It all seems a bit too canned and contrived.

This is an album of breath and sigh, baby’s gibberish and parent’s confession. It’s also a complex and layered meditation on fatherhood and family, rich in emotion, textured and capacious; it’s a long exhale--stately, calm, joyful.

Menos el Oso takes the act of melodizing the banal to dizzyingly silly new heights.

Ultimately, though, it becomes hard to identify individual tracks without keeping a close eye on the tracklisting as you go.

The songs drag, the lyrics lag depth, and many of the songs break down into nothingness due to a lack of concentration and effort.

Their sound isn’t one that’s been carved out necessarily; it’s always been there since Exquisite Corpse, but only more recently has it been developed (perhaps because of the aid of top-name producers).

What was once shambling and humble and fun has turned into another anonymous, swaggering, guitar-driven indie rock act.

Enjoyably dumb and agreeably psychedelic, Eating Us is easy listening for an easy-going season.

Mature Themes lives up to what's promised on the tin, but only relatively so.

With so much music released by White Hills, a lot of the tracks end up being mood-lighting (“InWords,” “OutWords,” “The Internal Monologue,” “Circulating”), but the album’s back-half, kicked off by “Forever in Space (Enlightened),” is what keeps me spinning.

No matter how likable all 10 of these songs may be, there's something missing here.

With Perfect Hair, Busdriver has once again crafted a fantastically immersive listening experience (arguably Busdriver’s finest work yet), only blunted by how profoundly it telegraphs its own ambitions and intentions, more than meeting my expectations as a piece of confrontational sound art, yet leaving its targeted structures a bit too comfortably in tact.

The new songs display a newfound sophistication in composition, arrangement, and production, with richly layered, textured guitars, and Pundt having come ever closer to finding his own voice.

Their residency was capped by a performance of their new record, Exotic Creatures of the Deep. Their crowning achievement? There is certainly a case to be made for it.

If the man’s curious oeuvre hasn’t already provided reason enough to pay attention, it’s doubtful Beware will convert anyone to the fold. But for those already attuned to Oldham’s songcraft, Beware is a rich and fulfilling work from a man who seems to have a paranormal grasp on human nature, with all the sensuality, God-fearing, tummy-rubbing and head-scratching that implies.

Much like his 2007 debut, "Ash Wednesday," Perkins speaks through characters and, more importantly, though his musical arrangements to present a nuanced approach to musing on mortality and loss and loneliness.

The dull interludes and derivative sound of "Close Forever Watching" prevent Owl Splinters from achieving the promise intimated by its standouts. It's a noticeable improvement over Pale Ravine, but perhaps not what one might expect after six years of hibernation.

Oddly utilitarian, geared towards dancing rather than listening. This is the type of music that reminds you that iTunes has made 'party' a utility.

Hold It In recalls the excellent Stag in its effortless eclecticism, and if there’s one criticism of the album, it’s that, even with its variety, its sounds and styles can’t help but echo its sibling from 1996 and also most of the other albums at the more diverse end of the Melvins spectrum.

There are tons of memorable hooks and verses all over 10 Summers.... All of these moments fly by and come across as natural and effortless, even “formal” in the platonic sense.

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 all adds up to The Mountain Goats’ most musically sophisticated endeavor to date. In fact, the music is finally beginning to hold its own with the lyrics.

An album of satisfying, summery rock.

Swift hasn’t put out a bad record yet, but The Atlantic Ocean is his most solid effort yet, his best attempt at managing the dark-lit record store in his head.

The New Pornographers are straying away from the niche they’ve carved out for themselves, and they’re doing it with skill and calm. And perhaps that should be celebrated, because Challengers is everything this sort of smooth transition ought to be.

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.

Unfortunately, not all of the experimentation works.

Where its siblings thrash and writhe and scream, No One Dances flows, undulates, sighs. The result is nothing short of pastoral.