Kairos is not an album completely devoid of charm. The R&B influence gives the songs a weight they might otherwise lack.

Orth would do well to pay more attention to whipping his songs into shape next time around.

The worldview Trash Talk puts forward continues to feel generic, as though it has passed through too many links in the human centipede of hardcore punk to contain any vital nutrients by the time it makes its way to us.

There are some redeeming qualities, but for every success there are one or two failures.

I doubt they’ll be circling back to the sound I felt so strongly about, but even the mildly frustrating Set ‘Em Wild, like all the band’s records, has songs I’ll be listening to for years to come.

The performances are competent, but the songs, themselves, lack compositional ingenuity.

Unfortunately, the focal point of the album is not on the music, but instead on Slug's lyrics, which have matured at a much slower pace than Ant's slick production.

Transfixiation’s weakest points are its fixations, when it lingers too long on a verse clearly aching for the payoff of a chorus or when it tries for serious by way of obscene.

There isn't much about Stars Of CCTV that hasn't already been done and better.

Although Hagerty's mercurial inventiveness is occasionally electrifying, it's not clear who will have the patience to comb through experiments that generally fall flat.

As welcome as this debut was at the time, and as arguably relevant as its topoi of absence and alienation are to us all, there’s something very disquieting about a band that, four albums later, is obstinately continuing to mine its somber wellsprings.

There isn't enough unforced spontaneity or meaningful pop-craft on The Vision to sustain a full-length album, and a smorgasbord of tasty synths isn't enough to inspire vision.

This is digital automation entering the flow of the socio-linguistic, or stark outlooks amidst techno-financial mind-control. This is the sound of a colorless decline.

These guys are working within a fully-formed aesthetic; they've got hooks to spare and production out the wazoo, but right now, I'm just not feeling the soul.

Stars Are Our Home is a passable enough album. It’s just a bit naggingly stale, even for a fan of this sort of thing.

The album is too overbearing to be much fun and too paint-by-the-numbers to feel dangerous.

Light Science manages, thus, to be impressively conducted, self-announcing, and well dressed while remaining static, safe, and a tad lonely.

Props are due for not recycling the same album over and over again--something he could probably do for awhile before anyone would call him on it --but, unfortunately, the new approach results in Bianchi’s most banal album yet.

Their meh generation, “shouting lager lager” take on four-on-the-floor energy is starting to wear a bit thin.

Although the record is saved from complete disaster with its musical accompaniments... Elk-Lake Serenade is outrageously lonely and cumbersome.

In the end, then, it's not that The Devil's Rain is a bad album, but it's by far the weakest link in the band's catalog, and coming at a time when faith in the group is at an all-time low.

There are only so many times you can key into someone’s heart before they change the code, and after about 20 listens, the veneer crumbles a bit, and it’s a little too easy to see the gears turning underneath. But that’s not the most frustrating thing about the record; the most frustrating thing is that Sia has so much access to us and just doesn’t do much with it.

Nu-Mark's beats still refresh the old school in the J5 way we've become accustomed, but the other beats here represent a sad cross-section of mainstream styles, totally missing the point of their first three albums.

While VanGaalen seems to be overflowing with great ideas, I’d prefer if he reined them in a little more tightly on his next release.

For the consummate BSP fan, Valhalla Dancehall will likely be met as a sufficient new entry in the band's growing discography, but for a fella like me on the periphery, I'll need a lot more of the standout experimentation of Living Is So Easy to convince me.

Even the sunniest of good-time albums needs a source of tension, but Gonzalez has provided nothing more than a stream of pleasantry. The resulting album is immediately gratifying, but there’s nothing to keep the listener coming back.

It’s definitely an improvement over "Happy Hollow," but the band has yet to reclaim the impulse that attracted so many of their fans in the first place.