Ultimately the album adds another respectable line to The Mountain Goats' discography.

For a band who made their name on straightforward, meat-and-potatoes indie pop, Strapped is all over the place.

During these 18 minutes, you can sense a tension between the darker atmosphere and the pop inclinations. That's a combination that's yielded its share of greatness, but the two don't fully merge here.

Krell seems like a victim of his own good intentions. There's a kernel of an idea here.

Standing at the Sky's Edge is Hawley's first major misstep.

Wild Peace is a work in progress, a document of a band on a very fast track, but still figuring out exactly who and what it is.

Guantanamo Baywatch is a pretty good all-instrumental surf band with a terrible singer. Chest Crawl... puts vocals on all but three of its 11 songs, attempting Cramps-style, reverbed rants, Trashmen-esque shouted call and response, Elvis-y 12/8 balladry and hiccuping rockabilly vamps and sheep-bleating, vibrato'd yelps, all badly off-key and dreadfully recorded.

Just as Yeasayer appears to have planted its two feet firmly on the dance floor, it seems to have lost much of its capacity for eccentric pop magic.

While the individual songs here impress, Holograms feels more like a collection of singles than a cohesive work.

Other than some inoffensive feignings at trying something new, there's not too much else to be heard.

Shrines lacks any friction; Purity Ring has created a very viable sound that doesn't offend or stick.

Country Funk frontloads these generic examples, and leaves the rest of the compilation up to artists who managed to eke meaning out of the stylistic changes.

Whilst this is a lovely, well-made album, nothing separates it from countless other acoustic folk recordings.

While pleasant enough on a superficial level, the band's third full-length, Traps, falls short of the kind of coherent, compelling vision that would lift them up from intermittently-engaging mediocrity.

Throughout this often incoherent hodgepodge of tunes, Baroness has mostly abandoned the contrast that made its previous records work so well.

Broken Water's second full-length, Tempest, is at once a deeply competent and unoriginal record.

The reality is that Valley Tangents just sort of floats by as background music even whilst actively listening.

This is not a diamond in the rough as much as it is a piece of carbon that might, with extreme pressure and effort, turn into something someday.

[The production] intrudes on the songwriting, distracts the listener, and interferes with what are otherwise solid and sometimes deeply moving performances.

Overall, Dub Egg isn't as strong as The Young's debut, Voyagers of Legend, but second-album jitters aren't the problem. If anything, The Young have a little too much confidence in their style. By the time the finale drifts into its dissipating breakdown, it feels a song too long.

Even if The Diver is too lacking in originality for many, it does what it says on the tin, with verve, energy and a keen sense of what went before.

Everything else seems comparatively flat and unsurprising; while the components of the individual songs are different, the results are of a kind, like a set of recipes using the same ingredients.

A few tracks wisp away into nothingness, but on work like "Your Heart is a Twisted Vine," Nadler approaches timelessness as well.

The Narrow Garden is, at times, polite to a fault, its sensual romance lacking visceral urgency.

The tracks that are built on longer samples and vocals are more involving.

Sandwiched between two of the most towering works of its kind, Greenwood's massed strings can't help but transmit a tad cheeky.

Gedge's wryly stilted voice and clever turns of hook are still on display, but without the frantic guitar of Pete Solowka from the group's early lineup, the songs are a bit too slow and heavy.

Pretty Ugly is neither very pretty nor particularly ugly, rather a lumpen, unengaging mess.