It’s not that The Opera Circuit doesn’t sound pleasant, or that his lyrics aren’t solid; they just don’t hit me as being all that moving or even mildly engaging.

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.

In the end, Opticks sounds nothing like Norway, but it's still quite a trip. Artful, spooky, groovy, human, it sounds like anywhere and nowhere on Earth.

A little more feeling would have gone a long way towards elevating The Camel’s Back into memorable territory. As it stands, whatever magic the album might have mustered has been smothered in the womb.

This album fits into the venerable history of The Ex and will make you want to dig out the old albums, too. History, as the band told us back in 1982, is what's happening now.

Even without the haunting, almost phantasmagoric washes of guitar that dominated the previous two albums and despite the newfound prominence of robust and well-rounded melodic work that was previously largely swept aside by it, Tamaryn’s new late-80s/early-90s sensitive pop still possesses something of the signature melancholia that inspired her earlier output with Shelverton.

Admittedly, it may not furnish any musical diagrams of how to move from A to B, but in its own illogical way, it succeeds in submerging us deeper into A.

With Little Honey Williams has once again assured her fanbase that she is incapable of releasing an album that is anything less than collection-worthy and wholly listenable.

Overall: Fair.

Never ratcheted up over a pleasantly throbbing pulse, this is music as anti-depressant, mood enhancer, and muscle relaxant.

Helena Costas and Danger Mouse combine the former’s folk pop proclivities with the latter’s penchant for hip-hop and psychedelia, and the results are mostly awkward and cumbersome.

I find myself disappointed with Plague Park despite its elusive initial luster. The good news is it’s an easy fix: Hire a band.

Life is Sweet! depicts a gifted artist taking a very solid step on the road to self-discovery. He's just wrestling with the palpable anxiety of influence at the moment.

Despite To Rococo Rot's placid rejection of any exceptionally radical artistic statement, there is a grace and deft care taken on the record not to buoy the stately jams with textural shifts, but to interlock the two in an elegant way that's impressive to the discerning listener. Nevertheless, this is a somewhat uninspiring recording.

Possibly the most confident and successful of this third phase of Black Dice, the pieces here make no claims to exist as anything but the welcoming and obtuse freaks of rhythms gone awry.

Barter 6 is an obvious, tight application of Thug’s lawless style brought into the space of a linear album, letting his flow drip and collect in horizontal spaces, as opposed to being sharply crafted like in his iconic hits, “Stoner,” “Danny Glover,” and “Lifestyle.”

TRST is a f**king great dance record. While it is so much more than this as well, considering the negative connotations "dance" can have within much music discourse, it's initially, at least, the album's most notable appeal.

While Franciotti's work is far from unique in its revival both of lo-fi synth panoramas and of ambient experimentalism, the combination and alternation of the two allows Forever a certain originality beyond other musicians mining either one or the other vein.

It’s good because, beneath his relentless hedonistic pursuits and idealistic belief in the nobility of the unruly drum loops, Future preserves a romantic’s perspective on his panoply of inconsequential street life and crystalline musings from within the studio.

The guitars are jangly and questionably tuned; the drums are doused in whiskey but always manage to keep the train moving; and the vocals are passionately out-of-key but always a perfect companion to the aesthetic and historical world they float within.

While keeping the same mix of hushed beauty and spooky old-time feel, Holland seems much more direct and confident, a forwardness that risks losing some of the mystery, but instead ups the awe factor.

Slowly, quietly, with near-complete calm, Fall Forever edges the listener into that space of total fragility.

The lyrics here are sparse and, as with most of the album, indiscernible. It’s rare that a rock album could be so enjoyable without a great presence of the English language, but Person to Person certainly is.

The problem is that what’s left--the imagined everything about this record--is that it just sounds like someone lamenting a one-night stand that ended too soon, some kind of physical communication that feels like it could have gone so much deeper and become so much more emotional.

Zonoscope is far from an outright failure, just more severe of a backslide than expected.

The LP isn’t internally coherent, isn’t particularly successful on its own terms, which is probably more of a sin than any imputed association with this or that philosophy could ever be.

Gold Panda shows himself to be a more mature, more skilled architect of sound, creating vast textures that expertly render the materiality of his samples.

Their most concise yet dense and appealing album since their first non-album, Description Of The Harbor.

Ultimately, Nas’ decision to sacrifice lyrical and aesthetic sensibility for controversy, hype, and pop-appeal exposes the commodification and hollowness of his artistic voice and vision.

Listening to this album suggests a universe of unheard information beyond the reach of understanding and perception, of phenomena both too brief and too enormous for us to comprehend.

So what if Scissor Sisters aren't challenging the conventions of pop music?... [Ta-Dah is] great and will please their fans.

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.

All of the delicate, precious tom buildups that segue into invariably lofty choruses, all laced with the same pining slide guitars, overlay the record with a strummy, mid-tempo delirium that sets in once the considerable swagger of the first three tracks wears off.

Splazsh evokes mood on a larger scale than Hazyville, increasing possibilities by stepping up production technique and stylistic variety, but it continues to focus on music's effect on the mind by allowing technique to undermine and contradict itself.

What you will get with From A Compound Eye is your typical gourmet spread of Pollard delicacies from the modern eras of Bob.

These tracks are lifeless, and the multitude of sounds turns to mud, eventually eating itself.

They’ve become one of the most prolific staples of the American underground. And it’s there that Nude With Boots is a sound and welcome contribution.

Lily’s nonchalant declarations of self-esteem leave me cold. And as soon as she traded generically upbeat ska/reggae samples for a bunch of ho-hum electropop beats, she became indistinguishable from her imitators.

Everything about the album seems so careful, from the presentation to the songs themselves.

The Like Young don't really veer from their predetermined path too often. They diddle around with loops and what-not occasionally like the rest of us, but their vision is singular, dedicated to the sort of buzz-heavy power-pop that's tough to resist.

What saves the album from musically becoming a boring, going-through-the-motions exercise is Imperial Teen’s ability to write good hooks.

As a whole, Reefer has proven its capacity for producing sunshine hits, but only time will tell if it will be able to push itself past the spaced-out beaches of Maui and towards more diverse soundscapes.

The musical accompaniment, courtesy of his more-famous friends in The Minus 5, is solid, workmanlike. Unfortunately, the vocals are placed front and center, and Harding’s inflection puts added emphasis on embarrassing lyrics.

Alien in a Garbage Dump sounds like the work of a noise veteran relaxing and trying out whatever comes to mind, tossing out ideas without worrying if every one of them sticks. And in this case, this approach yields considerable rewards, the noise equivalent of summertime jams.

Sic Alps are clearly both miles ahead of and miles away from their peers. Napa Asylum only further proves this.

The eponymous Stygian Stride LP might come from a period of psychological and technical excavation, but the music stands on its own in the halls of modern electronic music and psychedelia.

There are some solid points buried deep down in the wreckage of Cole’s seven-bar pileup, but you’ll have to sift through a great, big, ambivalent pile of solecisms in order to get to them. As it turns out, that holds true for the vast majority of Born Sinner.

It’s a welcome change of pace from what comes before it, but it’s equally dull and is very reminiscent of Butterfly from Weezer’s "Pinkerton." Take what you will from that comparison.

The execution may be on point, but the personality is absent, the ideas are fewer, and the experience is all-up flat, no matter how raw and flashy the playing.

When all's said and done, too much of the album sounds dated and uninspired.

It is, like so many other pop albums, the kind of thing that grows on you and ferments into an incredible entity.

The thrill of Flux Outside is that, if it had its way, it wouldn't stick around either.

Codes and Keys is littered with PDA for Gibbard's new celebrity wife Zooey Deschanel, but this especially garish monument to his muse would have been better placed on one of her She & Him album-wafers.

While Other Truths seems like Do Make Say Think’s attempt to re-articulate these active, forward-looking principles, they instead end up stagnating, reaching an unfortunate dead-end.

It’s a thoroughly digestible record, then, freed from the downstroke neuroses that basically defined Hot Snakes or the labyrinthine catharsiscore mounted and milked by Jehu.

Family is a work of purpose, from a band whose previously wandering attention-spans rendered any chance of artistic success accidental.

Constellations is a work of exquisite beauty, coming from a group that grows by leaps and bounds with every release.

Nadler's shortest and sparsest full-length yet. The decision to limit it to little more than a handful of tracks ensures it's succinct and absent of any songs I could comfortably call 'bad' or even 'not good,' but it also means there's no room for any of the risks that made her older work so fresh and adventurous.

With Childish Prodigy, his debut for indie-juggernaut Matador, Kurt Vile stretches and pulls the increasingly annoying “lo-fi” tag into interesting new shapes, distancing himself from his Woodsist-kin.

Unfortunately, for all the polish and gut that Grammy-winning producer Vance Powell brings to help turn diarrhea to gold, the songs lack idiosyncrasy, and Diarrhea Planet’s winking anachronistic irony is lost.

The Future Will Come blooms incrementally, driven from the ground by the grittiest keyboard performance heard on a dance album in some time.

It has a very laidback, late night, smoky loft vibe going on.

However, after one has settled in to the comforts of "Daughters," a shriek comes swooping down in the form of Daniel Smith's falsetto voice. Even on these faster-paced tracks, where Smith's falsetto demands less attention, it is impossible to deny this is the shortcoming of Brother Is to Son.

It’s rare for musicians to age so gracefully (and regardless, no one in Joan of Arc is really old either), and yet here one finds the band mellowing a bit from the over-exuberance of their early output while still retaining the ability to engage and be inventive.

Plaintive, spare, and narrative in approach, these songs--which seem to bookend the album--are among Raposa’s most affecting.

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

Fab and singer Rodrigo Amarante (of Rio De Janeiro’s Los Hermanos) affect the heavy hearts of coastal lounge singers yet retain the resilience of city kids who can’t be beat. Although backup singer Binki Shaprio is too feathery to really make an impact, the sum of Little Joy’s sincere regret and wide-eyed optimism lend a bedroom intimacy to the group’s debut.

As much as Stephens desires for a naturalist/humanist authenticity found in the limits of the extremes of existence, The Bloom and the Blight achieves an equal subjectivity that Stephens searches for.

Terra clearly isn't meant for a sun-soaked day at the beach. It's meant for quiet evenings at home, for slow living, for monotonous days of insularity, idealized but never unrealistic.

Poppy and breezy to the point of being nauseating.

Ultimately, Galactic Melt is like a good bartender: approachable without being overbearing, reminding you of past buddies while keeping a slight but not uncomfortable distance&hellip and fading into context, so that when you wake up the next day there's nothing more than a pleasant gap in your memory.

“The Line,” “Winter Queen,” and “Wingsuit” share in the rest of the album’s sterile, self-parodying style of production, but set themselves apart with their uncommon catchiness relative to the rest of Phish’s studio discography.

Imperial Teen sound here like they're trying to squeeze some new flavor out of a chewed-up piece of gum.

Once again, the limits of music and musicianship are foregrounded in Popp's relentless pursuit of the horizon afforded by a particular disposition of limits: the limits of imagination, of technology, of process, the organic and the inorganic.

After many detailed listens, the record feels like their strongest yet, a bold statement considering the importance of their previous works.

Bozulich has amassed a band and baptized it with the name of her last record, and together they careen through a broken itinerary of radiant darkness.

Mike Patton's The Solitude of Prime Numbers stands for the most part as a collection of missed opportunities, which ironically is its triumph.

The Next Logical Progression, is evidence of a serious identity crisis.

It's just a little sad to hear Mike giving in to conventionality, even if he does do it better than most.

The Endless Not is ultimately a testament to getting it right, even after a lengthy separation, and proves that getting old doesn’t mean that you have to suffer loss of potency.

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.

The acoustic slide guitar that opened "Fourteen Autumns" could have broken up some of this monotony. But it’s powerful monotony. It begs you to listen to it.

Tidings then, is a journey down a strip of tape from one reel to the other. Yes, it’s a little warped and damaged, but that’s what gives it its character; the insane parts make the most sense of all.

The combination of this 'throwback to '96' sound with confident restraint, and that Quasi have already proven themselves to the die-hards, I'm going to call this timeless underdoggery.

Blade of the Ronin’s greatest success lies not in avoiding the commonplace, but rather in their commitment to pre-SDCC juvenilia, as well as to a more holistic sense of sincerity.

The only thing keeping The Death Set from being remarkably original is the repetition of Siera’s beloved drum machine.

Duality pervades Gumption. City and country. Natural, machine. Personal, abstract. Song. Noise.

Rather than make broad statements about the nature of modern existence, Doiron takes an authorial approach, crafting brief but potent vignettes about bikes, minivans, and lovers walking through small towns.

Landing well above a genre bedeviled by the twin albatrosses of solipsistic whining and overwrought political grandstanding, lyrically Sollee's songs feel well-worn yet sturdy. But they stand out chiefly because the array of melodic and textural effects available to a cellist is much different than your run-of-the-mill fingerpickin' crooner.

What Batoh offers us here is a snapshot of a despondent, acousmatic psychogeography - a grief-stricken poetics wherein the blank nirvana-impulse of the Shinto rite of chinkonsai jars against the bleeding-edge caterwaul of his BPM machine.

They are uniformly wise and lovely, and by turns elliptical, sad, even political, whatever.

In Between still contains its predecessor's youthful spirit, if not exactly matching its energy. It's evident that replacing those muddling walls of noise with a cleaner, distinct, and more organized approach to songwriting hasn't affected the band's knack for capturing the melody and feel of early shoegaze.

The band's tight, and every song contains at least a few interesting musical ideas, but the album as a whole comes across less like a creative mess and more like a stoned-battle-of-the-bands gone wrong.

While it is simply impossible to duplicate the raw power and energy of [Vaudeville Villian], the newly resurrected Viktor proffers a tolerable continuation of his street hustle and ice-cold thuggery.

The Greatest Gift may not contain all the insight and manifest artistry of one of Stevens’s studio albums, at the very least, it reasserts his perspicacious understanding of his complex emotions and propensity for self-evaluation.

Land and Fixed suffers from a dearth of arresting moments, and the songs that do stand out typically only do so by directly aping well-worn standards.

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.

Gonzalez' voice is beautiful, but it doesn't have the emphatic uniqueness to carry the album on its own, while the songwriting, though producing gems like the EBTG-esque, understated "Mind & Eyes" is just uneven enough to fade occasionally into the background.