Its intentions are good, but it’s stuck in trying to make itself into something that it is not: frightening or bold or looming.

Yet if “Shattered” and follow-up “Guaranteed Struggle” are Dälek at their cacophonous and incensed best, subsequent tracks like “Masked Laughter (Nothing’s Left)” and “6dB” reveal a band cultivating a lighter, more introspective side.

The consistently laudable performances and production of Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon make for something that appears effortless and remains engaging throughout its 70-plus-minute runtime.

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.

While they haven't completely redrawn themselves, Alpine Static does signify a step forward for Kinski with its unashamed embrace of guitar rock.

The album gets really repetitive and just drones into the background.

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.

Although they have a ways to go before establishing their own musical identity, The Uglysuit have more than enough talent to make it plausible that they’ll get there someday.

The only thing letting The Strange Boys down this time is a lack of vivacity. Their attitude is dripping from every song, but occasionally you’ll find yourself wanting them to blow their top, to unleash the energy they seem to be capping throughout for the sake of melody.

The Moondoggies make: music for middle-class, middle-aged white liberals. Music for my parents, and the parents of pretty much everyone I know. Tidelands is almost just as good as the real thing, but the real thing is still out there, if I want to find it.

Sleep Forever, if anything, is an assurance of their staying power; they could probably get away with releasing this same record throughout the remainder of their career.

With Untilted, it's apparent that Autechre are still on top of their game.

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

Mozart’s Sister’s debut is a living monument to dead stasis.

Post-apocalyptic muck and digital drivel, outer space splattering of dark matter, Mattel and Fisher Price toy instrument sets: it’s all here, and it’s all in accordance with Anticon’s aesthetic.

Painting With lacks the consistency to be that work, but its moments of glory provide a welcome return to the melodic mastery of golden ages past.

It is Amon Tobin's richest work, and incredibly aurally pleasing.

This uncanny sound field suggests a different set of priorities from the usual transcendentalist rock seekers, and Trust Now is all the better for it.

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

Really, the only downfall of Bitter Tea is that it reeks of a transitional album.

[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.

For the first time, Dead Meadow have created something for everyone, not just fans of one aspect of their sound. While that might piss off those very same fans, it is for the greater good.

The fact that it’s alienating, strange, impossible to get through and occasionally radically boring isn’t a slight, because that’s not the point. It’s too much and too real and too close and too far away.

It feels lush, it pleases and occasionally stirs, but there’s a cold distance between voice and instrument throughout, a distinction that barely existed on previous releases.

As a whole, Black Ice is a mess of tired conventions shoved noisily at the listener, as though just getting them all on record was good enough.

What Will We Be is a better, more realized album, but it’s still a dud, filled with mediocre, half-composed songs and tediously unfocused songwriting.

Here Comes the Cowboy sounds awfully similar to 1973’s Hosono House. But there’s a lack. Maybe it’s the dynamism displayed on Hosono’s debut that makes it so intrinsically enthralling, but on Here Comes the Cowboy, the whole thing feels more like American gaijin vs. Japanese cowboy copypasta.

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.

It's rarely messy enough to be visceral, and rarely clean enough to be cerebral. Even the 30-minute running time is underwhelming. In fact, the album ends with a long electronic sigh, as if acknowledging that it hasn't accomplished anything.

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.

Bone-dry sessionman rock that’s either fun or stultifying depending on your mood is a tricky proposition, but fans of the TEASGJ sensibility should enjoy it either way.

EPHEM:ERA cheats our trained cognition and creates a space for itself, playing with our restless thirst for difference, working itself into the gaps in our memory.

Do It! is rarely dull. Uninspired? Yes. But it’s never dull.

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

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

Each track is unique and memorable in its own way, but they all follow the same basic pattern and structure.

The record’s second half is sedate by comparison, skewing away from the drone element and more toward conventional pastoral film score calling to mind Terrence Malick.

Perhaps what is most obvious is that Untogether may have benefited from Blue Hawaii turning it up just a notch or two.

Thistled Spring seems a really lovely idea; the lyrics are beautiful, the musical texture is auburn and wood-hued, smooth-sanded and multi-faceted. But there’s nothing that speaks to me.

Ghosts I-IV is a clear step forward while still managing to stay true to what NIN traditionally ought to sound like and represent.

In some ways, it is as an exercise in stripping away everything that makes The Flaming Lips such a truly special group, leaving only that which serves as decorative tinsel to their music, hanging limp and lifelessly in the air.

Albarn’s thirst for musical adventure is commendable, but unless you’re obsessed with his every move or have been dreaming of the day a former Brit pop king fuses the sensibilities of Eastern opera and Western pop, Monkey just doesn’t warrant your full attention.

For all the technology they bring to the table, Ratatat are soulful and savvy, putting everything in its right place and locking the listener in.

A classy affair all the way, Black Pompadour is sure to impress those who let it work its magic.

For fans of some of Broderick’s earlier material, then, these qualities, combined with the relatively narrow range of instrumentation and short duration of the album, may prove somewhat limiting and not as immediately immersive as some of his best work.

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.

Despite the aforementioned darkwave influences, it’s not that his earworms get leechlike hooks into you--but that, while you’re caught listening and daydreaming, strands of ivy poke tentative tendrils into the eardrum, and deeper.

Pattern To Excel emerges in fragments, almost painlessly, with every inch of space filled, all the darlings still written.

Disquieting but somehow quite familiar, the record contorts the warm sounds of yacht rock and island music into something primal yet alien. The end result is a sound that you’d swear has been done countless times before in the avant-rock pantheon, but in reality, its direct musical forebears are few and far between.

Mysterious Phonk feels extremely private in ways that are powerful but not entirely sorted out yet. Purrp finds numerous occasions to talk about smiling in the face of a cold world, but even a facetious smirk never really cracks, and the world is cold in only the most brightly-lit, fantastical, and dystopic ways.

Eisold's delivery, as cliche as it might seem, is often hypnotically compelling, and the lyrics are slightly redeemed by the synthesizers.

Caer is a magnificent oasis of feeling and reflection, where self-doubt, confidence, love, and lust live so comfortably alongside one another.

It’s poppy and fun, but it doesn’t let you get too comfortable.

Pick your adjective[:] Over-the-top, anthemic, epic.

Its complete lack of anything unique just reeks of someone in the background, someone with a suit and a cigar, shaking hands with these fellows and telling them they’re “gonna blow up.”

It simply lacks even the remotest kind of emotional weight, favoring that emo-lite, predictable kind of melodic progressions that make you swoon the same way a hot muffin on a cold day might.

This is undoubtedly a stronger effort than Shadows Collide, and maybe that's due to [Frusciante's] ability to just let the music fly instead of attempting to overwork things.

The very thing that animates the structure begins to ferociously explore, digging beneath its creations in order to observe itself. It is unclear whether the exploration of the structure’s depths is motivated by curiosity or by a need to undermine itself and to challenge its own creation.

Overall, the album is something of a grower.

Drone Trailer is another fine addition to MV & EE’s ridiculously prolific, yet highly impressive output. Even with its scant six tunes, it’s unlikely anyone will be left hanging long if more music from these two is what they are after.

Taken as a piece, Somewhere Else can’t live up to those giddy heights, but its sweetness is still to be savored.

The other two tunes here, the instrumental 'Ponce of the Flaming Peace Queer' and a once-again-relevant cover of 'Fortunate Son,' work fine, but, coupled with the album’s brief tracklist and tossed-off nature, they make Peace Queer little more than a focused stop-gap between proper albums.

From a purely musical perspective, You’ll Be Safe Forever remains a case of unfulfilled hope: an album that promises a great deal but attenuates halfway, eventually leading the listener down a path that’s disappointingly safe and familiar.

Sure, Nine Black Alps may be a more "genuine" concoction of Nirvana's formula, but how can this be considered revelatory or of interest when it comes across as so faceless?

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.

This CD is in itself a bold challenge to producers everywhere to step out from behind the laptop and explore the creative, spontaneous elements of live interaction.

This project was D.O.A. from the moment Ghost announced it a year back, and hip-hop fans should consider themselves lucky that there’s at least a few salvageable moments in Wizard of Poetry.

Dope Body albums have been great in the past because they took familiar kinds of rock melody and put a sinister spin on them, reimagining American popular rock through a spit-smeared lens, reinvigorating it with the edge and causticity those songs could have conveyed in different hands. But they don’t do any of that here. On Kunk, they just screw around a bit.

Audio, Video, Disco is simply too unfocused, too half-baked, and too busy hiding its inadequacies with superficially interesting window-dressing to fit in either of those settings--or any other.

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

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

So, it's formulaic, it's 'retro' in a really kitschy way, and Business Casual sounds pretty much the same as their 2004 debut, Fancy Footwork; and still, Chromeo are fucking great.

So, while this compilation retrospective may be aimed at completists, there is plenty going on here to satisfy even the most casual listener.

So the mission statement of this CD is clear; this is a product made by the emotionally and culturally sterile for people who either have no conception of love, depression, or any other emotional state outside of pop culture cliché, or those so desperate for entertainment that they would deceive themselves into thinking the feckless chicanery of this masturbatory ensemble resembles soulful expression in any way.

Herren has actually cooked up a brilliantly soothing and entertaining morsel for his fans.

Days of the Bagnold Summer plays like a b-sides compilation with a few cuts worth revisiting. Like the Storytelling OST, this one’s strictly for the heads.

What's frustrating is that beneath the surface of LP4 there appears to be the basis for a great record. But its execution is too rote, too much the result of being so entrenched in the band's Ratatat-ness that the material is suffocated.

With this record, though, Black turns that style into a genuine language--a flexible idiom--one that can conjure up a whole weird world of new emotions and experiences.

The recording perfectly reflects the aesthetic of the world Jay has imagined, and both Calvin Johnson and Bob Schwenkler deserve praise for accurately materializing Slow Dance’s wintry, yet robust landscape.

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.

Rather than referring to primal transgressions, however, Cowgill refers to the performative transgressions of earlier musicians. There is nothing wrong with this approach, and yet there is something about King Dude's particular gloss on neofolk that I find naggingly inauthentic.

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

Cheena is phantom shamble, a reanimation of bumps that still make us shake.

End It All doesn't reveal some new profundity to Beans' formula; it just happens to be the album that came out when I was finally smart enough to get exactly how weird he always was.

I, myself, will likely revisit 10,000 Days for plenty of extended listens, partly because I'm a percussion whore and partly because I want to be able to enjoy it with my Super Metal Friendz. But this is Soy Tool, a rubbery substitute for the real thing.

Lennon isn’t attempting to re-invent the wheel with Friendly Fire; he’s just writing a narrative using thoroughly enjoyable pop melodies.

With Graphic As A Star, she’s delivered an intimate reading of a revered American poet and made it entirely her own, creating her most beguiling work yet in the process.

This loss of focus characterizes You Can’t Take It With You. While As Tall As Lions are affected deeply by the weight of the world, they’re too flustered to make sense of it all.

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.

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.

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.

Longtime fans will be enchanted by such quips and the naked introspection offered by Goodnight Unknown, and while not at all challenging, casual listeners will enjoy it simply for its strong collection of pop songs.

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

MAYA's many false starts and dead ends also place M.I.A. on shaky ground aesthetically, and with no coherent message to fall back on, the album feels alienated and disconnected, perhaps ironic for an album attempting to evoke the hyper-connectedness and sensory overload of culture in the wake of iPhone and Google.

Avey Tare’s stream of vanishing sounds, creaking floorboards, and silently intonated lullabies is romantic in its faded resemblance to our radiant, ever-growing environment; but as with Portner’s newly adopted city of Los Angeles, the supposed nature exists purely as an extension of the human desire to create and actualize what we see in our minds.

I don’t think there’s any doubt Wavvves consistently delivers wonderful ideas, and those keeping a close watch on the West Coast underground will have to continue to include this kid in their daily musings until he actually provides material worth the blog-storm.

Tom Verlaine has delivered yet another beautiful creation to us.