so-dumb-its-addictive intentions.

A much smoother ride and more cohesive entity.

The only perfect choice here was to make an album full of ballads. It could have been a violent reworking of age-old texts. Unfortunately, there’s not enough violence here to fully rend and flay, just enough to bruise.

All in all, The Needle Was Travelling is probably the most “human” post-rock record to come out of Berlin.

The musical missteps wouldn’t be so bad if Broder’s voice didn’t often betray him.

Sing ‘Other People’ leaves behind much of the violence of Gira’s approach but retains the same soul-plunging ambitions, both allying him effortlessly with the druggy expressivity that characterizes practitioners of newer psychedelic music and belatedly identifying him as an influence and antecedent.

The Fallen Leaf Pages starts strong and tails off, but even that would be more forgivable if Putnam’s writing was as distinctive as it used to be.

This debut will not be the record of their career and leaves me wanting more already, but it is the right record at the right time and a stupidly profound and convincing debut that is up there with the best releases of the year thus far.

Portraying the state of pop as a series of predictable formulae long since exhausted by corporate superstructure, Human After All more than lives up to its name, rendering a metaphor for failure on the grandest yet simultaneously most personal of terms.

This is the kind of post punk that loves The Specials and XTC rather than Wire and Joy Division.

As an album, WIW seems to have sprung fully-formed from a single night’s restlessness; often more organic than much of his debut, but still with a steady electro-backed pulse, its pacing and sequencing flow like water beneath a frozen creek, barely seen and mostly imagined.

The Evens’ self-titled debut does sound curiously like hardcoreless moments of The Argument polished and lengthened into full-fledged songs.

Ultimately, Meltdown isn’t as dramatic a failure as its title seems to be begging me to pronounce it--in fact it isn’t really a failure at all. It’s just a crucial dip in momentum.

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.

It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here. But until then, Blue Eyed in the Red Room is one to skip.

It’s not that the male-female duo vocals make it or even the moments where the group channels the Delgados in their sublime use of strings and horns; it’s more that Stars has gotten tighter since their last outing.

His brand of subtlety yields far greater rewards and makes for a surfeit of future discoveries upon repeated listens.

Hurricane Bar is totally contrived: too much “That Thing You Do” and not enough shot-from-below-the-hip bacchanalia to keep the fire stoked.

Carter’s an artist clearly capable of making a great album. The Story of My Life isn’t it, but it’s a start.

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

Doves’ strength lies in their careful sculpting of the sonic and the emotional, and here they’ve restrained their palette and scope so much that the result is grey.