While B’lieve I’m Goin’ Down, at least as far as its words are concerned, is more interesting than it appears on the first few spins, that’s not quite enough to make it a memorable listen.

Faith in the Future disappoints in its lackluster melodies and overall vibe. The highlights here are the more ambitious songs.

Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is actually pretty good, and sometimes it’s great, but it is quiet, sounding very much like it sprung from the Internet ether to politely ask for thirty minutes of your attention.

My Everything is so concerned with making a palatable pop singer, it has watered down its subject to the point of tastelessness. It is pop music Bud Light.

It is familiar. It is, despite whatever priggishness keeps some publications from printing the band’s name in full, safe.

G I R L is safe, universal, and unforgivably dull. It should be a huge hit.

If this album works, it’s because of moments like “Landslide”: those that cut through the density of an artist in flux, one susceptible to myriad influences, managerial grumblings, and producer cues, overeager to pass off his work as undeniably unique.

As a record standing almost entirely on nostalgia, sure, it gives schmaltzy ’70s dance music a fine, not-sacrilegious update and sets it to a pleasant neon glow, but it’s a trip through history that’s almost more educational than immersive.

The record attempts to fuse dance music and complexity, but doesn’t quite reconcile the two; instead, its mindless thrills butt up against impenetrable baths of sound.

Eat Skull can be really charming when they want to be, but just as often they seem content to putter around, resulting in enough slack to overwhelm such a short record.

Amok is a palatable piece of 21st Century electronic pop that generally sounds complex without really being that complex at all. It’s as smooth a surface as Yorke has ever painted, without grain or contour. It seems designed to say little, to equivocate, to slither around the perimeter of our expectations.

Most of the time, Lysandre as a record feels confused and stifled.

It's the sound of all the band's weapons unceremoniously blunted.

2 seems to merely scratch the surface of what DeMarco can do; a record of what-ifs and wishes, 2 is only a partial glimpse of a guy we know too little about.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor offer a majestic, beautiful coda for a version of protest that is dated and unhelpful today. I missed having their music around, but I wonder whose eyes they're opening with a record that sounds like a document of yesterday's anger.

Weirdly, while each of the songs is too short, the album itself is too long.

"Bait and Switch," the best song on Port of Morrow, recaptures some of this eager, joyful glee; but in my opinion, the rest of the album holds none of these virtues.

Stephin Merritt, once capable of such subtlety, such beauty in his cynicism, has produced a record that's surprisingly shallow.

Welcome to Condale is a study in tactless excess, the sheer volume of inebriating nostalgic moments intended to overwhelm the lukewarm medium by which they're delivered.

Where † crafted sly treasures out of gaudy detritus, single-minded as it may have been, Audio, Video, Disco simply settles for canonizing the forgettable.

Extra Playful is fun in the worst kind of way and, at times, bad in very fun ways, but as a whole it presents rather discouragingly the attempt of an auteur marooning--perhaps on purpose, but hardly with purpose--as an amateur.

What makes American Goldwing so disappointing and, frankly, dull is that Blitzen Trapper seems entirely unconcerned with sounding either fresh or interesting.

It's a realization in retrospect that occurs too often throughout In Heaven. And in those moments one can't help but be disappointed, hearing Twin Sister such a cut below what they were doing just one short year ago.

While there's nothing wrong with the production displayed on When Fish Ride Bicycles, Inglish laid down the blueprint for supporting this duo so well that the oft busier and more varied work on this outing feels like too much to digest and too much for them to wade through.

It's well-produced with some nice drums, but it simply has no reason to exist.

It is his fourth record to be titled Finally Famous, which is preposterous for a lot of reasons, the largest of which being that he is still not famous.

His constant assurances across Goblin that he doesn't really mean any of the hateful shit that he continues to say, including this disclaimer's attempt to dissuade listeners from actually doing anything Tyler raps about and the title track's assertion that because Goblin is a work of "fiction" Tyler himself shouldn't be blamed for anything bad that results, undermines any of the resonance Goblin might have otherwise had as a, well, purer document of depravity and, at his most extreme, a certain kind of madness.

As with that last Aphex Twin full-length, The Only She Chapters plays to no one's expectations; gutted and reassembled, it will still unfurl like a disassociated string of insular oddities.

Shaolin is simply tiresome, a heap of cliches with no animating force beneath its husk-like frame, not so much a follow-up to anything but our long-held anticipation for something better.

Though the thesis of this remix album restricts remixers to only one album, the remixers limit themselves further, and seem afraid to do too much more than reaffirm certain dance touchstones already done away with by Weber himself. They've missed the sanctity for the structure.

You leave Nine Kinds of Light completely unaltered, neither enlightened nor offended, simply having experienced a series of first-person statements: Adebimpe in his doorless (and not terribly interesting) tower of self.

There's a lot of rappity-rap cliches at work here: overwrought punchlines, vague disses, bitching about the industry. Kweli spends a good chunk of the album acting like a drunk, unemployed superhero, stumbling into supermarkets to aid old ladies whose purses are fully in their possession.

It's to British Sea Power's credit that Valhalla Dancehall seems far less concerned with mainstream sermonizing than their last full length, opting to indulge in the off-kilter charm that drew us to them in the first place

As quiet strings and stupid whizzing noises pull the curtain on LP4, all I imagine is Ratatat going, "Alright, party's over, guys" and all I can think is "wait, is that what was happening for the past 43 minutes?"

Sundown is still considerably boring when compared to the likes of the Kings' first three albums. It's also too long, the back end sacked with faceless mid-tempo songs devoid of hooks that can't compare to the mini-epics up front.

Popp sounds as if he's having a ten-year-old argument with himself, and though he's certainly earned the right to make the point that this argument still holds currency, O is less than convincing.

With never any hurry or need to their lyrics or their vocals, with only dreamy soulfulness that sounds too content and comfortable wallowing in grief to want for much else-I just don't see what's very necessary about this album.

Humbled by a silenced rhythm section and bafflingly reverberated guitars, the majority of Interpol is little more than background static. Maybe it's time for an intervention.

As a whole, it's not consistently buoyant enough to be a good pop record, and the politics that weigh down its middle section aren't sharp enough to make it into anything more than a middle section weighed down by some obvious politics.

The problem here being that the clean production values are themselves another veil masking Williams' fundamental badness--and so this album becomes, like its predecessors, an exercise in misdirection and deceit.

What's the same is bigger and broader, bringing its faults into stark relief. This is, I stress, Best Coast's Proper Album, and so rather than Where The Boys Are's loosely defined "songs" we get Songs: feeble, noise-soaked throw-back translations of everything from doo-wop, girl-group, pop-punk, to pseudo-grunge.

It shouldn't come as a shock that Bionic is not a very good record. What should is that the conversation about how bad it is has become one of the most vitriolic and fascinating conversations pop music has recently provoked.

It’s a middling album that managed to get the best of collective consciousness.

Still, as much as the warped good intentions of the album can get exhausting and embarrassing, Nas and Damian's creative side remains pure enough to carry one through the lunkheaded didacticism.

Nothing Hurts ends up being its own worst enemy: it obscures its biggest strengths, choosing not to showcase them but to drown them out in a familiar and uninteresting haze.

The Dead Weather have released another quickly recorded batch of entirely unmemorable, unpleasantly limp rock music showcasing Jack White’s increasingly irrelevant take on garage, blues, post-punk, and guitar refuse.

It regresses to the essence of an increasingly stale sound with a series of second-rate tracks and bored performances. This is co-option at its base; you were a few years too early, Nick.

Forgiveness Rock Record doesn't provide anything interesting to talk about in and of itself. Its actual thematic talking points, as far as I can tell, tend toward political pedantry.

This is the third album in a row where Snaith seems to have devoted most of his effort into submerging his own unique voice deep within the musical persona he's adopted, I just don't really get what I'm supposed to do with it. Like, should we get him some water wings to keep his head above the water?

Here’s hoping Sweet Sister is the sound of a talented group shaking out some superficial songwriting ideas before getting down to it.

Volume Two is a record, of occasional charm, that comes off all-too-aware of how cranky a response to it other than “charming” will seem.

My frustration is simple: not only does the record’s production drag down what could have (probably) been good songs, the band deliberately downplays its two best players, and everything suffers as a consequence.

This album simply sounds like their first with inferior production and less-memorable songs.

Utilitarian sensibilities typically create better, catchier results, but Little Boots’s producers can’t help flaunting their knob-twiddling abilities, justifying their paychecks while counterintuitively making Hesketh’s music sound all the more amateurish.

An overcooked vanity piece from a band inflated by praise, Odd Blood heads in every direction at once.

Why Vampire Weekend seem uninterested in being a no frills pop band is a mystery. They slather what would sometimes be solid songwriting with such production doodads, intertextual namedrops, wry smirks, and defensive irony that the songs themselves are crushed under the weight

“Robocop” works on Storytellers too, proving that there are fleeting moments of emotional honesty beneath this steaming heap of artifice, a reason, for some puzzling reason and perhaps beyond all better judgment, to still find oneself interested in what this guy will do next.

If anything, this is an effective teaser for a new Broadcast album, since many of the tracks here could easily be part of great Broadcast songs, but in this form, they aren’t, and it’s clear that we both know that.

Whatever its origins, Psychic Chasms extols no actual reasons for being those ways, instead touching on now-expected tropes and empty gestures to fund a handful of ready-made critical anecdotes and popular opinions.

It’s a counterfactual, of course, but I’ve got to think that Monsters of Folk circa 2005 would have come up with something a bit more substantive than this.

For an album so brazenly loud it leaves little impression; as a record supposedly about statements, it makes very few intelligibly. Most inexcusably, it lacks imagination.

Patrick Wolf still engenders a puzzling and sometimes fascinating discussion about romanticism and pretension and authenticity and songwriter worship, but what’s disappointing is that he seems to no longer be a part of that discussion, simply the subject of it.

Strictly speaking not much has changed since this Japanese trio’s debut EP Neji/Tori washed up on North American shores, but somehow that previous effort had so much charming belligerence and ferocity and Destination Tokyo sounds bored and meandering.

I’m convinced that Bechtolt and Evans have a ton of potential that’s simply going completely unrealized for all but about nine minutes of See Mystery Lights, which leaves it feeling like a party that never actually gets going for some inexplicable reason as everyone involved tries too hard.

Each of these eight leftovers can be divided into rote, by-the-numbers Modest Mouse rock jams and meandering pseudo-experiments that feel, uncharacteristically and disappointingly, like nothing more than filler.

The Dead Weather makes smegma rock. It’s a squirming, nauseating label no doubt, but so is Horehound, convinced that skuzzed-up guitars and swamp blues roots demand sleaze, humidity, and grime.

Clearly, this record is boring. Whether or not that’s a good thing remains up to your discretion.

This is the real key to understanding Varshon: it can’t be a truly cynical attempt to recapture former glory because it’s too half-assed.

Nothing on this album surprises me because anyone who has listened to this band regularly has become so steeped in pointless oddity that they have moved past surprise into the realm of mild annoyance.

This might sound like a blunder, but Diplo can never be criticized for not being adventurous enough; though he can be criticized, magnanimously, for Major Lazer.

The best the band could do is take this folk stance and make it somehow relatable to the sort of listeners like those in Chicago, blessed as they are with one of the most storied and diverse stocks of bands in the country. What Of the Cathmawr Yards ends up instead is a cold catalogue of personal taste and increasingly diminishing scope.

Oh, charm abounds; what the album lacks is direction.

There’s something oddly sweet about how completely out of step Eels are with trends and genres, something nourishing about how secluded their music has become. Shame, then, that it must necessarily also be so exclusive.

Their rhythm section (ooh, two drummers!) is serviceable but generally underwhelming, and song by song the record just falls flat.

I could go song by song and come to the same conclusion with pretty much each one: the dedication to this carefree whimsy of youth ultimately stands as the most impressive thing about Passion Pit, and it wears thin quickly.

The net effect here is that Super Animal Brothers III is the stem of a great dance record with some irony smeared on it, shit-on-canvass style. Sure, it ends up making a statement, but…why?

Hard Islands is hardly a wash, just frustratingly short of the sound statement Fake wanted to make.

You won’t hate this record; you won’t be any more capable of hating this record as you would a particularly aesthetically pleasing houseplant. But the record’s greatest achievement is that it’s happy with just not being hated.

The hook aspires to nothing, and so its nothingness is an anthem for do-nothing/think-nothing slacker types we like to imagine were listening to the Beastie Boys and Nirvana in 1994, but were probably listening to the aforementioned Dave Matthews.

Fantasies is, rather unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, just another Metric album.

You Can Have What You Want is like "Turn on the Bright Lights" (2002) without the drama, without a voice as deep or distinct as Paul Banks’, and without the hooks. Instead of all that, Papercuts opt for a vague, beige production and generally indecipherable lyrics that may or may not be about some kind of futuristic utopia/dystopia.

Begone Dull Care spans eight aimless, meandering slow jams--each averaging a bloated six and a half minutes--and, returning to the pacing issues that threatened to put "So This Is Goodbye" fans to sleep, there’s simply not enough to distinguish one track from the next.

Most of that sonic rage is in absentia on It’s Blitz!, which is part OK electro dance record and part atmospheric boredom courtesy of producer nerd David Sitek, who, it’s becoming increasingly clear, saves all of his best ideas for his main squeeze TV On the Radio.

In all, the languidness of Rules has its own odd charm—since WBA never aspire to be much beyond a wistful dance pop quartet, they don’t fall down the stairs too embarrassingly.

LotusFlow3r achieves nothing so much as reliving the glory and joy of emulation, which is saddened by the image of Prince nudging our shoulders, urging us to relive with him.

Here we see the often-resourceful Deacon approaching a big canvas with too little paint, and the result is a record which feels bloated, overlong, and ultimately empty.

March of the Zapotec is a serviceable, if less than memorable, expansion of Beirut’s already established sound via the Jiminez Band, a 19-piece band from Mexico. Realpeople Holland is fucking awful techno music that is desert-bereft, wholly disposable, and somehow makes Condon’s crooner’s dollop seem alien and unlistenable for the first time. If

Mother of Curses feels suffocating: it’s experimental but constrained and bleak but not humanistic or relatable.

It’s Not Me It’s You is neither grating or annoying. It’s merely boring.

Dent May has a firm grasp on his ukulele, debuting his skill through an adept, kitschy, brief, and rarely but sometimes resplendent album, but he’s still forevermore a novelty.

This isn’t progress, it’s pleasant, capable, effortless stagnation; the dream’s already finished and we can’t, for the love of everything, recall what it was about.

Dälek have refined their work but their work has no reaching trajectory.

Even with their glut of talent (Bejar not included), the band is sputtering for ideas.

So, um, good? Yeah, but in the same way grilled cheese sandwiches are.

This is a power-pop album released by the biggest Fall Out Boy-ish band working today, on a major label, but it’s also 50.4 minutes of Fall Out Boy music--an extended, incomprehensible and surprisingly marketable clamor, ambulance siren loud, of contradictory signifiers.

This isn’t a bad release, and chances are, if you liked Cross, you could like this just as much. But it’s not going to contain any new revelations, and the extra reverb and applause are not enough to justify the release of a live album.

The terrible truth of this album hangs stupidly overhead--that it’s a yawner.

This is a record of a plump stomach, a belch, a bit of acid reflux; the by-product of Kanye’s indulgences? More heartburn than heartbreak.