King for a Day will definitely ‘love you long time’ with its bloated tracklisting, but you’ll soon realize that the attention-getting devices are working in reverse. Sure, they’ll cause you to crook your neck and gaze curiously, but once it all comes into focus, you’re likely to move on to better things.

I can't shake the feeling that I've heard this sort of epic music before, even from Mono themselves.

While his contrived sonic and visual aesthetics do much to explain the thinness of Smoke, they do not justify it.

In 37 minutes, there isn't a single moment when the music really hits with conviction.

It's a solid enough effort to merit hope for better things in the future is pretty good for us, too.

Press down on the ambiguities of Lust Lust Lust as much as you want, and you’ll still be trapped in a world of surfaces.

If they decide to get serious about being a band and not just a project, maybe next record they could take us to their own personal woods, instead of just telling us about boring generalized woods.

During some of the more composed moments, the album manages to shine out in semi desolate wonder; but most of the time, Monsoon sounds too much like the Jonathan Richman two-piece band from There's Something About Mary to outrun the malaise of mediocrity that blankets it.

It feels lush, it pleases and occasionally stirs, but there’s a cold distance between voice and instrument throughout, a distinction that barely existed on previous releases.

Gallery is an effort by a young artist who stylistically manages to be consistent yet not sophisticated, involving yet not affecting.

The signs are there, but they just haven’t come together in a way that makes significant impact--at least not yet.

Strangers is a fundamentally passable album.

Self Help Serenade is not an unpleasant listen; it has simply and unfortunately been played out over the years by scores of other bands.

This disconnect between Dirty Projectors’s pop tendencies with its “art” signaling is what ultimately stains the album with such a deep sense of confusion, making it difficult to parse who exactly this music is written for, if not people who are already fans of Dirty Projectors.

Pretty okay.... The lyrics, typical alpha-male self-pity material, aren't all that bad, really, but they're often curdled by the delivery.

No Más has three-fifths as many tracks in the same amount of time [as Jamz n Jemz], and for the most part, each track outstays its welcome.

Although you'd be hard pressed, but very pleased, to find a shindig entirely amenable to FlyLo's relentlessly eccentric experiments, Pattern+Grid World is certainly more pillow fight than lounge party.

Days of the Bagnold Summer plays like a b-sides compilation with a few cuts worth revisiting. Like the Storytelling OST, this one’s strictly for the heads.

Half a good album, half disastrously wrong.

No matter how you want to face it, the secret is out: pop isn't Friedberger's bag.

An album that is, at best, a dilution of the real experience it's trying to capture.

The joy of "Fur and Gold" has vanished and taken some of Khan’s potential with it. This is request for their safe return, no questions asked.

Even if it's derivative, Red Bedroom is very catchy.

Sure, Mister Pop might be of interest to fanboys and a few others, but it makes a less convincing case for why new listeners should care about these guys.

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.

While it still has a few standout moments that grab the listener and spark a mood, it’s only occasionally eventful and, ultimately, doesn’t reach the heights of its predecessor.

With Moon 2, Ava Luna modestly succeed along the same rubric that we apply when we listen to Steely Dan or Daft Punk: the result is impressive, pleasant, and inventive, but ultimately feels too insubstantial for us to garner much from it.

Unfortunately, Me Moan doesn’t really deepen Gibson’s exploration of this novel niche. Instead, it feels mostly like a country record that still has one foot in the sample-based electronic aesthetic that previously defined Gibson’s work.