The ethno-tinted dreampop of School of Seven Bells left me stymied and listless and, most crucially for a critic, at a loss for words.

In Our Bedroom After the War is half of an above average album, which is unfortunate if only because the band's still clearly capable of gorgeous pop convulsions when they lay off the theatrics and let their rhythm section rev things up.

While hardly the evolutionary leap forward that the band had suggested was afoot, Tonight is still, inarguably, fine for now.

The result is predictably less than comfortable, though certainly not in a difficult, experimental way.

A workmanlike effort that won’t do anything to harm the Phish legacy, but isn’t notable enough to make me wish that the band wasn’t packing it in.

Lurking somewhere in its spotty 80+ minutes lies an excellent 40 minute album, one of the best the Foos have ever done. As is, though, with its heaps of filler, dated production and needless segregation of rockers from ballads, it may actually be their weakest.

With a Cape and a Cane sounds almost nothing like its predecessor; the songs ring a million times clearer and the hooks bite far harder.

Of course it’s cheeseball, as we all were at that age. But that’s ultimately what makes this accessible, highly-listenable album a reinvigoration of both catalogue and genre.

The libretto/story/concept of the album is of absolutely no interest to me, and it won't be to you either.

Two thirds of a great album.

By showing a willingness to diversify their sound while cutting down on bloat, Phosphene Dream is easily the Black Angels most listenable record to date. It also suggests that they're keen on that most outmoded of concepts in the blog era: career longevity.

While it’s nowhere near Thriller or Purple Rain, it does manage a healthy attempt at a reinterpretation of both.

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

Luckily, as his focus on formative heartbreak has slowly graduated to the trials of marriage and children, Owen's catalog has likewise matured in sound.

Beyoncé’s an artist who’s not sure how to sell her full personality and craft in lieu of selling what she thinks we want.

The entirety of Within and Without is a mishmash of half-recalled thoughts sterilized in a cloud of sh*t production.

The Friedbergers have made a cogent statement that leaves most other contemporary acts in the dust.

Intuit makes sense, easy enough; it elucidates Knopf’s part in his more popular band, as if that were a secret, and it tentatively allows a familiar songwriter some more control, some new ground.

Though absent any truly great songs, That Lucky Old Sun is the most engaged and consistent effort from pop’s lonely genius in decades.

So, Ludacris is still a distance from a definitive, unmatched hip hop statement, but I’m content with his glaciered pace and middling “a-a-a-a-b-b-b-b-etc” frame. It’s just too much damn fun to pass up.

It’s more challenging than the indie-rock that makes its way into heavy rotation on college radio, and in the end, has the potential to be infinitely more rewarding as a whole.

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

As far as drone or ambient records go, Black Mesa is accessible and melodious.

There’s wit and meticulous posturing in the hills: we’ll be waiting right here for tomorrow. After all, there are enough immediately delectable grooves in his eleven tracks today.

Good songs, great times, and maybe it's a bit too long and short on variety but whatever. Plus, this record actually came out months ago and none of the songs have soured yet. That's something.

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.

This means that even though Get Awkward starts at a frenetic pace and pretty much keeps slapping you about the face for the next half hour--there’s hardly a song that goes above 2-minutes-30--it doesn’t feel like an assault.

Kinsella’s unrelenting lack of melody, his horribly self-absorbed and nebulous lyrics, and an overall misuse of timing force the rest of the mix into the periphery for a more numbing, frustrating listen.

The People's Key is not a bad album. In fact, boil the meat off these tracks, and you'd probably have the skeleton of a quite good album.

The best songs on The Forgotten Arm reveal the extremes of love and despair under their smiling masks, but the sorrows of the album are tempered by what can only be Mann’s own joy.

With Clear Heart Full Eyes he's established himself, tentatively, as a man apart from his band.

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

Instead of wrenching free of every single confinement that’s ever been placed around his tiny waist, like he’s pretty much always done, Prince is settling into 3121, accepting the decades of his career as what he should be content in emulating.

Unfortunately, First Impressions of Earth takes a steep drop in quality after “Ask Me Anything” and never finds its way again.

Innings succeeds as a minor expansion and development of the band's essential sound, and it's a progression that makes clear sense.

Nada Surf have not reached outside their comfort zone with The Stars are Indifferent to Astronomy.

Apart from these few times when the band touches on musical history, lyrically there’s still the same ridiculous preoccupations: rugged, Midwestern imagery; new age-y spirituality; rather obvious weather-related metaphors.

No matter how good these songs are (and many of them are quite good), the finished product is underwhelming, and I can only hope that I don't have to wait another half-decade to hear where they go next.

There is always a feeling of constructive clarification at the heart of Clay Class, and that reappraisal of the traditional sense of progress is something that is cemented by the ideology shining through the holes that Prinzhorn Dance School so artfully poke through the fourth wall.

While a Basement Jaxx album used to feel like a below-the-radar party for real heads, Scars could easily soundtrack a celebrity bash. That’s not the Jaxx’s fault, of course, though capitulation suits them.

This is drone ambiance for your buds, and Buds. Meaning: Crocodiles did good!

Bachelorette is not as immediate or inviting as My Electric Family, but I'm hesitant to condemn it for this. It's simply a different listening experience, one which creates a different mood.

Despite being quite well-realized and able to sustain a single mood for so long, the album sounds increasingly like a missed opportunity as it progresses, with the two songwriters' work almost never achieving a real sense of cohesion.

In this way, A Chorus of Storytellers resembles the Flaming Lips’ Embryonic (2009) in that it’s a characteristic and maybe even obvious album that stuffs a band’s commercial instincts under a protective layer of feints and refusals

It is as "original" as this band is going to get, and for that we should be contented.

A few duds aside, the album succeeds as an ecstasy pop update on the Blood Brothers’ delirious chaos and nobody who purports to miss that band should ignore it.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's third album might not set the world on fire, but it's a great little record in its own right.

Magic Potion never really manages to distinguish itself as an album; there are a number of excellent songs, but even with quite a few listens I never get the idea of the thing working as a collective whole.

Loney, Dear hasn't changed much, and that's what makes this inimitable album such great company.

We do get a consistent, theatrical dose of glamorous rockabilly out of Bobby Dee.

The album’s hyper awareness of its own mortar disrupts a bouncy pace that would otherwise fit Rhys’s suntanned pop to a tee.

It’s good, and I don’t mean just because it reminds me of Mass Effect‘s soundtrack but on the terms of a record: it ingratiates and ebbs and even exasperates, at a stretch, before rewarding in the end.

The tracks are at their most compelling--which is to say: very compelling--when they're listened to in isolation from one another or liberated from the album's initial lineup. The greatest favor you can do as a listener is to allow the same open air and breathing room the songs allow themselves.

The songs generally hold up, but the production job remains confounding. Keith Uddin’s meaty fists have ruined this album.

Sure, Banhart executes the truncated verse spectacularly, but he doesn't give his listeners enough time to love him.

Alpine Static unquestionably contains enough rock fireworks to warrant repeated listens.

Be Brave doesn’t live up to the rambunctious energy and junkyard swagger of the band’s debut LP, And Girls Club, but instead offers more subdued moments that allow Sambol’s frontman personality to transcend the clatter.

Sleep Forever will likely hold minimal appeal for anyone not already on the bandwagon built by Crocodiles' high-profile forebears, but I'm guessing Crocodiles wouldn't have it any other way.

Give Mobile time, and it will fasten itself, embed its patterns, and stay with you longer than you could have imagined a solo percussion album ever could.

The destination is certain in the screamer’s mind: he asks his band to draw up the new maps, and they do. On this level, 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons may be the most satisfying record the Silver Mt. Zion project has yet done.

The more Book of Bad Breaks plays, the more it clings and forces you to concede to its charms; it’s an admirable album, if not quite a great one.

In a nutshell, Neptune is a bit like Grace Slick fronting the Bad Seeds but not as good as it sounds.

Sun Bleached Greek Gods is a perfectly serviceable introduction to the latest hot-off-the-grill, young, immortal, unemployed, nearly insufferable bedroom pop outfit.

Bitter Tea has a bevy or unexplained items - crazy cranes, bloodthirsty in-laws, traitors lying in grass, osmanthus blossoms, card cheats and the only pewter pocket watch that belong to Joseph Smith's Great-Great Uncle's brother in law. It's outlandish stuff, and requires suitably outlandish music, from its weird melodies to jarring segues to an ocean of sounds marking a transition from one verse to the next.

Nearly everything else on Old Growth consists of middling blues-rock with impressive soloing but negligible heft.

Like all AC/DC records, this is a troubling one to love.

[Disc 1] is fantastic and worth the price of admission in and of itself.... Sadly, the results [on disc 2] sound more like the soundtrack to a bad '80s cop movie than appropriate or even interesting re-takes of some of the best pop songs ever penned.

They've struck a balance, similar to Terrible Two, that's instantly accessible, consistently surprising, and extremely satisfying.

While it may not match his most impressive work, he continues to challenge himself.

Musically, Silverman is his best effort since Messner.

While this album is far from The Hour of Bewilderbeast part two, it does represent a return to Gough's more stripped-down formula of simple, ramshackle pop songs built on electronic and symphonic detritus.

Do It! is about as radical as Clinic seem capable of, which is to say that they finally seem smothered by the borders they’ve set for themselves.

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.

Somehow, it all works remarkably well together. There are a number of songs that feel like guilty pleasures, and the Gram Parsons/Bob Dylan/Neil Young influences are worn on Adam’s sleeve, but lets face it: we’d all rather hear Ryan doing this than trying to bite ‘70s FM rock or Brit-pop shoegazer nonsense.

Coming from an unknown artist, West would be disappointing if it was anything at all; coming from Williams, it’s entirely abysmal.

Headhunter’s Nomad, taking cues from the mutated sonic vocabulary of minimal techno connoisseurs like Berlin’s Basic Channel, is altogether headier and more unreal. This is a futuristic, moody and vaguely menacing kind of dance music.

These songs, especially in the album’s first half, are uniformly gorgeous—the melodies are often quite good, and this record is all about finding ways to showcase melodies—but they suffer from sameness.

Taken all together, 29 is a staggering piece.

Fluff-heavy, Fast Cars snitches on the upcoming full-length: Blockhead better be back on beats, because Bavitz is moving in a sparse, faux-spacey direction that sounds bored compared to his busy work on Bazooka Tooth, Labor Days, and Daylight. But since there’s always going to be two or three songs on any Aesop release that deserve your Jukie-Board sig file, and especially since the The Living Human Curiosity Sideshow finally allows the listener to figure out what the lyrics to those great songs are, this one is just barely worth your lunch money as well.

There really aren't any bad or outright boring songs here, though Castlemusic's very best moments are largely front-loaded.

Classics can testify just like Ratatat (2004) did, and there’s no shirking of moral duty to melody, but the “growth” between the two albums leaves the sophomore effort a bit of a chore.

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.

This loosely associated collection of songs isn't even the logical extension of some of the more unwise artistic wanderings of Worlds Apart (2005).

There’s no getting around it: this sentimental, electronically-hackneyed glitch-pop shit can be remarkably effective.

Mister Heavenly, for better or worse, have debuted as a strong musical voice, one with perhaps so much combined talent and perspective that their reverence occasionally gets the better of them.

It’s perfectly reasonable to listen to Tape Chants at an ultra-low volume (a la Morton Feldman), but to absorb all of the color and contour of this veritable ocean of sound, I recommend playing it very loud.

The garish cover of Ghostdini is apt: this is an elaborate and unfunny joke, not to mention--if it even bears mentioning at this point—profoundly hateful to women

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.

Hal is basically just a pleasant, fun album.

There’s other fun songs on The Sun, but nothing that sustains itself as consistently as “Charlotte” and “Numbers.”

I doubt that anybody who found enjoyment in Behind The Music will be able to outright hate Origin Volume 1 because it’s about as similar to its predecessor as a follow-up record can be.

If Surrounded by Silence was Prefuse 73 beside himself, or even ten steps behind himself, Security Screenings is a commendable return to the path blazed by One Word Extinguisher and its subsequent outtakes.

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?"

Christmas Island shoots you down and makes loathing the same thing as self-loathing. But it’s also inspiring to listen to.

If there’s a weakness to Makers, it’s the occasional unmemorable tune in the album’s middle section.

The French Kicks have become too smooth and repetitive; they have been polished featureless and barely resemble four distinct personalities contributing to one idea.