The dichotomy between the agonies of face-melting and beatific singing has long been a Pterodactyl motif, but this time the guitar wizardry takes a nonetheless threatening backseat to the structure of the songs.

Where it is intellectually interesting, it may not be aurally satisfying.

Poetry aside, none of these 14 songs are highlights of any of the three artists’ vast catalogs. The stories and the production alike are pure sunshine, which often passes into the saccharine.

Exquisite Corpse's saving grace is that there is enough variety to its ensemble of guest performers to keep the listener somewhat interested.

Share The Joy sees our own Vivians enter into a similar contretemps: locking horns with death and with demons (literally, on "Trying To Pretend"), they achieve a narrative victory that nonetheless remains, for the auditor, a work in progress.

This exact formula probably will function well with the new listeners, although it's hard to imagine someone appreciating Buck65 for all he's worth without being familiar with his earlier work.

It's Nurses' funky dance pop album, and thankfully they've also conjured up some irresistibly catchy melodies to complement them.

Foreign Body has moments of generous lucidity. Yet it struggles to find a foothold amid a flood of ideas, as if each performer were vaguely unsure about her role.

As the album unfolds, there is a genericness of atmosphere that, while not unpleasant, fails to blossom into anything more

He's best when he's less accessible.

Instead of commanding attention, Relief allows it to drift, preventing the listener's final escape into the contentless void of sonic oblivion.

When they get it right - as they do on half of Personal Life - The Thermals are a joy to behold.

Although it does falter at times with a seeming complacency ("Meridian," "Colony"), it is mostly characterized by a quiet ambition. It’s gutsy and its gutsiness pays off.

That mainstreaming of queerness and breaching of boundaries is the context, spirit, and thesis of Pictureplane's second album, Thee Physical.

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.

Far from essential, Hvarf/Heim can merely be looked at as a stop-gap before the next proper record.

Tomorrow Today sees Seeland headed in the right direction with solid, well-constructed songs, but the group should consider shaking themselves out of their languid state before releasing another album.

With Love’s desire to obscure any traces of the artistic hand that made it is both its most compelling trait and what ultimately prevents it from ascending to the aesthetic nirvana it imagines.

The Real Feel is a solid step in the right direction, both sonically and lyrically.

Not everything on Shape Shift With Me fits like “333,” which fits plenty, and hits hearts. Some of the hyper-syllabic loose-lyric delivery of “Norse Truth” drags baggy, some of the mixed political/personal imagery of “Suicide Bomber” bogs down what the song wants. Like want and love and bodies, songs won’t always feel good.

The River & The Thread transcends its geographical markers. It is an open-hearted piece of Americana, filled with music that is literate, narrative, and just a little bit strange.

His subtle turns of phrase and shifts in volume manage to achieve immersive depth even when the interplay of sax, strings, electronics, and drums otherwise lacks color.

It's not like Again and Again is a terrible album; in fact, it's an almost uniformly enjoyable one.

While it does have moments where the listener is reminded of why they love power-pop, Together ends up sounding too vocally divided as an album and at times too top-heavy with orchestral arrangements.

An album in which a majority of the heavy lifting is performed by the extra-textual aspects of the project, providing undeserved depth to a series of obsessive repetitions of the banal.

Too much of Disconnect From Desire is an interchangeable muddle of middling drum programming and Teflon Liz Fraser vocals.

Listeners looking for a long-term relationship are advised to look elsewhere or lower their expectations for love.

Even though the evidence isn’t excessively rife on Aerotropolis, it’s clear that somewhere under the shiny, retrogressive hedonism and 4/4 decadence, there’s a voice trying to escape the easy confines it has found for itself.

The energy imparted simply can’t overcome a drowning of influences, or rather, the kinetic is overcome by the potential.

A disappointment, maybe, but that’s to be expected – and shouldn’t we prefer that he want to give us something new?

The songs of his that have stood out most are the ones that at least try to meet the listener halfway, the ones that betray the deep-seeded enthusiasm underlying Vile’s laid-back, stoner(-esque — he’s a family guy, now) cool. While such material can still be found on Wakin on a Pretty Daze, locating it is becoming more and more of a chore.

At its worst, it wants memory over future. At its best, it wants to remember who sings next, after the shades fade.

Attractive Sin ultimately suffers from a lack of humor and humility (namely, pride).

Wolf gets lost in tepid mumbling, the musical equivalent of the guy at the end of the bar staring forlornly into his whiskey.

There is some great interplay on the George W. Bush track and the epic of John Wayne. Other than that, not too much is memorable here.

Harry Fraud’s production ensures that the EP is still enjoyable in a purely instrumental, non-lyrical dimension; I just wish that Action had stepped up and delivered rhymes on a level that these beats deserve.

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.

It certainly avoids the epic-lite quality we usually associate with bands in the post-rock mold. There’s no soundtrack material here: nothing to be exploited for the purposes of perfume advertisement erotica or inspiring nature documentaries.

From most bands, half of a great record would be an incredible accomplishment, but we’ve heard so much better from them.

Our Ill Wills is a good pop album. Now go make your own.

Despite these vigorous moments, too often The Winter Of Mixed Drinks falls prey to indistinguishable mid-tempo material.

So much of listening to Ardipithecus feels immeasurable by good or bad. Ardipithecus fails as a pop record, because it’s barely aware that it’s a part of that conversation.

Contra isn't really that bad, yet it's also not nearly sturdy enough to maintain the puppy-love, Obama-esque crush many of us have had on them.

Other groups have approached the issue of originality by genre-blending; but in the case of Esben and the Witch, it is their very faith that ensures that the hollowness one feels while listening has a doubled quality, reflected not only in content but also in experience, leaving one with the ominous aftertaste of a doppelgänger encounter.

Expektoration offers a strong tracklist, heavy with fan favorites (opener "Hoe Cakes," "Accordion," "Rhymes Like Dimes") and peppered with rarities ("People Places & Things," "Change the Beat"), but it's not the type of strength you can't feel from going back to the originals.

In a word, Gloss Drop just sounds confused, and its structures don't challenge or excite.

[The songs] may be executed with prowess, but their bandied crassness isn't just a tried-and-true style, it's a tiresome cliché.

Religious Knives’ latest recording doesn’t implore repeat listens the way "Resin" did and still does.

There’s something to be said for two masters of their craft talking jazz for the joy of it, but to me, the question remains whether or not this kind of jazz is played out.

As Damaged Bug, John Dwyer exposes new horror, though perhaps that’s not quite it. Perhaps horror is hyperbolic. Perhaps as Damaged Bug, Dwyer exposes anxiety as ambience. Inescapable static.

For Art Brut vs. Satan, the band didn’t need Frank Black to give them an edge; they needed a mentor to help them focus on their real message: changing the musical landscape. Satan may have won this round, but don’t count out Art Brut. Not just yet.

If Belle and Sebastian appear to be repeating themselves here, maybe that just means there's another minor reinvention coming somewhere down the line.

This album is no disaster, no Moonbeams and Bluejeans, but the benign flatness here suggests the ineffable whatever that made The Fall fascinating has fallen away, and it looks very far gone.

Wilco (The Album) isn’t a failure--not by any means--but when a band has become so attached to the notion of change and then stagnates, it casts a heavy shadow that’s hard to escape.

Two Trains could be pared down to a gorgeous EP.

Even though songs like the jittering “444Sure” teem with propulsive energy and dynamic peaks, they lack the inventiveness and originality to induce euphoria in any other way, and thus they descend into commonplaces and banalities.

It’s fairer to say that this album fails me because these 12 tracks are simply not interesting enough, especially for a band that was always so visceral and engaging.

Some Sweet Relief’s beauty starts to wear kind of thin on repeated listening.

Lambchop show glimmers of invention, and if these were pursued more and the quality control was stricter, one very good album could be the result. [combined review of both discs]

In total, it sort of feels like Campbell and Lanegan want to be on the balcony and in the party at the same time, and so succeed at neither.

A mild sense of self-congratulation permeates the record, as if the attempt to synthesize several disparate elements together is somehow as admirable as that synthesis itself.

I think it’s safe to say that this third Volume remains the most autobiographical of the bunch.

While Fluorescence may be an enjoyable record, it's certainly not a remarkable one. Hannah and Chikudate are adept at digesting diverse influences and turning them into an album that's pleasing to the ear, but few would consider it essential.

Like all things retro, Faunts find themselves stuck between nostalgia and total recall, unable to determine the criticality of their appropriation.

While End of Daze features some of Dum Dum Girls' more sophisticated songwriting to date, there is an overwhelming shadow of certainty and safety that is cast over the EP, preventing it from being a truly singular musical experience.

Despite occasional flourishes, Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy is an average set by a band who should be far beyond releasing anything less than stellar.

All the riffs, drums, and lyrics seem to struggle against the current of a constant drone, with odd sounds bubbling out of the muddy puddle, yet remaining stagnant, as it were. There is nothing remarkable or striking about this mirror’s explosion.

His good intentions are largely undone by the occasional ideological confusion. The enjoyment offered by the instrumentation is unmitigated, however, which ultimately makes Li(f)e something of a positive-sum venture.

Coldplay’s all about elongation this time around, and if you couldn’t tolerate their dramatics before, Viva la Vida will do nothing for you. Don’t get me wrong; to my ears, this is the group’s strongest offering yet, but since this album is the same old naive romanticism theatrically propped on a pedestal, it’s not really saying a lot.

Do Whatever You Want All The Time is tepid and uneventful, and proof that the band's previous work didn't succeed solely on its raucousness.

Kairos is not an album completely devoid of charm. The R&B influence gives the songs a weight they might otherwise lack.

Orth would do well to pay more attention to whipping his songs into shape next time around.

The worldview Trash Talk puts forward continues to feel generic, as though it has passed through too many links in the human centipede of hardcore punk to contain any vital nutrients by the time it makes its way to us.

There are some redeeming qualities, but for every success there are one or two failures.

I doubt they’ll be circling back to the sound I felt so strongly about, but even the mildly frustrating Set ‘Em Wild, like all the band’s records, has songs I’ll be listening to for years to come.

The performances are competent, but the songs, themselves, lack compositional ingenuity.

Unfortunately, the focal point of the album is not on the music, but instead on Slug's lyrics, which have matured at a much slower pace than Ant's slick production.

Transfixiation’s weakest points are its fixations, when it lingers too long on a verse clearly aching for the payoff of a chorus or when it tries for serious by way of obscene.

There isn't much about Stars Of CCTV that hasn't already been done and better.

Although Hagerty's mercurial inventiveness is occasionally electrifying, it's not clear who will have the patience to comb through experiments that generally fall flat.

As welcome as this debut was at the time, and as arguably relevant as its topoi of absence and alienation are to us all, there’s something very disquieting about a band that, four albums later, is obstinately continuing to mine its somber wellsprings.

There isn't enough unforced spontaneity or meaningful pop-craft on The Vision to sustain a full-length album, and a smorgasbord of tasty synths isn't enough to inspire vision.

This is digital automation entering the flow of the socio-linguistic, or stark outlooks amidst techno-financial mind-control. This is the sound of a colorless decline.

These guys are working within a fully-formed aesthetic; they've got hooks to spare and production out the wazoo, but right now, I'm just not feeling the soul.

Stars Are Our Home is a passable enough album. It’s just a bit naggingly stale, even for a fan of this sort of thing.

The album is too overbearing to be much fun and too paint-by-the-numbers to feel dangerous.

Light Science manages, thus, to be impressively conducted, self-announcing, and well dressed while remaining static, safe, and a tad lonely.

Props are due for not recycling the same album over and over again--something he could probably do for awhile before anyone would call him on it --but, unfortunately, the new approach results in Bianchi’s most banal album yet.

Their meh generation, “shouting lager lager” take on four-on-the-floor energy is starting to wear a bit thin.

Although the record is saved from complete disaster with its musical accompaniments... Elk-Lake Serenade is outrageously lonely and cumbersome.

In the end, then, it's not that The Devil's Rain is a bad album, but it's by far the weakest link in the band's catalog, and coming at a time when faith in the group is at an all-time low.

There are only so many times you can key into someone’s heart before they change the code, and after about 20 listens, the veneer crumbles a bit, and it’s a little too easy to see the gears turning underneath. But that’s not the most frustrating thing about the record; the most frustrating thing is that Sia has so much access to us and just doesn’t do much with it.

Nu-Mark's beats still refresh the old school in the J5 way we've become accustomed, but the other beats here represent a sad cross-section of mainstream styles, totally missing the point of their first three albums.

While VanGaalen seems to be overflowing with great ideas, I’d prefer if he reined them in a little more tightly on his next release.

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.

Even the sunniest of good-time albums needs a source of tension, but Gonzalez has provided nothing more than a stream of pleasantry. The resulting album is immediately gratifying, but there’s nothing to keep the listener coming back.

It’s definitely an improvement over "Happy Hollow," but the band has yet to reclaim the impulse that attracted so many of their fans in the first place.