[Unpatterns] contains some of the most mature, atmospheric music we've heard from sirs Ford and Shaw - and, periodically, some monstrous grooves pierce through the ambient haze.

Hendy now seems to be making a bid for the sort of omnivorous, stylistically noncommittal psych-hop that's been relatively popular - marking critically acclaimed hip-hop milestones - for more than a decade now.

Although Ghost has an uncanny ability to pair their improvisational style with recognizable structures, there seems to be something missing in the overall design of this album.

Maniac Meat births a few new wrinkles, but it's the same old Linus blanket: comforting, yes, but worn and approaching threadbare status.

It lacks an authorial voice. Since no one made this album, no vision binds it together with its identity--it doesn’t cohere.

Thee Oh Sees construct a serious approach to a non-serious existence, placing value upon both craft and childishness.

So when the repetitive rhythms of 23 don’t bowl you over like the first synth lines of Melody, allow yourself the opportunity to sit through its entirety. What you’ll find is an album that reveals its true personality slowly, surely, and yes, lovingly.

It’s certainly an enjoyable collection of pop songs, but, unfortunately, it’s mostly innocuous and not as remarkable as past efforts.

At best, the record is filled with remnants of bottled anger and expelled demons. At worst, it’s filled with the kind of angsty cries typically read in pouty 14-year-olds’ LiveJournals.

Of course, songs like the playful “Lost My Head There” and the searching “Dust Bunnies” could just as easily be about the consequences of excessive drug consumption or no-less excessive levels of modern stress, yet the persistence of the self-alienation motif amid slanted nods to his career in music end up strongly insinuating that his growing status as a rock icon is weakening the already weak hold he has over himself.

Schmaltziness is the only real pitfall here.

Bright and Vivid is a solid follow-up, one that delivers the same catchy songwriting as Calder's debut while simultaneously opening her work up to a broader instrumental pallet.

Demanding, absorbing, and, for better or worse, never feeling like a cohesive album, Mother of Curses is a collection of shocking truths set to stun the senses.

While Helplessness Blues is sparser and more restrained than its predecessor, it's also spotted by unexpected flourishes that are almost experimental by the band's traditionalist standard.

On an album that quite simply comes up lacking in spots, they provide a healthy dose of the same brilliant elegance found on "Furr."

The album is still frequently guilty of some of the shortcomings that have plagued the band since "Picaresque."

Despite Beep Beep's shortcomings, they do get over on energy alone.

With Creatures of an Hour, Still Corners prove that they can progress beyond this ubiquitous predilection for visual evocation.

Culture II is very long, yes, and vulnerable to momentum-killing duds like “Beast,” but to assess the album as an irreducible work is to cling to an entirely outmoded conception of how music is consumed.

Jaguar Love inject a vicious vitality into their neon-hued rock, and the idea of a dance punk with real fury behind the party is appealing. But in order to avoid being merely irritating or simply diverting, Jaguar Love could benefit from fully unhinging, with an increase in wrath.

Tommy is a kind of maximalist musical confetti, a mostly instrumental amalgamation of jazz, hip-hop, folk, and laid-back electronica. Disparate ideas flit in and out of these songs, often before the listener really has a chance to get acquainted with them.

It's the fragmented experiments that keep Undermind from being a straightforward batch of songs, and they ultimately provide a much-needed balance.

It’s utterly consistent, simply arranged, and scrolls through the bad ideas fast enough to make them forgivable.

I guess whether or not Elevator is worth picking up for you depends on just what you want from Hot Hot Heat. If you liked Make Up the Breakdown, still like it, and want more of the Hot Hot Heat you've come to know and love, then knock that rating up another .5 or so and walk briskly to the nearest record store to buy it.

While the album shows the band refining their sound, it also carries the threat that their future might be too refined, too polished and neat.

All jokings aside, this record is downright GNARLY despite its hang-ups, impossible to wash from the soul and probably the thickest, grittiest substance you ever did see.

Bowerbirds continue to show great potential, with some truly beautiful music along the way, but Upper Air’s most interesting tracks ('Bright Future' and 'Crooked Lust') are the ones that deviate from their core sound.

The Menham Street Band realizes the vision of No Time For Dreaming, with Brenneck at the helm. More Memphis than Detroit, they're always present but never pretentious.

Harmonicraft is a short, sweet collection of pop-metal confectionery, irresistible if not unforgettable.

Very straightforward Interpol-lite.

There are hooks, and as usual Pink has an uncanny ability to worm his 80s-worshipping melodies and one-liners into your head whether you want them there or not, but the grand effect of Dedicated to Bobby Jameson is that of a restless mind finally beginning to slow down, settling into its patterns rather than excitedly seeking new ones, and struggling with one of the most unavoidable, stinging realities of being alive: disappointment.

While the instrumentation gives the impression of self-bricolage, made up of materials from Mac’s own private collection under a particular washed-out filter, the lyrics derive from common property, things like fragments of old clichés and easy rhymes.

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.

Sex with an X is a clear case of The Vaselines boldly going where they have gone before - most of the record more than stands up to many of the nuggets in their tiny back catalog - but maybe that's okay; maybe it's better to have them as they were than to not have them at all.

Kensington Heights matches up each spectacular moment with an equally mundane one.

Eyes At Half Mast seems to be, on one level, an exploration of the horizons of the style of music that Talkdemonic themselves invented, but a lot of it retraces steps already taken, albeit with a noticeable upping of the proverbial ante as far as energy goes.

(k)no(w)here is a really good, enjoyable record that this band has already made twice before, if a little more unevenly in the past.

32 Levels is a line in the sand, rather than a high watermark, for Clams Casino and the genre as a whole; a fertile growth outward, rather than a zeitgeist-recapturing album.

If you've enjoyed Gomez's musical direction in the last six years, you're sure to take pleasure in listening to Split The Difference.

His strengths are all being restrained, but you can tell they're struggling to get free.

Level Live Wires, is almost a pitch-perfect continuation of 2005's "Burner."

12 Desperate Lines takes tried-and-true radio rock tropes and imbues them with enough life to make them feel fresh.

However, palpable in the sound of hej! is the plastic production that in most PC Music releases obscures what severs real from virtual, superficial from sincere, instead exposing that the uncanny excess of the latter grounds the former’s dominion in our minds.

This is what ultimately makes Alphabutt a top-notch kids record: that it was recorded by a woman so in love with her kid and with being a mother that you’d happily let her babysit for your wonderful little creature.

Fishscale is a confusing journey: far from a disappointment, it breathes new life into the legacy of Ghostface without blowing too hard, and for that we should be thankful. But to champion his latest as equal or, god forbid, superior to past albums in any way, shape, or form is laughable, as years-removed and repeated listens will bear out.

While McEntire’s aimlessness feels honest and satisfying in its questing, it also makes for an album with plenty of movement but less, perhaps, in the way of progress.

The Cave Singers, though hobbled by their overly-familiar nature, make sweet, sentimental music. Welcome Joy, despite its rockier bent, is no exception.

The earth will remain unshattered by this release, but that's okay; there'll be time enough for rocking when we're old.

What do these songs evoke? Nothing much in the realm of emotion.

Vs. Children is a pleasant but uncaptivating album, and I’m inclined to believe, especially when confronted by his album’s deliriously enchanting highlights, that Ashworth is spreading himself a little thin at his current pace.

It’s Frightening is far from a bloodless copy of a more vivid being; it is, rather, a living, breathing creation, one that is only dubiously theirs.

I Am Very Far can only be considered a stumble or misstep on a steeply curved scale, yet it proves, even as the shock of the musical pomposity fades and familiarity sets in, to be a less emotionally generative return to the same wells from which Sheff has long drawn.

The album is as stuck in time as a delivered text or dead second cousin. The songs remain the same.

Bird’s simultaneous engagement with the words and distance from the material free his delivery to keep the album feeling lighter than I’ve implied.

“Harpies” is emblematic of the issue that prevents Glynnaestra from being an unblemished success, since despite its enveloping airs, the instrumental does often reverberate as a little undercooked and sketched out, as if it were the anticipatory intro to a more expansive and consequential piece. A significant minority of the album’s tracks could be charged with this offense, because for all their sheen and arch-modernism, they often don’t build upon their ostensibly innovative foundations.

Without an adequate treatment or storyboard, [I Decided] feels listless and wanting immediate predicate. It lacks a ready place on the shelf.

It all adds up to something that is far less than a great record, but those who approach Distant Relatives can expect at least a handful of keepers for the summer months.

Autodrama feels just several adjustments away from fullness.

Pillars of Ash is the body in transition, all crumble and ovation, an album that celebrates a human voice and exists in a world without it.

The listener is unfulfilled at the album's end. We learn nothing new about Sole, who's the only character on the album.... There's nothing to grip on to. All the lyrics are observations twisted into weak witticisms.

ARTPOP wants to hide that it doesn’t have much to say.

Magik Markers seemingly forget their own warnings and regain their former wily intransigence, ending the album with a threesome of songs that return them to sonically murky territory, as if suddenly realizing that in fact they’d been trying to uncover something in this murk rather than striving to bury themselves in it.

I'm sure purists would prefer to snag the recently remastered originals as opposed to this Gift, even though those older fans would be able to appreciate this album most.

Tracer glimmers with the CD-ROM gleam of early-90s intelligent techno.

Each record is made for the true believers, but this new one should at least bring a few more into the fold.

While the rest of the album flirts with the shivering, uncomfortable mood found on 'Since I Came,' it infrequently equals it.

Schoolboy Q is neither a great lyricist nor a technically dazzling rapper.... Happily then, the production on Oxymoron is uniformly solid.

The dull interludes and derivative sound of "Close Forever Watching" prevent Owl Splinters from achieving the promise intimated by its standouts. It's a noticeable improvement over Pale Ravine, but perhaps not what one might expect after six years of hibernation.

Putnam doesn't seem to be striving for something new, and if a new lineup isn't shaking up the formula, it’s likely that the music community shouldn't expect something new either.

Overall, however, Money is hit-or-miss. The less structured tracks often get lost in the shuffle, resulting in stretches of floundering in between the more highly developed tracks.

Ultimately, Tanglewood Numbers is a pretty good record for the Silver Jews and a very good record if you like chimey, talky, uncool indie rock.

Silicon Tare sounds like 2010, which could be a good thing, depending on how you look at it.

Remember Your Black Day has some great moments--the eight-minute title track, with its hyper-pulse percussion and somber synth strains, is a solid incarnation of what made Vatican Shadow so compelling in the first place--but it’s surrounded by a mixed bag of tunes that either attempts some agoraphobic tightrope walk before falling flat or wrestles with contrasting ideas that weaken the project’s potency as opposed to crystallizing it.

Despite its shortcomings, Always Want is a debut that shows considerable promise and a willingness to test the boundaries of the singer-songwriter framework.

After awhile, the monotony becomes wearing. Television Man is a disappointment in the sense that it’s a lot of the same, save for the two instrumental tracks, based on keyboards, that sound like attempts at making warped VHS soundtrack music.

Unlike Patton's previous forays into the experimentalism of John Zorn or Merzbow, Mondo Cane delivers a more conventional set, heavy on romantic strings and swaying nostalgia.

While far from easy listening, the mechanics of NYC sound positively pastoral, and the interplay between Reid and Hebden, formerly spastic and indebted to the free-est of jazz, is now melodic, the give and pull of the rhythmic forces against the melodic textures gentler, and the songs more likely to cause subtle head-bobbing and confused stares.

Return to Love is a sticky, sweat-drenched spiritual that commands attention with each wrenching power chord. Far from any aesthetic bait-and-switch, the album marks a slow maturation, a deep breath of chordal refinement that for once feels like an honest distillation of form.

Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is a weepy response to the Postal Service.

Contains a set of willingly - and often tedious - half-finished songs, forming a clumsy collage (cover art reference) that is actually more coherent and better enjoyed when contextualized within the band's 34-year trajectory.

Transistor Rhythm is an album with a thin atmosphere. There is little reverberation, just repetition, vocal samples repeating without degrading.

In lieu of messing around in the dark fringes of slightly bizarre café music, Free The Bees is a straight up rock album more in line with Iron Butterfly and the Small Faces than Morcheeba or Quantic.

The middle third of pom pom gives itself over relentlessly to schlock and dross for the purpose of exposing deeper truths on the way.

This new approach is graceful but weary, with mixed results throughout.

Many of the tracks are begging to be played live in full force, as most of them, to be sure, sound unfulfilled here on CD.

Drunk’s a chill listen, but it’s also a restless one.

Melt-Banana prove with Fetch that they can twist their peculiar universe into something more cordial, but one that forfeits a certain part of their penchant for risk.

If you've been pining for a fresh take on the libidinous funk of yesteryear, or looking to go back to prurient, carefree days of teenage infatuation, the National Trust is for you, ooo, ooo, yeahhhhhhh.

It sounds promising at first, but then it slumps into a bed of mediocrity that Toro y Moi has already proved he is more than capable of avoiding.

Mirror Eye is just as solid in its own pop culture reductionism as Moon Safari or Before The Dawn Heals Us. It’s just that the hooks here are more textural than musical.

Compton itself is a part of this little something too, because even though it fails to make a clear artistic statement, it houses some of the finest hip-hop production Dre has turned in for years, and proves that the city has much more going for it than just a bad reputation.

The more lukewarm segments of Ghosthorse weigh its worth down like saddlebags filled with iron, particularly the trip-hop confessional sections. But even these lesser moments contribute to a greater good when all is said and done, adding up to a slightly cinematic experience best witnessed with full attention fixed on the little details.

The songs on Pyramid serve admirably as precise and severe mood pieces; they are great for rocking out to while one devotes half a mind to something else.

For Years is at its best when Airhead is working in the first of these modes, the more melodic one.

It continues to be true that instrumental synth of this caliber is a perfect backdrop, but today it gives the impression of digital trompe-l’œil, a backdrop devoid of foreground, a Real Hero as crash test dummy.

There is a deeply impressive EP to be found on this album.

As progressive and interesting as Wilderness the band is, Vessel States is not a great leap forward for them, and those who appreciated [their debut] will probably be underwhelmed with the band's latest offering.

I’d rather be listening to Magnificent Fiend’s antecedents.