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.

“The Line,” “Winter Queen,” and “Wingsuit” share in the rest of the album’s sterile, self-parodying style of production, but set themselves apart with their uncommon catchiness relative to the rest of Phish’s studio discography.

Imperial Teen sound here like they're trying to squeeze some new flavor out of a chewed-up piece of gum.

Once again, the limits of music and musicianship are foregrounded in Popp's relentless pursuit of the horizon afforded by a particular disposition of limits: the limits of imagination, of technology, of process, the organic and the inorganic.

After many detailed listens, the record feels like their strongest yet, a bold statement considering the importance of their previous works.

Bozulich has amassed a band and baptized it with the name of her last record, and together they careen through a broken itinerary of radiant darkness.

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

The Next Logical Progression, is evidence of a serious identity crisis.

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

The Endless Not is ultimately a testament to getting it right, even after a lengthy separation, and proves that getting old doesn’t mean that you have to suffer loss of potency.

Port Entropy is Tokumaru's fourth widely-available full-length and sees him taking his songs to greater aspirational heights than much of his previous work, which has been characterized more by restraint than indulgence.

The acoustic slide guitar that opened "Fourteen Autumns" could have broken up some of this monotony. But it’s powerful monotony. It begs you to listen to it.

Tidings then, is a journey down a strip of tape from one reel to the other. Yes, it’s a little warped and damaged, but that’s what gives it its character; the insane parts make the most sense of all.

The combination of this 'throwback to '96' sound with confident restraint, and that Quasi have already proven themselves to the die-hards, I'm going to call this timeless underdoggery.

Blade of the Ronin’s greatest success lies not in avoiding the commonplace, but rather in their commitment to pre-SDCC juvenilia, as well as to a more holistic sense of sincerity.

The only thing keeping The Death Set from being remarkably original is the repetition of Siera’s beloved drum machine.

Duality pervades Gumption. City and country. Natural, machine. Personal, abstract. Song. Noise.

Rather than make broad statements about the nature of modern existence, Doiron takes an authorial approach, crafting brief but potent vignettes about bikes, minivans, and lovers walking through small towns.

Landing well above a genre bedeviled by the twin albatrosses of solipsistic whining and overwrought political grandstanding, lyrically Sollee's songs feel well-worn yet sturdy. But they stand out chiefly because the array of melodic and textural effects available to a cellist is much different than your run-of-the-mill fingerpickin' crooner.

What Batoh offers us here is a snapshot of a despondent, acousmatic psychogeography - a grief-stricken poetics wherein the blank nirvana-impulse of the Shinto rite of chinkonsai jars against the bleeding-edge caterwaul of his BPM machine.

They are uniformly wise and lovely, and by turns elliptical, sad, even political, whatever.

In Between still contains its predecessor's youthful spirit, if not exactly matching its energy. It's evident that replacing those muddling walls of noise with a cleaner, distinct, and more organized approach to songwriting hasn't affected the band's knack for capturing the melody and feel of early shoegaze.

The band's tight, and every song contains at least a few interesting musical ideas, but the album as a whole comes across less like a creative mess and more like a stoned-battle-of-the-bands gone wrong.

While it is simply impossible to duplicate the raw power and energy of [Vaudeville Villian], the newly resurrected Viktor proffers a tolerable continuation of his street hustle and ice-cold thuggery.

The Greatest Gift may not contain all the insight and manifest artistry of one of Stevens’s studio albums, at the very least, it reasserts his perspicacious understanding of his complex emotions and propensity for self-evaluation.

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.

Taken as a whole, Embrace is an enjoyable album. It’s predictable in places, at times even a little cliché, but it’s executed competently enough that these qualities are forgivable.

Gonzalez' voice is beautiful, but it doesn't have the emphatic uniqueness to carry the album on its own, while the songwriting, though producing gems like the EBTG-esque, understated "Mind & Eyes" is just uneven enough to fade occasionally into the background.