Unfortunately, The Pretty Toney Album falls short in replacing what Raekwon had contributed to Ghost's previous album releases, causing the album to feel essentially incomplete.

At its core, Total Life Forever is a good dance record: something you could leave on at a party and not stop moving to until its full 50 minutes have finished. But as much as it tries to run away from that, it isn't a whole lot else.

There are a number of mediocre ideas that are drawn out a bit too long.

This lack of identity admittedly fuels the indecipherable, entrancing mystery of the album, yet unfortunately this strength also equates to the album’s primary weakness.

The pioneering hardiness Faun Fables capably venerates is now the domain of reenactors. The intrepid few who still seek frontiers have only the vaster dark of dreams to explore.

Votolato has a lot to offer as a musician, but his songwriting veers into stale territory too often over the course of 12 songs, neglecting to pull itself from its many holding patterns in time for salvation.

Pared down and stripped to its primal rudiments, the latest Timberlake saga could have been something truly epic; instead, it just feels unnecessarily immense.

The laid-back feel of White Van Music ultimately hinders it from being a truly creative and distinct work.

Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress’ is not a failure; it’s merely familiar.

With the bag secured, Gucci has nearly limitless options to proceed, but he’s done little to show that he’s interested in them. Droptopwop is a return to form insofar as it is the high point of his post-jail music, but a plateau is a plateau nonetheless.

Psychic simply doesn’t leave a lasting memory when one considers the work as a whole.

The jettisoning of shoegaze trickery takes place within a comeback that, even if very welcome, isn’t entirely spectacular.

Though for him this may seem to be a progress toward honesty and wholeness, for the listener the benefits are not so clear.

No Color isn't a bad album by any means - it's great at times, never less than good, and certainly better than could reasonably have been expected - but there's no sign here of return or retreat to their old strengths.

A languid mood piece with discreet variations, Coil is a pleasant, if homogeneous, listening experience.

While Tical 0: The Prequel is an adequate and at times entertaining record, too much collaboration has overshadowed the rhyming prowess and lyrical wittiness of Method Man.

It's very long and the songs don't really relate to one another, despite the band's description as "a subconscious concept album about the sorry state of rock n' roll." But Let It Beard certainly seems like a strong statement about something.

The songs are all snappy with their rhythmic play and potentially memorable with their stop-start hooks.

Listening to Faking the Books makes you feel utterly alone; and maybe that's the whole point.

A Vintage Burden is well-executed, spare, and in the simplest terms, makes wonderful Sunday morning background music.

Despite its lack of focus, the record's immediacy is also kind of charming, and there's something else about White Wilderness that makes me less inclined to toss it aside; only a few listens in, it's proven to be a grower.

Despite her best efforts, the non-instrumental tracks still suffer from a kind of sameness that causes them to run together.

While Arcade Dynamics is a major turn for Mondanile, it's aesthetically in line with the trajectory of many modern acts that also hide behind effects and atmosphere as they develop their songwriting chops.

While Nurses’ adherence to pop construction might not do them favors when it comes to standing out from the pack, it also means that their music is potentially more durable than many similar blog-hyped acts.

Parts & Labor are exciting, both on a gut level and an aesthetic one, but the shift to a more sedate sound hasn’t pushed them in directions that emphasize this enough, at least so far.

Its songs are well-constructed, well-paced, and all subtly different from each other.... [but] for the most part, it’s a little too “safe” and unadventurous.

Here, Cloud Nothings move past the slacker touches that marked their first releases, their gestures getting bigger and broader as they make attempts at emotional universality.

On this new album, it's not so much a problem that they remain stuck in the 90s politically, but more that their music seems so irrelevant sonically and willing to wallow in a mid-tempo techno-metal goth-night ghetto.

The Center Won’t Hold is what most respected musicologists would term a “good album with some great songs.”

Many of these songs begin promisingly before losing momentum and settling into turgid grooves. Rather than serving as a platform for D∆WN and Machinedrum to hybridize and expand the pop form, Redemption offers ornate, glittering garments, which constrict as they envelop.

Skeletal Lamping is by no means a bad album; rather, after such an organic and fully realized career milestone as Hissing Fauna, the difficulty of finding a new direction is a creatively arduous one, and of Montreal’s experimentation here is notable overall.

Portastatic is exactly as advertised: catchy, sometimes dumb, occasionally rockin', but always at least competent pop.

A double album of prickly rock-outs, pugilistic odes, and utterly eerie ambient entr’actes bridging an anthology of lyricism that shunts your earbud-plugged head toward the mirror to take a good long look (and listen).

It's unfortunate that 13 & God neither succeeds nor fails.

Violent Hearts manages to tread the line between familiarly catchy and refreshing throughout.

News and Tributes is relatively smooth sailing from note one; very consistent and effectively less immediate.

Familial is a worthwhile attempt at the contemporary folk that has been bastardized by many, coddled by some, and ignored by most. In this regard, perhaps Selway has forged an experiment more daring than you might think.

What’s important is confirming that you haven’t completely lost it, that you’ve still got the inspiration that made us listen in the first place--Donkey, however, is in danger of making us forget.

AMOK might be a weaker, meeker product than the output of Radiohead, but its compact nature, its genre codes, and its context are what’s important here. AMOK sums up Thom Yorke as he stands to today.

Born Like This is simply not as forward-thinking as his best works.

Melodies are practically nonexistent, leaving the music almost completely ignorable.

It’s a perfectly respectable, fun dance record, but I just wish its grooves came more naturally.

While the songs here are not memorable in the buzzer-beating manner of a title shot, no one would prefer a world where all-star matches were missing.

The flesh on the 11 ghosts of Strangers is heavier than on lots of Nadler’s past work. And the sonic space mirrors the lyric meat; this is corporal, forward locomotion.

It’s hard to imagine a few stellar tracks and a well-flowing album being taken as a negative, but the result just isn’t enough to make these lads stick out.

Listening to Slaraffenland find their way, as they approach indie-rock from a rarified angle, is enjoyable enough in itself to cancel out any inhibitions.

The one thing the demo and the remix have in common is they both put Francis' voice in a more prominent position than on the Pixies albums, and that is certainly not a bad thing.

There is a poise about Scintilli in its strongest moments that was absent even from those early blazed trails.

Ibeyi is an uneven but sturdily promising debut.

The record resists you making sense of it. It hits, laughs, ends.

The Phoenix is, ultimately, a collection of immersive and impressively well-produced analogue techno tracks, bound up in a package with overt cultural references that tend to distract rather than add to the experience.

Beams, like Asa Breed, is front-loaded with the atmospheres and vocal manipulations that are bedrock to his best work. But Beams fails to evince the kind of songwriting growth that the vocal minority of his fans have been waiting for.

Taken as a whole, There Is No Enemy is a solid album on par with the band’s more recent output.

There is a natural grace to these compositions that's difficult to deny.

Witch is a solid heavy metal album that is nearly as much fun to listen to as it probably was to record.

Anti-folk or not, the band exudes confidence and camaraderie, and The Bundles surely won't disappoint their longtime fans.

It's end-of-summer music.

There’s still enough innovation and experimentation among the banalities here to suggest that they might have a great fourth album in them.

Antidotes is really a pleasurable record that found itself displaced by its worn-out, second-hand clothing

Drift is a step up from Devil’s Music (2016), which attempted to recreate Leave Home’s career-making abrasion with little of its viscerality. On the other hand, with nearly every song on the album performed in a different style, Drift lacks the cohesion of The Men’s less acclaimed albums.

If there’s a problem, it’s that this batch of songs doesn’t quite show off Donovan’s gift for weirdness as much as previous Sic Alps outings.

It’s refreshing to hear such heavyweight harmonies being shipped out by a modern act, especially when relatively crunchy guitars and urgent drums act as the styrofoam packing peanuts, ensuring things never get too messy or convoluted.

The sounds sometimes crash and collide rather than meld together, whereas elsewhere, paradoxically, they slide off the ear, a little over-anonymous yet falling short of the unique grey palette of an act like Japan.

While the lyrics at times retain the smarts and wicked humor that we've come to both revel in and expect, the romantic ballads more than flirt with cliché.

Though it'll never be powerful or earthshaking, Weathervanes seems to have found its place among the clouds.

Like a good term paper, much of Graduation sounds great in theory but flounders in its execution.

While I am not one to fault Kilgour for slowing things down a little, an impatient listener might argue that Frozen Orange shows Kilgour's age in the same ways Yo La Tengo's Summer Sun belied theirs.

It is still mostly sickly sweet sounds from Tennis, but the band must be commended for talking a bolder step the second time around.

Full of craft and purpose, enchanting and creative, Rites is a promising tease of better things to come.

While Eden’s Eastern flavor is certainly enjoyable, it walks a thin line between cultural exploration and exploitation.

Even though A Constant Sea is arguably somewhat conservative in its regurgitation of established tropes and forms, the execution of its inherited framework predominantly unfurls with confidence and clout.

With his inoffensive voice and inoffensive beats (surprisingly so, considering their producers), Bodan does, if only for a brief time, achieve something exciting and intimat

This 18-track monster drives home one point more than any other: Ryan Adams needs a fucking editor.

Despite its prickly sonics and inaccessible veneer, Isa takes recourse to a privilege of gratuitous futurity, a privilege its cold sheen blinds itself from registering.

There are sounds, but are they melodies? Yes and no. We hear these sounds and get awed by how Lord Raja manages to suspend the belief that they, the sounds, are somehow working to form a whole. Snares and pads and synths. The same formula, a slightly different approach.

Ultimately, Inherit is neither a great nor terrible album. Although it certainly sounds like it was a hell of a lotta fun to record, I don’t think even die-hard fans will get overly excited about it.

Bonfires is certainly a step up on its efficient, bloodless predecessor "God Save The Clientele" and stands up no matter what’s next for the band.

If Watersports paced itself, if it weren’t afraid to be shorter, if it understood the power of precision, it could have been more awe-inspiring.

It sounds dismissive to say that Farm is, undeniably, nothing more than another Dinosaur Jr. record. Yet it is, and if that assertion carries with any ideas of complacency or stock “rock action,” it should also denote the superb craftsmenship inherent in Mascis, Barlow, and Murph’s work.

Whether or not one enjoys Presidence depends largely on whether this practice resonates; and resonance is a highly contingent, subjective process. However, if you do manage to hum along at their frequency and wavelength, you are in for one of the longest, strangest, most well-documented trips in the contemporary indie scene.

There's a ton of great music on this release, but Kinsella ultimately ruins the focus.

While some of the tracks on the album may get bogged down in their own slumped posture, tracks like "The Extremists," "A Go-See," and "Soft Light" are instantly palatable and give a take on the '80s which says, blame the decade, not the music.

His ambition’s got the better of him this time, though: it’s tough to care about the overarching (and admittedly interesting) theme when the component songs aren’t satisfying themselves.

Wonderland isn’t a very good album, but it more than succeeds at being a mess. Is this meant to be a Marxist critique of capitalism, or is it a maximalist celebration of the same? I’d argue that it’s both, but much like Berglund, I have too strong a sense of the fact that I do not understand what it all means.

The straightforward manner in which Disappears present themselves makes it easy to take the album at face value and enjoy its vibe and vigor without worrying about its place in the broader canon.

His legacy is confirmed and almost nothing he does could harm that, but it also seems as though the young bucks of the music world are progressing the framework more so than he.

These songs are alive, but there are too many cooks, and they clutter things with all their different ideas and approaches. Madlib's instrumental interludes are weird and compelling, which is no surprise, but because of the multitude of voices, his influence is more subdued than usual.

If Dani appeared on a few less tracks here, Scale may have been one of the year's finest.

While this doesn’t exactly add up to any profound reinvention of genre, Before a Million Universes thrives best without thinking.

The stronger songs to these brittle ears are the ones that feel like experiments within an album.

While the album can aptly be termed “good,” it isn’t the epic that many might expect, especially to those whose interests have long since shifted away from GN’R’s aesthetic and the younger generation unable to emotionally connect with the sounds.

With so much music released by White Hills, a lot of the tracks end up being mood-lighting (“InWords,” “OutWords,” “The Internal Monologue,” “Circulating”), but the album’s back-half, kicked off by “Forever in Space (Enlightened),” is what keeps me spinning.

As a whole, On Your Own Love Again is a somewhat murkier affair.

Its problems arise not out of any dearth of talent or skill, but out of its unfiltered sincerity and relentless positivity--qualities that are hardly problematic in themselves.

It’s as if the music has already presented itself. But it hasn’t. Titles can’t describe timbres or structures: they can only point to them.

Port Entropy is Tokumaru's fourth widely-available full-length and sees him taking his songs to greater aspirational heights than much of his previous work, which has been characterized more by restraint than indulgence.

Cotonou Club backs up the feeling I got when I saw the group on their recent UK tour, namely that, while they're still very funky, they aren't currently laying the voodoo down like they did on those magic 70s discs.

Taken as a whole, Embrace is an enjoyable album. It’s predictable in places, at times even a little cliché, but it’s executed competently enough that these qualities are forgivable.