Considering the extent to which they seem to follow whatever musical desires grip them at the time, rather than following an overarching path, it's not much of a disappointment to suggest they haven't quite graced the heights of their best work here

It's all very controlled, as any functional dance club record should be, and its quality extends past its single, as any decent-to-good dance club record should be.

The third Foals album doesn’t represent a huge leap forward from Total Life Forever’s formula so much as a refinement.

Pick out the antihero tracks and one or two missteps and you have every Beck album (no typo) crammed into one disc with more wit and charm and weird science and heartache than that dude’s cumulative catalogue.

It wavers back and forth between showcasing the band’s strengths and having fun in the moment, more like a live show than a unified statement.

An Argument with Myself seems like more of an attempt at an encapsulation of Lekman's talent--to use the smallest things as gateways into work more ponderous but still relatable, achingly pretty but still occasionally biting, adventurous but familiar--than a showcase of new directions.

With Our Heads is a lonely, long stretch of un-anchored time passing, the audible, honest-to-god equivalent of switching one's mind into Airplane Mode and eyeing the smooth, barely altered upper cloudscape for the duration of a flight.

No amount of production dross can obscure the fact that Clockwork Angels still constitutes the strongest collection of Rush songs since the mid-'90s.

The Eraser is not Radiohead good.

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

Perhaps its primary feat is that the music manages to sound fresher than anything industrial-tinged has a right to sound.

An entirely pleasant, listenable little soundtrack.

Enemy Mine is altogether more defined in its varying forms, food groups falling out a cornucopia rather than coming together like the stew that bubbled in the "Beast Moans" cauldron.

Though these variations are often enjoyable, particularly on an individual track level, taken as a whole they're just too slight, making Civilian difficult to fully engage with.

It’s largely half-baked in its execution.

It suffers less from a lack of competence than a general lack of inspiring tracks and the consistency of swiss cheese.

So Hot Chip have built a very admirable sound. What confuses the issue with Made in the Dark is that it presents so many glaring kinks that still need working out.

With the gentle, delicate soundscapes of Let Go mostly replaced by energetic guitar riffing, Nada Surf can only transcend the limitations of the '90s sound for so long.

This EP is thus a fine, if also slight, document that showcases the duo's serious potential-and hints, perhaps, at how it could be used to produce a more ambitious set of songs as he approaches his next album--more than it fulfills the promises of Pallett the almost solo performer/arranger.

If reduced to a single disc, Street's Disciple could well be one of the more exciting albums of the year. As is it's a solid, if not brilliant album from an artist we've come to not expect too much from.

Hey Hey is sharper than "D-Don’t," filled out and throbbing like soul should be, not burdened with the entropy of a smattered ramshackle collection all heart and no brains.

It makes for a workmanlike listen. For all the frills of doom and cadences of industry firing on all greasy pistons, the dynamics at hand are simple, rounded up summarily when the album presents its glaring contradictions as a matter of fact

Traditional folk-rock outings that reek of Workingman’s Dead (1970) and the musk of Jerry Garcia’s beard.

The terrible truth is that -- and maybe this is a matter of an album’s length, replayability, interesting tenure, obedience, whatever -- Gruff Rhys will always be as politely awesome as Gruff Rhys has always been, and that’s just not enough anymore.

It’s not a bad album, and Doom’s rapping is damn near unparalleled; but when you come right down to it, The Mouse & the Mask kinda feels like a throwaway.

If Drake had it his way, one imagines he would deliver this album via fan newsletter. He made this record for them-which is why his aesthetic so thoroughly encases this record like a cocoon made of syrup-and he'd rather any stone-throwers politely evaporate.

Thing is, though, that for every failure Graduation puts me through it has many a saving merit that only the nigh witless audacity of Kanye West could afford

Sift through Are the Dark Horse and the sounds of the Beach Boys or Orbison can certainly be found, but the band has yet to learn the clean, economical songwriting of their influences.