As beautiful as many of these songs are in terms of immediacy, their lackluster instrumentation never allows them any lasting appeal.

The saddest part of all this useless audio-masturbation is that it completely masks the genuinely beautiful pop songs of which Anderson is so capable.

Too many tracks on It’s All Around You don’t quite measure up to the compositional quality or imagination of previous works.

The Sunday girl may be entering her autumn years, but she’s still an absolute treasure.

Again is an opportunity missed by such distance as to become pointless and even irritating.

It’s obvious that the group can write straight-ahead rock/pop songs, but only chooses to tease the listener with short glimpses of their ability in this regard.

They can’t rap. Period.

A wonderful album stuffed full of sentiment, emotion and melody--and traverses the bridge between teenagerdom and adulthood with a moving and thrilling honesty.

Gone is pretty much everything they’ve learned in the last eight years or so, ditching all the progress they’ve made in favor of just making another Modest Mouse record. The results, needless to say, are disappointing.

One of those singular albums that is so richly dense, so unabashedly whimsical and so damned polished.

The fact that the music, vocals and melodies are stunning is just icing on the cake - a cake that is crumbling before your eyes.

It’s hard to fault an album for being too much of a good thing, but there it is. Songs like “Goliath”, “Glass Walls” and “Linus” just blend together. By the end you no longer look forward to another swooping, disheartened melody, you want variety of any kind.

Muse write... the same way Metallica write, i.e. just compiling bits of ‘music’ then sticking them together, except they’re more impressed with their fragments (though they’re simpler and duller and even more remarkably similar to each other than Metallica’s), so they make them go on longer and repeat them more times.

Panic Movement is far too samey and too much emphasis is put on the lyrics, which are not the Hiss' strong suit.

Those looking for the instant gratification of the first side of YFIIP--the “Almost Crimes”s, the “KC Accidental”s, the “Anthem”s--will be grossly disappointed. This is a collection for those of us who dug the album’s second side--meandering, experimental, but ultimately just as urgent and just as rewarding.

Despite the increased emphasis on production, like Blonde Redhead's entire catalogue, the chirping, child-like cords of lead vocalists Amedeo Pace and Kazu Makino act as the essential ingredient to the bands avant-garde concoction.

The biggest problem with the album is that most of the tracks feel like there should be a rap over them.

The whole album is put together so oddly, almost haphazardly, that this works better as a collection of moments than as a whole.

Canned Heat mixed with Kiss and chopped into lines with Elvis and Queens Of The Stone Age.

Beam seems to have smoothed over some of his rough-hewn ruralist poetics in favor of undeveloped blandishments and sentimental homilies.

The production's sanitary feel plays a large role in the album's conservative nature, as it scrubs away any potential raucousness.

Accomplished and full of bluster but ontologically completely hollow; this is The Vines.

By trimming excess fat (read: R’n’B choruses), Madvilliany keeps a sense of spontaneity, cutting off unexpectedly and never allowing anything to get stale.

Fennesz makes Boards Of Canada sound like Daft Punk and My Bloody Valentine sound like Oasis.

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.

While Seven Swans is possibly a better record than Michigan, with such an overtly Christian sheen, it will be interesting to see if the liberal music press gives it as much praise as it deserves.

For all of their rock leanings, they are a jazz combo in the best way possible—each player brings a potent set of chops to his respective instrument.

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.