Sadly, much of Welcome Interstate Managers is bogged down by forgettable midtempo slush. [Aug 2003, p.104]

The least imaginative album of their career. [Oct 2005, p.158]

It's a deathfest of sound and fury, quietly melancholy and fiercely apocalyptic. But it's a tale that grows wearier with every listen. [Sep 2004, p.122]

A precious orch-pop labyrinth that unfolds with sudden melodic left turns and zany shifts in dynamics and instrumentation. [Aug 2001, p.94]

Some of [Daniel's] stripped-down material sounds gaunt. [May 2005, p.166]

The cohesion that made their previous records so captivating has been significantly diminished. [Dec 2005, p.204]

An accurate representation of the prolific group's career. [Aug 2004, p.106]

Sounds like a good Wallflowers record. [Mar 2003, p.98]

They're so busy crafting the perfect pop song... that they've made a uniformly dull album. [Sep 2003, p.102]

Drummer George Barnett's military-precision beats are way up in the mix, but the band dynamic that made "Pyramid" so engaging, vibrant and coruscating, is virtually non-existent. [Apr 2010, p.130]

It's not an album that will change your life, but it could alter the way you look at bits of it. [Feb 2003, p.64]

His world-music diversions should challenge even those who aren't pedestrian Iron & Wine fans--but that's what EPs are for, right? [Apr 2005, p.116]

You may be surprised to learn that the roadside corpse does more than twitch; it gets up and positively rumbas in places ("Girls of Summer"), while "New Birds" heaves with the same fidgety agitation that occasionally made Joy Division seem special. [#147, p.83]

The songs explode with more energy than the whole underground combined. This makes it very hard not to love Los Campesinos!, and makes it easier to forgive the fact this record could have been better served as an EP. [Nov 2008, p.162]

Stag for the most part rocks with biting fierceness and vibrant energy. [#155, p.81]

Musically, it doesn't seem like Chan has gone anywhere. [March 2003, p.88]

A whole that's less than the sum of its parts, a bittersweet pill that's best taken in small doses. [Feb 2005, p.88]

The results are hit-or-miss. [May 2005, p.132]

Misguided in points, Contra shows a more accomplished and daring Vampire Weekend--albeit a less endearing one. [Feb 2010, p.97]

Both participants' artistic weaponry [is] set for "stun" instead of "kill." [Dec 2005, p.216]

There's a foundation for true duality somewhere, but a lot of growing pains as well. [Nov 2014, p.94]

Call it growing pains for a storied discography, but the result leaves the album feeling unbalanced around the gems and less rewarding over multiple listens. [Sep 2014, p.110]

It was probably inevitable, but having raised the bar so high for cut-and-paste music, Shadow spends a little too long here looking up at it. [Jul 2002, p.96]

Far from essential, but... a good jazz starting point for the unitiated. [Mar 2003, p.90]

There's a bit more quiet time on this effort. [Nov 2004, p.149]

Youngster is only temporarily satisfying. [June 2008, p.135]

It's important that albums like Ghost exist--but unfortunately, those albums don't always make the most enjoyable listens. [Aug 2004, p.116]

Hit or miss. [Dec 2003, p.154]