Rat Farm has only the occasional flash of brilliance. [Apr 2013, p.53]

There’s a lot to unpack, endless fun to be had cataloguing his references from Three 6 Mafia to Octavia Butler, his consummate brilliance as a wordsmith and architect of flow. ... But it gets monotonous quickly. [Nov 2019, p.52]

Phase One impresses more on first listen [than Phase Two].... But it wears thin quickly. [Feb 2016, p.54]

A fitful and languishing affair whose best moments will have you yearning for more, while the worst may leave some listeners wondering what they were doing here in the first place. [#248, p.59]

This particular experiment has left a formerly unpredictable group sounding as though they've been replaced by a bunch of tired retromaniacs. [Apr 2013, p.61]

[New Facts Emerge] finds the group in passable but not especially inspiring form. [Sep 2017, p.59]

When he muses on ideal love it comes off like How To Dress Well with a bit of a John Mayer wink--Vulnicura this ain’t. Longstreth is a talented producer and arranger and it shows here. ... Shame about the lyrics. [May 2017, p.59]

How you feel about the LP will reflect how far you’re into its comic meets splatter trick. It feels sketchy and underdeveloped to me. [Apr 2019, p.68]

Introspective, emotionally charged pieces such as “Father Time”, “We Cry Together” and “Savior” provide high – or jarring – points on the record, but elsewhere there are periods of lull absent on previous efforts. ... As sonically impressive as his latest album may be, his approach to the topics under discussion doesn’t feel sufficiently thought out. [Jul 2022, p.48]

The more they change, the more ADULT. sound the same: pared down electro pulses, synth jabs with industrial elbows, and Nicola Kuperus’s passive-aggressive post-Slits lilt. [May 2017, p.61]

This record has its moments, for instance the squarewave basslines and breakbeats of “Edelweiss” and the outro to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”. However, as is often the case with Laibach, the pervasive air of calculated irony prevents the album from passing from the ridiculous to the sublime, even when it all gets so silly that on paper it sounds like it should. [Dec 2018, p.52]

They're entering into new territory now and have yet to push as far out as they need to. [Nov 2016, p.62]

Rick Ross is pretty much incapable of going more than 30 seconds with out using the word boss--too bad, because Justice League turn out three monsterous cruisetime tracks toward the end. [June 2008, p.63]

In flashes it could be a parallel universe in which Mahavishnu Orchestra ended up inventing Japanese city pop: a luxuriously hi-tech vision of urban utopia. But just as often it has the futile atmosphere of those projects in which string quartets would perform Aphex Twin. [May 2017, p.61]

Fading out, they leave the impression of an album too ambitious for its own good, but offering moments of real awe. [Apr 2021, p.52]

There's nothing on their fourth album that couldn't have been recorded in the early to mid-1980s. [Sep 2010, p.50]

15 tracks of raspingly dry boilerplate hiphop, whose moods and references are pretty much (all) the Americans ones you'd expect. [Nov 2007, p.51]

Deprived of the rushing, crescendoless highs of Glass Swords, the tracks often seem to struggle to articulate their fascination, or to find satisfying structures. [Sep 2014, p.60]

He frequently seems bored with his own raps, rarely breaking his monotone and indifferently fluctuating between bragging about the quality of his weed and bragging about nothing. The record's saving grace comes with reemergence of producer Ski Beatz. [Sep 2010, p.68]

Ultimately only the title retains the tang of locality. [Nov 2016, p.73]

They sound somewhere between being tentative and caught in a frozen, allegorical state of sketchiness, turning the sleepy head of bedroom pop into a death's head. [Sep 2014, p.64]

The first part of this milary-concrete triptych is mostly vague interference and Radiophonic Workshop-style wibbling about that towards the end, has developed into discomforting BBC Ceefax music. The middle section is sonically richer... Part three is illbient comedown. [Jun 2013, p.51]

An album which largely plays assured and empty. Genesis is home to a few brilliant moments, however. [May 2016, p.49]

Some awful lyrical lapses scupper otherwise promising pieces. [#223, p.51]

Optical Delusion’s seven different guest vocalists yield wildly differing results, ranging from hits to misses. [Apr 2023, p.67]

“Dreamfear” sticks to the artist’s more conventional penchant for collage-style dance music. .... “Boy Sent From Above” is less convincing, clumsily layering Auto-Tuned vocals over the kind of schmaltzy synth one might hear in pop outfits like Yazoo. [Mar 2024, p.54]

As an album it’s almost entirely soporifically dull though beautifully appointed throughout (and it’s a joy to hear Beyoncé rapping) by some smart production from both main protagonists and some slick grooves from the Daptone band. [Aug 2018, p.68]

Tracks run the usual gamut, aggregating pop references and stylistic tropes from the entire history of hiphop, rock, punk, techno and their esoteric subgenres, and assembling them into a harrowing Frankenstein that’s more sardonic than revelatory. [Sep 2018, p.50]