What saves the album from musically becoming a boring, going-through-the-motions exercise is Imperial Teen’s ability to write good hooks.

As a whole, Reefer has proven its capacity for producing sunshine hits, but only time will tell if it will be able to push itself past the spaced-out beaches of Maui and towards more diverse soundscapes.

The musical accompaniment, courtesy of his more-famous friends in The Minus 5, is solid, workmanlike. Unfortunately, the vocals are placed front and center, and Harding’s inflection puts added emphasis on embarrassing lyrics.

Alien in a Garbage Dump sounds like the work of a noise veteran relaxing and trying out whatever comes to mind, tossing out ideas without worrying if every one of them sticks. And in this case, this approach yields considerable rewards, the noise equivalent of summertime jams.

Sic Alps are clearly both miles ahead of and miles away from their peers. Napa Asylum only further proves this.

The eponymous Stygian Stride LP might come from a period of psychological and technical excavation, but the music stands on its own in the halls of modern electronic music and psychedelia.

There are some solid points buried deep down in the wreckage of Cole’s seven-bar pileup, but you’ll have to sift through a great, big, ambivalent pile of solecisms in order to get to them. As it turns out, that holds true for the vast majority of Born Sinner.

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.

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.

When all's said and done, too much of the album sounds dated and uninspired.

It is, like so many other pop albums, the kind of thing that grows on you and ferments into an incredible entity.

The thrill of Flux Outside is that, if it had its way, it wouldn't stick around either.

Codes and Keys is littered with PDA for Gibbard's new celebrity wife Zooey Deschanel, but this especially garish monument to his muse would have been better placed on one of her She & Him album-wafers.

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’s a thoroughly digestible record, then, freed from the downstroke neuroses that basically defined Hot Snakes or the labyrinthine catharsiscore mounted and milked by Jehu.

Family is a work of purpose, from a band whose previously wandering attention-spans rendered any chance of artistic success accidental.

Constellations is a work of exquisite beauty, coming from a group that grows by leaps and bounds with every release.

Nadler's shortest and sparsest full-length yet. The decision to limit it to little more than a handful of tracks ensures it's succinct and absent of any songs I could comfortably call 'bad' or even 'not good,' but it also means there's no room for any of the risks that made her older work so fresh and adventurous.

With Childish Prodigy, his debut for indie-juggernaut Matador, Kurt Vile stretches and pulls the increasingly annoying “lo-fi” tag into interesting new shapes, distancing himself from his Woodsist-kin.

Unfortunately, for all the polish and gut that Grammy-winning producer Vance Powell brings to help turn diarrhea to gold, the songs lack idiosyncrasy, and Diarrhea Planet’s winking anachronistic irony is lost.

The Future Will Come blooms incrementally, driven from the ground by the grittiest keyboard performance heard on a dance album in some time.

It has a very laidback, late night, smoky loft vibe going on.

However, after one has settled in to the comforts of "Daughters," a shriek comes swooping down in the form of Daniel Smith's falsetto voice. Even on these faster-paced tracks, where Smith's falsetto demands less attention, it is impossible to deny this is the shortcoming of Brother Is to Son.

It’s rare for musicians to age so gracefully (and regardless, no one in Joan of Arc is really old either), and yet here one finds the band mellowing a bit from the over-exuberance of their early output while still retaining the ability to engage and be inventive.

Plaintive, spare, and narrative in approach, these songs--which seem to bookend the album--are among Raposa’s most affecting.

News and Tributes is relatively smooth sailing from note one; very consistent and effectively less immediate.

Fab and singer Rodrigo Amarante (of Rio De Janeiro’s Los Hermanos) affect the heavy hearts of coastal lounge singers yet retain the resilience of city kids who can’t be beat. Although backup singer Binki Shaprio is too feathery to really make an impact, the sum of Little Joy’s sincere regret and wide-eyed optimism lend a bedroom intimacy to the group’s debut.

As much as Stephens desires for a naturalist/humanist authenticity found in the limits of the extremes of existence, The Bloom and the Blight achieves an equal subjectivity that Stephens searches for.