Instead of commanding attention, Relief allows it to drift, preventing the listener's final escape into the contentless void of sonic oblivion.

When they get it right - as they do on half of Personal Life - The Thermals are a joy to behold.

Although it does falter at times with a seeming complacency ("Meridian," "Colony"), it is mostly characterized by a quiet ambition. It’s gutsy and its gutsiness pays off.

That mainstreaming of queerness and breaching of boundaries is the context, spirit, and thesis of Pictureplane's second album, Thee Physical.

Despite its many retreads, Semicircle is still occasionally enjoyable, and that it manages to exist without a modicum of urgency or intellectual rigor is okay with me.

Far from essential, Hvarf/Heim can merely be looked at as a stop-gap before the next proper record.

Tomorrow Today sees Seeland headed in the right direction with solid, well-constructed songs, but the group should consider shaking themselves out of their languid state before releasing another album.

With Love’s desire to obscure any traces of the artistic hand that made it is both its most compelling trait and what ultimately prevents it from ascending to the aesthetic nirvana it imagines.

The Real Feel is a solid step in the right direction, both sonically and lyrically.

Not everything on Shape Shift With Me fits like “333,” which fits plenty, and hits hearts. Some of the hyper-syllabic loose-lyric delivery of “Norse Truth” drags baggy, some of the mixed political/personal imagery of “Suicide Bomber” bogs down what the song wants. Like want and love and bodies, songs won’t always feel good.

The River & The Thread transcends its geographical markers. It is an open-hearted piece of Americana, filled with music that is literate, narrative, and just a little bit strange.

His subtle turns of phrase and shifts in volume manage to achieve immersive depth even when the interplay of sax, strings, electronics, and drums otherwise lacks color.

It's not like Again and Again is a terrible album; in fact, it's an almost uniformly enjoyable one.

While it does have moments where the listener is reminded of why they love power-pop, Together ends up sounding too vocally divided as an album and at times too top-heavy with orchestral arrangements.

An album in which a majority of the heavy lifting is performed by the extra-textual aspects of the project, providing undeserved depth to a series of obsessive repetitions of the banal.

Too much of Disconnect From Desire is an interchangeable muddle of middling drum programming and Teflon Liz Fraser vocals.

Listeners looking for a long-term relationship are advised to look elsewhere or lower their expectations for love.

Even though the evidence isn’t excessively rife on Aerotropolis, it’s clear that somewhere under the shiny, retrogressive hedonism and 4/4 decadence, there’s a voice trying to escape the easy confines it has found for itself.

The energy imparted simply can’t overcome a drowning of influences, or rather, the kinetic is overcome by the potential.

A disappointment, maybe, but that’s to be expected – and shouldn’t we prefer that he want to give us something new?

The songs of his that have stood out most are the ones that at least try to meet the listener halfway, the ones that betray the deep-seeded enthusiasm underlying Vile’s laid-back, stoner(-esque — he’s a family guy, now) cool. While such material can still be found on Wakin on a Pretty Daze, locating it is becoming more and more of a chore.

At its worst, it wants memory over future. At its best, it wants to remember who sings next, after the shades fade.

Attractive Sin ultimately suffers from a lack of humor and humility (namely, pride).

Wolf gets lost in tepid mumbling, the musical equivalent of the guy at the end of the bar staring forlornly into his whiskey.

There is some great interplay on the George W. Bush track and the epic of John Wayne. Other than that, not too much is memorable here.

Harry Fraud’s production ensures that the EP is still enjoyable in a purely instrumental, non-lyrical dimension; I just wish that Action had stepped up and delivered rhymes on a level that these beats deserve.

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.

It certainly avoids the epic-lite quality we usually associate with bands in the post-rock mold. There’s no soundtrack material here: nothing to be exploited for the purposes of perfume advertisement erotica or inspiring nature documentaries.