It might be helpful to think of Blood Bank not as an EP but as a single with a solid new A-side and three largely irrelevant B-sides.

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.

Aloha sound more like Genesis than ever.

Maybe it's the squeaky-cleanness of the sound and singing both that keeps me at a distance; a band like Okkervil River, both sonically and thematically similar to Vanderslice, succeed partially because they don't mind screaming and getting clumsy.

Until the Quiet Comes isn't bad, exactly. It's just definitely not good either.

Despite its misfires, Tongues does make for an intriguing listen, and the record is punctuated with the occasional highlight.

Mike Patton's The Solitude of Prime Numbers stands for the most part as a collection of missed opportunities, which ironically is its triumph.

While Menomena’s sound has matured and their musical prowess has grown considerably, similarities between songs of old and new are unmistakable.

Most will find this album unnecessary, even if it's not entirely inconsequential.

Essentially, Haines' piano playing and singing are lovely, but Knives' timidity, coupled with mundane and occasionally outright bad lyrics, keep this record in check.

The Big Dream is but a pretty stone that withers the moment it is touched, lifted for further inspection.

Things just go from mad galloping gobbledigook to spongy sentiment.

Land and Fixed suffers from a dearth of arresting moments, and the songs that do stand out typically only do so by directly aping well-worn standards.

On Iradelphic, Clark makes a sizable sonic departure from this tried-and-true brand, accelerating his recent investigations into vocal song structures and exploring rudimentary acoustic guitar textures, with mixed results.

Unlike the greatest movements of his previous albums, Wings of Love’s diversity is its greatest fault, as 14 tracks visit musical fads long forgotten and ill conceived.

Tragicomedies isn't terrible, but its significance hinges on two established and already surpassed mediums.

Despite having moments that tip it toward being his most “challenging” album lyrically (if being challenging has anything to do with being serious), This Old Dog might be his least interesting instrumentally and musically.

For every song that I replay, there’s another that I skip.

A connoisseur of contemporary folk may find something to love in Andy Cabic’s latest offering. For the rest of us, Tight Knit will likely serve as little more than a relaxing soundtrack to our mid-afternoon siesta.

Ignoring the conceptual background, Kannon only achieves the very cusp of the transportative, magical power of past Sunn O))) albums.

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.

This is the sound of a band in transition.

They've got all the right footnotes and they know their way around a hook, but A Thousand Heys doesn't carve out a distinctive enough place for itself amid this year's crop of guitar-wielding miscreants.

It's just a little sad to hear Mike giving in to conventionality, even if he does do it better than most.

Replacing the kitschy DIY aesthetic with intentional roughness and bloating each nook and cranny with some sort of sound, what’s emphasized is its production, not its songwriting.... At the same time, however, it’s the production that makes the album somewhat interesting.

When the boys aren’t treading water, they’re still treading a fine line between memorable and anonymous.

His style, somewhere between Leonard Cohen and The Velvet Underground, offers little in terms of originality, and often the sappy and stoically emotional quality of the lyrics comes off as snarky.

Although I quite like some of the tracks here, overall there just isn't enough here to keep me interested. [combined review of both discs]

You can’t hear The Feeling in his voice, which is still one of the most infectiously beautiful in the industry, because as his faith has saved him from his pain, his production team has saved his voice from Justin. It makes for a series of unbeatable mainstream and crossover singles, and a desensitized, unnerving album.

While Mars Volta distinguished its high-volume concept and freak-out-the-neighbors formula with its apocalyptic wails and catastrophic soundscapes, Sparta has developed a middle-of-the-road rock entity, seldom swaying away from its new and unimproved sound structure.

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.

NewVillager have the potential to expertly toe the line between unkempt ambition and childlike fascination, and bridge this unfortunately large gap between big ideas and big audiences in the process. They just aren't quite there yet.

It may be more accomplished and accessible than its forebear, yet it mostly comes across as a tad inconsequential, running through one nice song to the next without ever really being anything more than “nice.”

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

This new album is relentlessly dark, disjointed, and disturbing. While there exist elements of his pop past -- gorgeous string sections, delicate guitars, bombastic drums -- there's nothing like a song here.

Unfortunately, not all of the experimentation works.

The album's distinctly lacking in structure or direction.

I find myself disappointed with Plague Park despite its elusive initial luster. The good news is it’s an easy fix: Hire a band.

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

To be sure, The BQE score isn’t an utter failure on its own, but it’s clearly missing the dramatic effect found in the rest of Stevens’ eclectic seven-album catalogue.

Riceboy Sleeps is an elegiac set of powerfully evocative songs, functioning at its best as lovely background music while flipping through the pages of the art book it's bundled with. Listened to unaccompanied and in its entirety, the experience is frustrating and unpleasant, and its bloated feel renders a lot of it impotent.

The execution may be on point, but the personality is absent, the ideas are fewer, and the experience is all-up flat, no matter how raw and flashy the playing.

It all seems a bit too canned and contrived.

Amputechture, though not near as spam-handed as Frances, is a bumpy ride, registering somewhere between the latter and debut full-length De-Loused in the Comatorium.

Despite Shame’s lyrical foibles, they evince a prodigious adeptness for musicianship, and though Songs of Praise isn’t the most arresting debut by a garage band, there are far worse places to start.

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.

Yet, for each of these highlights, there’s a much weaker counterpart.

I listened to this CD quite a bit, and it took some work for it to grow on me. I’ll admit that it finally did, but I’d say Knapp and Koster’s experiment was more failure than success.

Pleasant but unmoving.

Everything about the album seems so careful, from the presentation to the songs themselves.

The lyrics are particularly generic, even for a pop band, and they render The Broken West’s mission obsolete.

Either way, therein lies Congratulations' biggest triumph: despite being every bit the sophomore slump MGMT damn near willed it to be, it leaves you just enough reason to stay interested in what they do next.

The lyrics can’t support the music, and vice-versa. That’s not to say there aren’t some great moments for people who’ve been following Bejar’s work--“Ivory Coast” and much of the second half of the record have a lot of noteworthy moments, in both their musical adventurousness and lyrical successes. But the interplay between flatness and richness that Bejar describes as integral to his lyrics--and that can be extended to its interplay with his music--isn’t here a lot of the time.

There's nothing supremely bad about this record, but there are no surprises either. It's just--well, there.

Just to Feel Anything never quite seems to justify itself in the way that Does it Look Like I'm Here did, to compel you to pay attention in spite of its apparent familiarity, by whatever method. And as a result, it just feels like a lot of wasted energy.

There’s enough pulling power to draw you in, just not enough to get you hooked.

Rival Dealer might be an intrepid leap for Burial, but the music is ultimately obscured by his intention to share a positive message through the most glaring of means.

Object 47 is not a horrible record; it just isn’t all that good. It has none of the flare found on the band’s trilogy of classics and is never quite able to free itself from not-so-desirable labels like bland and unchallenging.

Although I'm usually a fan of the short and (hopefully) sharp delivery, at 34 minutes the album feels insubstantial in terms of length as well as material.

With The Stoned Immaculate, Curren$y has successfully touched down in the land of commercial weed rap with a solid set of downtempo tunes that have everything they need to be successful: rich soundscapes, witty brags, hummable hooks. It just needs a stronger presence from the Jet-Life juggernaut himself.

The album is full of familiar tropes dressed up in gold and leather, and the songs are wrapped in a plastic that stops our touch--turns it cold, numb from feeling the electricity of the body, of the night.

Like Magic, Springsteen’s last long-player, the best tunes here mine a curious retro-pop angle.

If only conviction had been more successfully transposed onto their music, the band could have produced a follow-up that would not have had to contend with standing in its predecessor's large, looming shadow.

Now, equipped with the stylish, but too-often substance-less Tha Carter III, Lil Wayne seems poised to flip the script on the “rapper racists” (radio stations, MTV) by evolving into the “biggest” rapper alive.

Arrowhead is unfortunately not among the stronger things he’s released.

The problem is that what’s left--the imagined everything about this record--is that it just sounds like someone lamenting a one-night stand that ended too soon, some kind of physical communication that feels like it could have gone so much deeper and become so much more emotional.

Despite To Rococo Rot's placid rejection of any exceptionally radical artistic statement, there is a grace and deft care taken on the record not to buoy the stately jams with textural shifts, but to interlock the two in an elegant way that's impressive to the discerning listener. Nevertheless, this is a somewhat uninspiring recording.

An album that, much like Pinback’s 2004 full-length Summer in Abaddon, is more immediate in its appeal but suffers from repeated listens.

Sure, Phil Ek's production is as crisp and effective as ever, but while it emphasizes immediacy, it also draws attention to the repetitive, redundant elements of these songs.

The Old Believer feels like a creative plateau, all the more disappointing for the fact that the band’s last album left them standing on the cusp of what seemed like an even greater breakthrough.

Though it shrouds itself in chaos, Bottomless Pit is ultimately Death Grips’ most straightforward, morbid, and brutal report from the deep end yet. Like watching a great beast eat itself, there is little in the way of elegance or grand design to this music, yet it remains throttling nonetheless, as relentlessly blunt as it is overwhelmingly meaningless.

Kazuashita wants what psychedelics want of human brains: transcendence. But its fleetingness masks any sort of completion. Frantic impulses come from afar, a random sphere of floating values, frames of signification.

Earth Junk’s parts are greater than their sum.

In spite of every effort and explicit claim to the contrary, it doesn't really sound like they're having that much fun.

The entire album is too claustrophobic for its own good.

There is nothing new for the listener.

Overall, Smother seems to be missing purpose. I hear those careful ruminations on relationships, and I hear the pain that evidently went into this, but it leaves me cold.

This dropped-ball feeling that NehruvianDOOM exudes derives from how it handles and telegraphs (or rather how it doesn’t handle how it telegraphs) its supposedly unifying theme.

Living Thing sits uneasily in some sort of odd pop no-man’s-land: it’s not quite smart nor fully-realized enough for the sad-sack indie set, and it’s too despairing and insightful for the pop set.

While the latter two discs have their moments, they’re all too predictable when held up against the first disc’s ambitious blend of noise and dance.

Trans-Continental Hustle is an honest effort, but one that pales a little when compared to the Technicolor explosions of Gogol Bordello's back catalog.

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.

We know he's capable of better. Whether it ever comes together on a Carter release is anybody's guess, but the prognosis isn't good.

in the end, most of it turns out hypo-real, turns out less enticing and engaging than its eroding object, and this more than anything else is what makes On Oni Pond such a disappointment.

So while Penny Sparkle might constitute yet another step forward on the band's musical journey, it's not one that I feel compelled to follow them on.

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

While it’s clear that the album harbors a sign of affection, there’s just no room for the audience to revel in the appreciation that makes it so.

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

While stripping back the instrumentation, so went some of the ambitious structures and much of the angularity that draws the ear into their gorgeous textures.

Between the overlong, overstuffed songs and arrangements, ridiculous album concept and lyrical conceit, there's no room left for the vicious, hurtling energy that first impressed me on Hidden World's best songs.

Seabed is drained of an expressive self.

After a great start, Faded Seaside Glamour loses its way and ultimately fails to inspire.

He has always played it warm and safe, but in this album, he is playing it warmer and safer than ever....Lukewarm this album is, indeed.

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.

Overall: Fair.

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.

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.

I sense a more natural sense of songcraft here. Banks is still trying too hard, seemingly attempting to write songs he thinks people will like rather than songs that, whether simple or arpeggio-filled, he and his mates like.