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.

I can't shake the feeling that I've heard this sort of epic music before, even from Mono themselves.

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

In 37 minutes, there isn't a single moment when the music really hits with conviction.

It's a solid enough effort to merit hope for better things in the future is pretty good for us, too.

Press down on the ambiguities of Lust Lust Lust as much as you want, and you’ll still be trapped in a world of surfaces.

If they decide to get serious about being a band and not just a project, maybe next record they could take us to their own personal woods, instead of just telling us about boring generalized woods.

During some of the more composed moments, the album manages to shine out in semi desolate wonder; but most of the time, Monsoon sounds too much like the Jonathan Richman two-piece band from There's Something About Mary to outrun the malaise of mediocrity that blankets it.

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.

Gallery is an effort by a young artist who stylistically manages to be consistent yet not sophisticated, involving yet not affecting.

The signs are there, but they just haven’t come together in a way that makes significant impact--at least not yet.

Strangers is a fundamentally passable album.

Self Help Serenade is not an unpleasant listen; it has simply and unfortunately been played out over the years by scores of other bands.

This disconnect between Dirty Projectors’s pop tendencies with its “art” signaling is what ultimately stains the album with such a deep sense of confusion, making it difficult to parse who exactly this music is written for, if not people who are already fans of Dirty Projectors.

Pretty okay.... The lyrics, typical alpha-male self-pity material, aren't all that bad, really, but they're often curdled by the delivery.

No Más has three-fifths as many tracks in the same amount of time [as Jamz n Jemz], and for the most part, each track outstays its welcome.

Although you'd be hard pressed, but very pleased, to find a shindig entirely amenable to FlyLo's relentlessly eccentric experiments, Pattern+Grid World is certainly more pillow fight than lounge party.

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.

Half a good album, half disastrously wrong.

No matter how you want to face it, the secret is out: pop isn't Friedberger's bag.

An album that is, at best, a dilution of the real experience it's trying to capture.

The joy of "Fur and Gold" has vanished and taken some of Khan’s potential with it. This is request for their safe return, no questions asked.

Even if it's derivative, Red Bedroom is very catchy.

Sure, Mister Pop might be of interest to fanboys and a few others, but it makes a less convincing case for why new listeners should care about these guys.

The best thing to do with this album is to put the first and last tracks on repeat, and give everything in between a shot when you’re stuck in bed sick; it could be the perfect moment.

While it still has a few standout moments that grab the listener and spark a mood, it’s only occasionally eventful and, ultimately, doesn’t reach the heights of its predecessor.

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.

Unfortunately, Me Moan doesn’t really deepen Gibson’s exploration of this novel niche. Instead, it feels mostly like a country record that still has one foot in the sample-based electronic aesthetic that previously defined Gibson’s work.

It doesn't have a whole lot of replay value.

Folk devotees may have a little more patience for the proceedings here, but I find it doubtful that Seconds will come as much of a revelation to anyone.

I think a big part of the problem is the singing. The lyrics are alternately cloying and curious, and they’re sung in a pretty and formal manner.

Like ghosts that don’t know they’re dead, the songs on Deerhunter’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? wander about in a well-produced limbo almost in mourning for the death they can’t die. But they don’t know it, so--and this is the saddest part about it--they become what they deplore, all loss glossed over.

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.

At the end of the album, no stone on the topic of love and disillusionment feels unturned. Such is the strange comfort of blanket statements, but Lekman's fans may still feel the pea-like irritant of stories lanky and untold.

“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.

Whole sections that might feel accomplished if taken as isolated pieces feel misplaced in the economy of these side-long tracks.

Ultimately, this album is a useful index to effects and samples you might want to import into Ableton Live at this moment, but not much more than that.

If one stripped away the halcyon, indistinct haze and the open-road aesthetic it furthers, you’d be left with precious little, save 10 unobtrusive, well-executed sleep aids. New Universe is its archetype--nothing more, nothing less.

Lost Themes II isn’t the monster transfigured. It’s an echo chamber for the transforming horror to howl in.

It’s mostly enjoyable on a surface level or if you’re in the right mood (or under the right influence), but it doesn’t beg repeated listens.

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.

Paracosm is, at the very least, beautifully rendered wallpaper, and it’s hard to blame Greene for living in this fantasy for as long as he possibly can.

Neither the downfall nor demystification of the group, the truly awful Ten$ion only further tangles the mess of questions surrounding Die Antwoord.

Total Nite still feels to me like lateral growth, neither distinctly worse but certainly not better than what preceded it.

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 turns out he's simply not the Nerd Messiah; he's creative and emotional and gifted, but at least right now, he'd do better making rap songs rather than ambient soundscapes.

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

Unfortunately, there's not much here to distinguish Ruins from the group's previous work, and too few of these compositions stick once the album is done.

The problem is that all of the moves feel like they're pointed in the wrong direction.

It maintains the headstock-nodding guitar work, the coherence between players, and the alternating structure, but it winds down the pace and pokes some air holes in the top of their sound.

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.

The alien, blank dead-eyedness of Britney Jean is frightening, because it feels like it’s all will.i.am trusts Britney with.

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

He spends the whole record cooing and coaxing a series of barely-described lovers, but it’s never clear whether they’re real, imagined, or an idealized online version of the two.

Song of the Pearl, then, is well-executed, but stuck in the same gear, especially in its middle.

It's the clingiest and most needy record I've heard in a while.

As is, Teenage Emotions reads more like that freshman-year college paper you really wish you’d just deleted off your hard drive.

There are a number of songs with enough stuff to listen to many times, but there isn’t anything grand enough to linger in the mind like an inamorata.

The Orwells and the very much earnest Disgraceland will be invigorating solace for anyone who gets a kick out of deadbeat rock musicians and the illusions they provide of refuge and reprieve.

Peppered with dissatisfying, mommy-daddy emotastic lyrics, Jeff Tweedy impressions, and Four Tet-inspired, stop-on-a-dime, into-something-totally-unrelated segues that don't really belong on a country-twinged "let's hang out, drink, and make a record, dudes" kind of affair.

An enjoyable yet essentially average release that plays it very safe, sticking close to preconceptions and relative “rules” of electro/synth pop without straying too far from the groundwork set down by the figures from another era it quotes and, to some degree, replicates.

jj struck a subtle and surprising balance with their debut, but this time around, they've withdrawn, letting their techniques dangle in the air, starving for justification. The effort is weaker for it.

While the overall record is much more song-centered and even features honest-to-goodness vocals on many of the tracks, he's still basically stockpiling scraps from his childhood.

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.

His flow never deviates from that of Doggystyle, but the production on his hits demonstrates an effort to evolve with the times.

In the end, the album is a collection of songs, mostly good, some indifferent, and all a hundred times more honest than, say, Rihanna. But it's all really to no transcendent purpose.

The final product is an album marked by the unique signatures of its creators that ultimately fails to play to any of their strengths.

Crafting a "singular" sound is as idealistic as the next musical virtue, but this album--the band’s debut--is glaringly commonplace.

The lyrics on To The 5 Boroughs are, with a few exceptions, a dismal failure.

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.

While that combination [hip-hop beat, industrial trudge, start-stop synth] yields some moments of blissful jitteriness and pop rejiggering, Mr. Impossible never gets too far past being big, dumb, and unquantifiably creepy.

Either too sugary or too bitter and complacent, Normal Happiness is a strictly a family affair.

Unfortunately, the goodwill that Eminem builds up with these engrossing and macabre Mathers family confessions are too often torn down by his tedious turns as a goofy court jester.

Three 6 Mafia’s aspiration to evolve seems to have manifested itself on Last 2 Walk, from production to sound to lyrics. Having taken their novel sound to its lofty limits, it is time for the group to change and progress towards another musical frontier. However, their aspirations of progressing by melding Hollywood and the hood have largely failed.

Eno’s continuation of his flag-bearing series is about as ignorable as it has always been with waning levels on the side of interest.

In the end, it’s the vague, shapeless, and undefined nature of the fancies her protagonists chase that partly undermines the album’s substance, since without any clear delimitation of their supposedly particular aspirations it’s a little hard to sympathize with her characters and see in them anything more than cowardly, flighty children who ought to grow up.

The collages he’s created are undoubtedly lovely, but as they stand, the songs sound more like attractive opportunities for great musicality than confident realizations of it.

The record can at times feel static and repetitious, revisiting the same structural devices numerous times and using a lot of the same timbres and ambient sounds on every track.

Easy to dismiss, but possible to take seriously if so inclined.

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.

Completists will appreciate the ability to experience the Art Cologne installation in the convenience of their own home, but everyone else should have no trouble finding more compelling examples of this theme, from the most difficult noise music to the most pleasant synth-pop.

Some of these beats are really interesting and unique, almost flawlessly incorporating subtle elements of jazz, folk, psychedelia, and the boogie-woogie rhythm of J Dilla, whose two appearances on the album are characteristically powerful. Too often, though, DOOM and his guests offer inconsistent, barely-there performances.

Paradise is the best attempt (yet) to cohere a deeply incoherent artist.

The Perishers' second full-length album is, well, rather bland.

On 20/20, the Timberlake/Timbaland team seems content to set up a basic (and more often than not, bland) hook, repeat it ad infinitum, and tack on some superfluous bits until the desired, bloated end product comes into being.

Outside of the few moments of innovation, though, very little will strike one as all that inspired.

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.

Amid the minor missteps and business-as-usual pleasantries, though, there is one winner of a track. Album opener “Wiggmann” finds Japanther supplementing their pop craftsmanship with an equal measure of ingenuity.

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.

For its circuitousness, there's always been a lean, mean backbone to the guy's writing; even his most bored-sounding toss-offs came wrapped in barbed wire. Here, he just kinda sounds bored.

At its best, Blade of Love is nicely adventurous and somewhat relentless. However, where Palace of Wind left listeners with an active role of relation and interpretation, Battle Trance comes off as a little overbearing this time around.

The Clearing is nothing if not the sound of a band discovering a new home, musically, emotionally, and physically. The sound is far bigger than either of the previous fingerpicking-heavy records.

Unfortunately, instead of rebuilding a sound structure (double meaning intended) with those scattered shards that Deerhoof has violently shaved off over its career, with La Isla Bonita, they’ve traced a nominal new work from a picture that never existed in such an ostensibly neatly composed way. Without that compositional tension hanging in its margins though, La Isla Bonita’s expressions, however inciting, remain just out of grasping reach, like an island mirage.

The songs here are mindless, repetitive, and perfect for the dance floor.

Cruel Summer is half a classic and half a concession to mediocre talents.

His music’s dynamic, but his voice lacks range and variety. Krug sings emotionally, but not responsively.

"Eighth Avenue" starts us off with a case study in mid-aughts indie pop: nylon thrumming, snare-led rhythm, spare buoyant bass.... Feels orchestrated but spontaneous, massive but twee.

Longer listeners will be impressed with the band’s evolution but will inevitably be let down with the lack of charm in these new recordings as opposed to their looser demo cuts.