Fading Parade brings back the guitars, but continues the slide toward formlessness, with songs that are always pleasant but no longer very compelling.

As these descriptions should suggest, none of the songs on No Witch grabs you on its own as a standout piece of songwriting. It's less that the instrumentation and tones are structural veneers concealing merely passable songs and more that the record is just one extended riff on a host of roots music styles.

I'm not particularly enthralled by that idea; rock minimalism often is rather aesthetically empty. While faulting the band for taking that route doesn't feel right, it does make the album a rather uneven, if still interesting, affair.

Anika was apparently recorded in a short time, and it's hard not to wish it felt at once more urgent and more cohesive.

If she wanted to move or enlighten, Let England Shake falls short.

Now, they're just going through the motions.

While Carlson and company continue to explore new influences (much has been made over the band's recent declaration of affection for Pentangle and Fairport Convention), Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 sounds to me like a different manifestation of the same sound they've been exploring for some time now.

Credit to Beam, of course, for challenging himself rather than continuing to remake The Creek Drank the Cradle over and over again, but Kiss Each Other Clean is unlikely to count among his best work.

Alas, the manic pace of the total structural collage makes it awfully hard to settle in as a listener. Deerhoof vs. Evil has a Guernica quality, in which pleasure and humanity are sublimated to the grotesque, which in turn is justified by the supposed inevitability of rational progress.

Mostly these songs seem slight and shy, unable, really, to support the massive facades of synth and disco drums that Small Black layers onto them.

The most interesting tracks on this album sound like music for the great Pier 1 Imports in the sky, suggesting an infinity of pure, terrifying stasis.

Over the course of three decades, Gelb has managed to make two albums that are great all the way though: Chore of Enchantment and 'Sno Angel Like You. He's made dozens that are uneven, and this is another one.

What is peculiar about Undercard is the frequency with which Bruno flops back and forth between these two roles. The result is an inconsistent album that is sophomoric at turns and sublime at others.

With perhaps the exceptions of "Silver > Blue" and "Levitation," none of the songs catch your attention. No melodies stick in your mind. No spirit of the album lingers, and the room isn't warmed by its presence. It's there and nice, but then it's gone.

Lovely as it may be, Light of a Vaster Dark largely lacks the surprising, adventurous quality of Faun Fables's past efforts, coming off as monotone and unremarkable in comparison.

Pop chanteuse lets the sunshine back in.

The Fool brims with potential for something more substantial, but never confronts those depths.

This time out, more than ever before, it really feels like Brooks and Co. are half-assing it, victory lap style, when they could have soared once again.

For the most part, Write About Love is a disappointment. That's even truer, I suspect, because Belle and Sebastian aren't the only ones getting older.

You can hear him trying to sort out the differences between Aeroplane's past and its/his future without resolving them yet. Appropriately, if you often find yourself unwittingly listening to pop hits from 1975-1985, you are the target demographic of We Can't Fly.

As a listener, you pretty much have Eskmo pegged by halfway, and it's disappointing that there aren't any sonic curveballs in the second half.

This is not a one-hit wonder situation, or even an album with only one good song. With King Night, Salem exhausts all its resources in a singular moment, which leaves the rest of the record to suffer through its own paralysis and mediocrity.

All I did was press fast-forward, track after track. When that expectation of emotional articulation wasn't met, it brought up that feeling of outrage, as if somehow Superchunk let me down.

The farther it strays into new territory, the older and duller and more dubious Wilderness Heart sounds.

They're going through the motions, you can't get into it, and then it's over, just like that. Strange Weather, Isn't It? is a party where everyone looks like they're having fun.

It's another misfire with a handful of great moments that point to something better.

It's a project with too many authors and not enough personality, too many ideas and not enough meaning.

Kozelek plays beautifully, but without orchestration, his songs (which tend to run upwards of six minutes) start to seem directionless.