Ingenious in its conception as a soundtrack, weak and tedious as a standalone musical venture, an interminable experience despite its brevity.

All these various elements are arranged like a sleek showroom with smooth glass surfaces, a few international flourishes, maybe a pair of funky modernist chairs in the corner; it all sounds like a seamless, impersonal, cosmopolitan package.

Alpinisms is an undoubtedly singular album, setting the bar quite high for this burgeoning trio.

As much as The Garden departs from past Zero 7 albums generically, it ultimately falls into the same trap: it readily signifies pop accessibility, but fails to communicate more than a vague aura.

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.

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

There is something powerful about the chaos of these recordings: it evades critique in that, at its best moments, the instrument becomes a force of nature.

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

Nary a fragment of the 10 compositions sounds even a bit out of place; new ideas are explored, and not at the expense of the listener; and, perhaps best of all, a mongrel of a talent finally lets his instincts to ROCK REALLY FUCKING HARD take over.

Some of the catchiest songs he's ever written.

They've got that sound--you'll know immediately that you'll like it, and this time around, Grooms don't screw around with your certainty.

The satisfaction at being amongst those who make it through to the other side threatens to supplant the sonic satisfaction, but there's nothing artificial about it; if anything, it's flat-out welcoming.

Each song feels like it belongs as filler between other more upbeat tracks. Isolated, some of the tracks can be enjoyable, but as an album, Paranoid Cocoon disappoints.

The album is not a total loss, however. When Bad Religion turn to more interesting subject matter, the results are more than worthwhile.

If Tegan and Sara were looking to release something which sounds like so much of the girl based rock, which can be found on TRL and on the radio waves, then they could most likely consider So Jealous a wild success.

YG’s songs about women are just clumsy from a basic storytelling standpoint, rehashing the same clichés that you’d find on a Hotep Facebook group. It stunts the flow of 4REAL 4REAL. ... But while he oftentimes plays the role of hyper-masculine rapper, he also defines his anxiety in deeply traumatic and thorough ways. He has a knack for boisterous exuberance, stressing the finer things while being relatable to regular people on every block in every town.

I admire the boldness of the album's sequencing more than I admire any of its individual tracks.

Waterfall is promising, but it’s perhaps the first Evian Christ release that hasn’t amazed me.

King for a Day will definitely ‘love you long time’ with its bloated tracklisting, but you’ll soon realize that the attention-getting devices are working in reverse. Sure, they’ll cause you to crook your neck and gaze curiously, but once it all comes into focus, you’re likely to move on to better things.

This album will please a lot of people looking for a more “punk” twist on past minimalism, but while that’s great, my ears are on a search for something fresher.

I’m deflated again, as all Gonzalez does with this blank canvas for electronic experimentation is cycle two chords over and over with a little synth sprinkled on top.

Widow City is by far the band’s toughest-as-nails record yet, with Matthew incessantly setting fire to the stage.

Every track on Axes offers something exciting for those who care to listen.

The overall air of the album would probably be more new-wave influenced trip-hop but Lock's sure and steady raga forges Rawar to a more funky-dub feel.

On “Fuck Me Out” and “Billy Not Really,” both these dissections of Ride and the brutal rearrangements of Björk’s vocal and fidgety programming would push the ensemble’s rough, nasty but compelling sound to new levels if they hadn’t already perfected it on The Money Store. Instead, what is achieved on niggas on the moon is something that speaks differently but through the same terms.

For the consummate BSP fan, Valhalla Dancehall will likely be met as a sufficient new entry in the band's growing discography, but for a fella like me on the periphery, I'll need a lot more of the standout experimentation of Living Is So Easy to convince me.

The one knock on this record is that it just isn’t very dynamic, as too many of the tracks fail to strike with the impact of truly great efforts. There are exceptions, of course, and the drumming on the fantastic 'Skeleton Man' propels the track with a driving momentum that’s too often missing on The Evening Descends.

With Moon 2, Ava Luna modestly succeed along the same rubric that we apply when we listen to Steely Dan or Daft Punk: the result is impressive, pleasant, and inventive, but ultimately feels too insubstantial for us to garner much from it.

Though hardly a radical departure from the baroque-pop template set by that debut, The Orchard is more mannered, fussy, and prim than its predecessor, exact and instrumentally articulate in ways that evoke no one more than Ms. Bush.

It's more pleasant than arresting.

The Fiery Furnaces have made one of the most ambitious and, quite likely, one of the best records of 2004.

Although everything here is at drum-and-bass tempo, White approaches each track from wildly different directions.

This is no walk in the park, it has to be said, but Wolf is going to be remembered as the record that sees Tyler deploying his tact as an astute beat-maker and a producer more than allowing his reputation as a Satan-worshiping neo-fascist to swell any further. Musically, it’s a step in the right direction.

Lantern comes off like Birchard wallowing in an uncharacteristic and blissful tedium.

Sequitur contains powerful resonances with the past, and it certainly reorganizes some beautiful moments that have been left behind, but some of these moments were left there for a reason.

Even though …and then you shoot your cousin never quite betrays its allegiance to either criticism or satire and is consequently an awkward, variable amalgam of both, it offers something important in its efficacy to disrupt that logic and pave out a new line of progression for a mature act.

Dry Land Is Not a Myth fails for two reasons that could have been easily corrected: (1) rock albums, especially rock albums purporting to be "psychotropic," should never be produced by artists whose primary working medium is the remix, and (2) Church's weird, pinched vocal delivery, which the editor remedies with a variety of fixes characteristic of overproduced music (see point 1).

Wilson continues to rehash southern California culture with increasingly less perspective, further eschewing the untamed adolescent aesthetic by including stuffy musical theater elements and a top-down point-of-view that’s more clumsy analysis than sincere memoir.

Despite expectations, it’s an utter joy to listen to--a simple display of what 21 Savage sounds like when he’s having fun rapping.

These Days is full of potentially enlightening ideas, and its beats and hooks are often mesmerizing, yet Ab-Soul spreads himself too thin here, his abstraction resulting from a kind of undertaken emaciation, a renunciation of tangible substance in favor of nebulous spiritual impressionism rather than from a perspective-driven distortion of this album’s strong central themes.

Despite its many retreads, Semicircle is still occasionally enjoyable, and that it manages to exist without a modicum of urgency or intellectual rigor is okay with me.

What Emblems lacks in youthful charm it makes up in its confident and solid delivery.

She's just as accomplished as a woodsy singer-songwriter as she is a synth-pop Star.

This game of literal musical chairs completely cripples The Most Serene Republic’s musical aims to the point that the album’s 40-minute runtime feels 20 minutes too long.

It's a solid reminder that it's tough to grow your rock up, but worth working toward, and Fantastic Explanations is a solid record demonstrating the results.

The album as a whole falls short of offering us anything new or of exceeding quality in relation to either Porras' other projects or the work of similarly-minded artists. Still, Black Mesa is an unmistakably effective, quality genre piece by an artist highly invested in the form.

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.

While his contrived sonic and visual aesthetics do much to explain the thinness of Smoke, they do not justify it.

But even with Brooke’s uncharacteristically romantic epiphanies, The Grand Archives still occasionally tends toward predictable sentimentality.

The battle between the cream and the shit ends in a perpetual give and take, but it's the positives of A Hundred Miles Off we will remember in the long run.

Let it also be said that Jemima Pearl’s voice has improved in a myriad of ways; throughout Be Awkward, she wails, rally-cries, and (especially on 'Becky') croons with a range of emotions that were bereft in previous recordings. If there’s one thing Be Awkward has in common with BYOP’s first effort, it’s the fact that it runs a bit long.

Rapor doesn’t push any boundaries or break the speed of light, but it constructs its fragile, fervid, and elegant confections with laserlike precision.

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

Depending on how one looks at it, The People's Key might even be understood as the culmination of a long and troublesome trajectory Bright Eyes began as a teenager's bedroom project in the mid-90s.

“Wild Strawberries” and “Enchanter’s Nightshade,” which occupy over 30 minutes of the album. They are mid-tempo, trad-to-the-max, predictable clean-tone psych-music.... Yes, there’s strong guitar playing, and the bass and drums plod capably, but it stays in the background and never enters the head. The record suddenly feels awkwardly escapist, and the listener is reminded that the whole disc actually feels rather laid-back.

Whimsical waltzing and barefoot stomping, warm 'n' fuzzy resurrections of soothing old-tyme indie-baroque-pop shimmies for sunset revelry, splashed upon buoyant, Northern African-influenced rhythms and shining with the silky gloss of a keyed-up, Eastern-Euro-tinged lounge sashay.

All the things that give an album its personality--the sound of a band finding its feet, the little tempo fluctuations, the requisite "are we rolling, Bob?" fits and starts--are here in spades.

Ghostory is well on par with the strident ephemera to which followers of this project have become accustomed.

The music won't knock you on your ass, but the overall delivery is a real treat, if you go in for this sort of thing.

There is indeed more good than bad. Unfortunately, there is also more bad than there should be.

When Joyner’s at his best, he can break hearts in the most hopeful way possible; in these moments, he is as reinvigorating as a much-needed cry. But most of the songs on this album lack this quality, instead coming off as contrived and, as a result, harder to relate to.

While MU.ZZ.LE isn't thrilling, in the suspense film sense, it manages to strike a rewarding middle ground between comfort and pain, simplicity and difficulty.

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

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.

Lonely Twin is a unified creation, concerned from start to finish with existential idee fixes like death and despair, and how humanity deals with those universals.

Nothing can be a comfortable resting point, not only for Zomby, but also, symbolically, for the whole dubstep scene, a brief and peaceful pit stop for mental refueling and contemplation of the followed path in the vertiginous, intricate, never-ending electronic music circuit.

Throughout Invisible Violence, Ortiz traffics in the kind of sea-and-eye-centric imagery and bloated abstractions that might cause an adult listener to strain whatever muscle is associated with rolling ones eyes.

The majority of tunes on offer here do very little to build on the ideas and panache exposed on Soft Control.

Infinite Arms is a confusing, schizophrenic work. Several of its earlier tracks find the band clicking like never before and exploring fresh ideas while sounding more aerodynamic than ever. But so much else seems to have been haphazardly thrown together, as if the band never even entered the same room during the recording process.

Brightblack Morning Light retain a signature, singular, salient sound and still refuse to nudge their songs forward at anything but a crawling pace.

A casual, only slightly-different-than-usual release smothered in atmosphere with one solid R&B song (that’s reportedly been kicking around in a vault for a while) left stranded in the album’s penultimate slot.

It is somewhat disappointing that they would play it so safe at this stage in their creative life.

Austere without the compulsion of self-restraint and experimental without the drag of formlessness, The House confirms Porches’ primacy as indie-dance mavens.

Pyramids would serve as a helluva soundtrack to a dream I once had, a lucid dream around age 10 wherein I woke up within the dream, realized I was in a dream, and acted accordingly. Super accordingly.

There's a great, brisk evening stroll quality here, drifting imperceptibly between wistful and paranoid.

This is their best album in years, but there’s no real progression here. Ono’s mindfuck of a performance is proof: when a band needs to include such bizarreness as their record’s experimental centerpiece, perhaps they are working a little too hard to prove their expressive worth.

Ghost Games is nothing so profound, but it certainly is something to bring out of the closet once a year or so.

Nocturnes points the way out, with Hesketh having demonstrated not only the willingness and the ability to grow and develop, but also to retain a sense of her individuality and a keenness for what may set Little Boots apart from the rest.

We get tiny tastes of levity, but scarcely the sort of wit we’re used to.

The compositions here are rich, complex, and moving, and they consistently bring out the best in their (very talented) collaborators.

Blunt has proven himself to be a master participant in this aesthetic float-game, and The Narcissist II is his demented billet-doux to the gratification that continues to elude.

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

The result is a rap album that fundamentally challenges the notion of what a compilation is.

LaValle’s been trading in spitshined tonal conventions and vacuum-sealed beauty for quite some time now, and this might well be his best effort at putting it to record. But there are already three Album Leaf LPs that do this exact same thing, and the prospect of him doing that thing slightly better simply fails to excite.

Ultimately, High Places have succeeded in doing something that, on paper, seems an impossibility: they've managed to make an album that is undeniably focused around rhythms sound like an absolute slog.

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.

As a straight-ahead listen though, it’s oddly paced.

It’s not a terrible album. It’s not a spectacular train wreck. It is, in fact, so remarkably unremarkable that neither a glowing nor incinerating score feel deserved.

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.

The impressions made are that the sublime, the relinquishing of the self can only come with work and time. “-” seems to come from a similar place as The King of Limbs’ latter tracks, which speaks to the notion of human fallibility and fragility, helping make News From Nowhere a decidedly beautiful album.

As good a distillation of pop's best qualities as I've heard all year.

Maybe Warzone is better understood as a deep-cut career retrospective than a singular album. Despite its stylistic consistency, the record is uneven and only its closing track, a reworking of “Imagine,” will ring any bells to those casually familiar with Ono’s work.

Here, then, is a songwriter capable of drawing remarkable depth from swinging pop-rock, crafting a distinctive voice among an oversaturated pop-music landscape and leaving a front-to-back winner of an LP as evidence.

Harbors feels mannered, genteel even; the aesthetic is humanness within mechanical complexity, as the jet wings, lungs, and eye on the album art suggest.

Musically, Somewhere Else treads the ground between organic performance and arrangement, as well as the efficiently expansive possibilities of minimalism and pop in electronic music.

If you like the Super Furry Animals you will definitely enjoy this album.

RTX’s Western Xtermintor packs an undeniable hard-rock punch and leaves no question that the band have both the chops and the attitude to back it up.

e Kranky audience is likely to find the work here to be a charming retrospective. Newcomers should approach Reinhardt’s stuff as a pretty gateway to an era whose ideas continue to fertilize today’s pop.