I think a big part of the problem is the singing. The lyrics are alternately cloying and curious, and they’re sung in a pretty and formal manner.

Like ghosts that don’t know they’re dead, the songs on Deerhunter’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? wander about in a well-produced limbo almost in mourning for the death they can’t die. But they don’t know it, so--and this is the saddest part about it--they become what they deplore, all loss glossed over.

The fact that it’s alienating, strange, impossible to get through and occasionally radically boring isn’t a slight, because that’s not the point. It’s too much and too real and too close and too far away.

At the end of the album, no stone on the topic of love and disillusionment feels unturned. Such is the strange comfort of blanket statements, but Lekman's fans may still feel the pea-like irritant of stories lanky and untold.

“Wild Strawberries” and “Enchanter’s Nightshade,” which occupy over 30 minutes of the album. They are mid-tempo, trad-to-the-max, predictable clean-tone psych-music.... Yes, there’s strong guitar playing, and the bass and drums plod capably, but it stays in the background and never enters the head. The record suddenly feels awkwardly escapist, and the listener is reminded that the whole disc actually feels rather laid-back.

Whole sections that might feel accomplished if taken as isolated pieces feel misplaced in the economy of these side-long tracks.

Ultimately, this album is a useful index to effects and samples you might want to import into Ableton Live at this moment, but not much more than that.

If one stripped away the halcyon, indistinct haze and the open-road aesthetic it furthers, you’d be left with precious little, save 10 unobtrusive, well-executed sleep aids. New Universe is its archetype--nothing more, nothing less.

Lost Themes II isn’t the monster transfigured. It’s an echo chamber for the transforming horror to howl in.

It’s mostly enjoyable on a surface level or if you’re in the right mood (or under the right influence), but it doesn’t beg repeated listens.

The Moondoggies make: music for middle-class, middle-aged white liberals. Music for my parents, and the parents of pretty much everyone I know. Tidelands is almost just as good as the real thing, but the real thing is still out there, if I want to find it.

Paracosm is, at the very least, beautifully rendered wallpaper, and it’s hard to blame Greene for living in this fantasy for as long as he possibly can.

Neither the downfall nor demystification of the group, the truly awful Ten$ion only further tangles the mess of questions surrounding Die Antwoord.

Total Nite still feels to me like lateral growth, neither distinctly worse but certainly not better than what preceded it.

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 turns out he's simply not the Nerd Messiah; he's creative and emotional and gifted, but at least right now, he'd do better making rap songs rather than ambient soundscapes.

Do It! is rarely dull. Uninspired? Yes. But it’s never dull.

Unfortunately, there's not much here to distinguish Ruins from the group's previous work, and too few of these compositions stick once the album is done.

The problem is that all of the moves feel like they're pointed in the wrong direction.

It maintains the headstock-nodding guitar work, the coherence between players, and the alternating structure, but it winds down the pace and pokes some air holes in the top of their sound.

It’s not that The Opera Circuit doesn’t sound pleasant, or that his lyrics aren’t solid; they just don’t hit me as being all that moving or even mildly engaging.

The alien, blank dead-eyedness of Britney Jean is frightening, because it feels like it’s all will.i.am trusts Britney with.

The album gets really repetitive and just drones into the background.

He spends the whole record cooing and coaxing a series of barely-described lovers, but it’s never clear whether they’re real, imagined, or an idealized online version of the two.

Song of the Pearl, then, is well-executed, but stuck in the same gear, especially in its middle.

It's the clingiest and most needy record I've heard in a while.

As is, Teenage Emotions reads more like that freshman-year college paper you really wish you’d just deleted off your hard drive.

There are a number of songs with enough stuff to listen to many times, but there isn’t anything grand enough to linger in the mind like an inamorata.