In the end, the album is a collection of songs, mostly good, some indifferent, and all a hundred times more honest than, say, Rihanna. But it's all really to no transcendent purpose.

Bibio aims to express an exquisitely blurry mind-state; instead, his lack of focus conjures only a musty shadow of the varied, sportive electro-pop album he strains to create.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have retained most of what we loved about them while also finding new ways to dazzle us, to make us swoon.

In many ways, All Eternals Deck, his greatest work since 2005's The Sunset Tree, is the perfect final album, fixated on death, legacy, survival, and an uncertain future.

Discontinued Perfume has a net effect, despite its potpourri. Still, I wish they'd let some of their ideas out to roam a little more.

It's the sound of restless, searching energy channeled into a bare-bones context, surging against its boundaries by sheer compositional rigor.

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.

No Color isn't a bad album by any means - it's great at times, never less than good, and certainly better than could reasonably have been expected - but there's no sign here of return or retreat to their old strengths.

Other groups have approached the issue of originality by genre-blending; but in the case of Esben and the Witch, it is their very faith that ensures that the hollowness one feels while listening has a doubled quality, reflected not only in content but also in experience, leaving one with the ominous aftertaste of a doppelgänger encounter.

Where The Excitement of Maybe shines--like a harvest moon--is in production, composition, and musicianship, but these alone aren't enough to sustain the distinctive voice Cervenka has spoken in so boldly, particularly when they're employed in the service of pastiche.

EDD are probably too traditional a band to ever record a straight-up punk record. But it would have been nice to hear an entire album powering through with the intensity of the more rocking half of Riot Now!.

Barnes and Trost may be back home from their sojourn abroad, but their music is still out on the road somewhere.

12 Desperate Lines takes tried-and-true radio rock tropes and imbues them with enough life to make them feel fresh.

Ghostface may be the most spectacular survivor of the Wu, but Rae is its real heart; the voice of speed, he moves through these tracks like a field of threats, chronicling progress towards a goal that's never lost.

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.

Never mind the cultural appropriation bollocks, here's ethnotronic industrial pop.

Even as it limits the album's appeal as much as it does the band's chances of broader success, Wye Oak's stylistic purity is a virtue in itself.

Something Dirty has something of the reliability and surprise of rediscovering a trusty, well-trod paperback on the shelves of a particularly high-quality, secondhand but not-to-be-outdone bookstore.

For its circuitousness, there's always been a lean, mean backbone to the guy's writing; even his most bored-sounding toss-offs came wrapped in barbed wire. Here, he just kinda sounds bored.

100 Lovers baffles with the breadth of its misfires; from sequencing to packaging design to instrumentation, this is a band taking bold steps in the wrong direction.

Compared to her two previous releases, Barwick's songs on The Magic Place are much longer and more layered, with a greater diversity of textures and instrumentation.

Hendy now seems to be making a bid for the sort of omnivorous, stylistically noncommittal psych-hop that's been relatively popular - marking critically acclaimed hip-hop milestones - for more than a decade now.

Relying heavily on posturing and tired song structures, lacking the incisive commentary and pointed humor that it strives for, Music's Not For Everyone is a record that fails on many fronts.

The songs on Pyramid serve admirably as precise and severe mood pieces; they are great for rocking out to while one devotes half a mind to something else.

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 Rural Alberta Advantage's capital-E Emotions are rarely comforting, but they serve as a reminder that life, stark - and wintry - as it is, is worth feeling hurt over, that our petty, mortal passions are justified.

It's as if Tyvek decided to reinvent themselves as a mutated punk group, and to no one's surprise, the aesthetic shift works.

This is soul music, sometimes in form, but always in content; mournful and inspirational in equal measure, Wounded Rhymes more than earns that categorization.