The Spell cannot break free of the band’s successful formula without something a lot more challenging than this.

Thrills is technical to a “T” and plenty competent, but its lack of stylistic push or spread marks its void of hunger or ambition, a space that the mechanized heart of Berlinette nearly pumped blood into.

Moderat never combines as effortlessly and endlessly as that still-breathless collaboration between Apparat and Ellen Allien, Orchestra of Bubbles (2006), but it is alternately as enjoyable as seeing these two collaborate should be and a roundabout disappointment.

Two of Drake's favorite topics on Thank Me Later are I'm young and I'm rich stated with precisely that level of eloquence and imagination; should we start calling him the Justin Bieber of rap?

Björk’s biggest drawback, then, is that while “Holographic Entrypoint” is an enlightening rarity, most of Björk’s fans will find it boring. Very, very boring.

Crush is cold and hard and calculated. I mean, it's clear it's supposed to sound like that, but I have a hard time getting into it.

Someone needs to tell them that just sounding important doesn’t mean they actually are important.

Xuca keeps the listener at a chasmic distance from anything resembling intensity or urgency.

What Infra is, is perfectly pretty, atmospheric, rainy day music.

There’s not much to be said about an album that exists exactly as it should, satisfied by its own completion and purpose and really looking to nothing else for motivation or worth or whatever.

The Else is good, surprisingly and simply so. It’s also frustratingly focused.

It is true, this album does have songs and nearly all of them suffer the same fate: a few great ideas ruined by the need for everything to be so overblown and melodramatic.

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

Thankfully, these are just two misfires, album-cripplingly sandwiched around a triple whammy of floor fillers.

Chairlift are perfectly capable of producing a really good album; Something just isn't it.

When these songs sound like El Perro del Mar fronting the saddest, slowest disco band in the world, they work out best, but too much of this “mini-album” doesn’t quite get there.

Albums like Kiss Each Other Clean and The Age of Adz are so giddy with compacting layers and counter layers into the already mapped-out confines of their pre-existing aesthetics that they come across like snowflakes: each one is beautiful and unique, except that the detail is too small to see and anyways there's about a billion of them shits and you have to shovel the walkway and hope public transit isn't delayed. It's distracting, basically, because nothing gets a chance to breath.

The harrowing track list of Electro-Shock just wears too thin here.

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.

Despite some engaging song-craft, however, the album overall feels lacking in real substance and its fixations leave me blase.

It is rewarding that the album should end showing his passion displayed as a performer and shining through as a song-writer. The only problem is, with the rest of the album being so slight, it’s may be too easy for most to stop listening before they get to it.

Where Live From Rome really falls off, though, is the production.

When the Deer Wore Blue feels like a safe record. As they play this record too close to the chest songs blend together, needless repetition pervades, and most of the record's latter half is undistinguished.

Many of the songs lose their indelible glow being snail baited and cleared up like this.

Unfocused, haphazard, and a bit homogenous.

Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters is an album with a sum worse than its parts.... Still, there’s a lot of promise here.

The new versions aren’t bad, but the Vertex-era fan might quickly become the unwitting recipient of a $20 coaster.

Belle & Sebastian are in transition, as they were in the early 2000s, and I can only hope that we don't have to wait another four years for the likely superior follow-up.