Parquet Courts needs an extra injection of grandiosity (as 2014’s towering “Instant Disassembly”) when they slow things down, and they don’t always provide it on the songs that need it the most.

As I said, there is nothing really to fault, at least superficially, with Night Gallery, but it just never builds on the decent ingredients at play. It's simply far too easy to forget once you've heard it.

A solid, if not predictable emo-tronic excursion.

Even as Barnes works with a more limited palette, the drums/bass/guitar ensemble sounds as tight and crisp as could possibly be desired. He just doesn’t seem to want to be as gentle as the music that he has created here, resulting in a frustrating, and sometimes rather irritating listen.

At the end, S-M is still a silly tribute band, years away from hoeing a unique row. But when musicians crank out such a joyously chaotic mess of someone else’s forced nostalgia, it’s hard to be mad at them.

The album’s elements--large scale pop and tightly controlled electro--don’t always work together, but they come together on the very last track, 'Radio Kaliningrad.'

Maybe Butler was aiming higher than simply "dance music." A laudable ambition, but one that sadly isn't matched by the content of Blue Songs.

The Richest Man In Babylon is strictly background fare. If you run a coffeeshop, you’re cooking with gas.

While wildly uneven and far from either's strongest work, Instrumental Tourist does have its moments of inspiration.

Together is a good album that is catchy and full of hooks and does a lot of what we've come to expect from the band. Having said that, it's also a step down.

Unlike previous output, the ten tracks on Attention Please are slick, synthesized, almost club-ready vamps (or at least that seems to be their aspiration). The affect may be intentional but for the most part I found them to be drowsy, forgettable, head-nodding throwaways with at least a passable amount of textural variety but very little in the way of memorable song-writing.

There’s no question that when they get it right, the Walkmen are captivating. But with songs like 'Long Time Ahead of Us' and 'New Country,' the only thing keeping your attention is Hamilton Leithauser’s slurred laments.

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

So refined at times it borders on the insipid.

Strawberry Jam is a mixed proposition if ever there was one.

Right from the start, it’s the attention to detail in the arrangements — what Frank Zappa used to describe as “eyebrows” — that brings Norm to vivid, radiant life. ... Regardless of how gorgeous it all sounds, sometimes the songwriting does feel a little wanting, as if Shauf has penned a decent verse and chorus, then run out of ideas about how to add another section to take the song to the next level. ... By keeping all the songs to a succinct few minutes, Shauf stymies their potential to evolve into longer, more complex pieces.

The more faithfully you capture these songs, the worse they sound. The Lillywhite Sessions may be DMB’s darkest, most dangerous material, but it is still slick as hell. No question, though, that Walker approached these songs out of love, and for that, you have to give some credit.

It sounds like the Good Shoes are tired and mildly sick of it all--and unfortunately, it’s catching.

With no connecting thread or great songwriting, I Am Very Far is difficult to engage with. It has its moments, of course, but the more I listen, the more I think of it as a creative palette cleanser -- a chance to try out a few ideas while planning the next big song cycle.

The confident, relaxed, but still concise and appealing “Vertical” indicates that Animal Collective still have some life in them, and as much as some of Painting With can tend to grate, it’s still an improvement from the band’s last two albums; trying to write pop songs instead of dance records or noise jams suits them in their middle age.

There are certainly more fun moments than not, at the very least rendering The Grey Album enjoyable, but it’s hard to argue for any reason other than its novelty.

The record is more about preserving hip-hop culture that about creating something fresh.

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

Alligator's biggest missteps are the moments when the music joins in the apprehension, rendering the coyness in Berninger's lyrics unreadable.

It goes through stretches of boredom. From a distance, the album seems concise and poppy. But up close, the heavy grazing of each song bursts its seams.

If you prefer the combination of styles in his other Thrill Jockey work, or the more ambient and experimental character of A Child’s View, this may not be your bag. There is a specific focus on 10th, a consistent if ultimately unspectacular attempt to see through a child’s eyes.

Listening to Equilibrium is like attending a Matthew Shipp museum retrospective: one samples the various facets of Shipp’s recent career without delving too deeply into any one of them.

The net result of The Uglysuit’s formula sounds something like an imagined pairing of Bedhead and Phish. It’s all right as far as it goes.

Espoir is an unusual release, part interesting artifact of aesthetic oddities, part field recording of a talented man with a smooth voice who knows his way around a guitar. Not the ideal introduction to Burkina Faso, but worthwhile nonetheless.

Although sloppiness normally both describes and compliments their sound, Shadows is messy with little to redeem it.

An often fascinating, if frustratingly uneven record.

On the stereo, Who Loves the Sun is almost too pretty, coming perilously close to that "beautiful music" vibe popular in dentists' waiting rooms.

Like Darnielle’s shrill tone that many have come to love and now mourn, We Shall All Be Healed is sometimes on the mark, but often left of center. Its moments of clarity, although surely there, don't come around enough to keep it near the stereo.

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.

Like Masana Temples as a whole, “Dripping Sun” is fun but uneven, too ambitious stylistically and not quite ambitious enough sonically.

Tao of the Dead makes me, by turns, want to improve my attention span and want to listen to something else.

The majority of the first half finds Ejstes at his most melodically direct — including singles “Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus” and “Skövde” — while the second half indulges some questionable studio experimentation.

Nothing quite so interesting develops; instead, heavy generic riffs create the impression that Dave Grohl may be waiting in the wings to launch into an anthemic chorus. ... This is music that would sound best after the third beer. I hope, though, that Tyler is preparing to offer up some fresh, forward-looking music soon.

Sex Change is uneven from song to song, but name a Trans Am record that isn't. What's something here is the smoothness with which the record evens out as a whole.

Speck Mountain might have a great album in them; this one isn’t bad. But I hope that some day they get over themselves and really get down.

Ultimately, as the disc draws to a close and one hushed sonic wisp after another drifts by, justice is done to neither Foster’s considerable talents nor Dickinson’s genius.

If anything, the album isn't obnoxious or overproduced, and those who are more forgiving of beauty-mongering landscape pop likely have a year-end list candidate. Those who are into Apparat's more adventurous work and collaborations, though, should pass.

As an album, The Crying Light is neither as revelatory nor as consistent as "I Am A Bird Now."

A Dream A While Back is entertaining enough. Hearing Higgins recorded so simply can be starkly beautiful. Yet, anyone contemplating picking up a copy should be reminded there's another, far better record that should be heard first.

While there’s no disputing the attractiveness of its well-polished recording... it’s patchy and... in places, disturbingly adult-contemporary.

As a mood piece, there are poignant moments, but nothing resembling a clear emotional statement.

The problem is that if it’s not very compelling as theatre, the theatrical parts get in the way of enjoying the songs, which are pretty good in a brash, bull-headed, punk-belligerent kind of way.

The majority of Friend Opportunity fails to surprise. While it’s an easily listenable disc not without its share of good and engaging tunes, for a band who have made some of the best and most confounding pop music of the last decade, it’s a bit of a letdown.

Two compact chunks that could have made a gooier whole, one can certainly consider the potential excellence of “Seadrum”’s sprawling galaxy-march against some “House of Sun” morphed licks.

Ultimately, it's hard to embrace Sepalcure. The record has received some critical acclaim, and as far as stateside bass music goes, Sepalcure deserve the attention. But something is missing...risk.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing to the band besides the concept. Far from ramshackle, exploratory fun, the songs are paint-by-numbers melodramatic nonsense with a few interesting genre gestures.

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

Nothing wrong with clearly highlighting your influences, although you do run the risk of reminding listeners why said influences are better.

Newman's third album is beautifully put together, well played, slyly and cleverly worded, but it works too much on the surface.

Waves is an album filled with nice touches and sincere sentiment, not much more.

It's not as good as Ugly, but it's not as bad as Travels, and it's a welcome step in the right direction.

Established fans will appreciate a few new gems in the catalogue (I've returned repeatedly to "(They Found Me On the Back Of) The Galaxy"), but those unfamiliar with The Intelligence would do well starting with Deuteronomy, Fake Surfers or Males before circling back to this one.

This is great for obsessive fans and for the remnants of the Elephant Six community, for with Electronic Projects they can get a more complete picture of the band. But why make them pay for it?

There's no denying Lynn's skill at reconciling disparate sounds, even if the brightest moments fail to paper over all the cracks.

Haley tows the line between soundtrack and banger throughout, exposing the similarities between the two but also the pitfalls that come with catering to a particular demographic.

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

It's cool to hear all this stuff put together in one package, but it's so smothered in nostalgia and cheekiness that the predictable analog incidents that keep the tracks from sounding repetitive seem clichéd.

Veronica Falls are enjoyable to listen to, but they don't seem to offer more than that fleeting smile.

For as strong as much of the material on You’re Nothing may be, it is an uneven record, without the focus or pacing of its predecessor.

This go-around does lack the face-sucking gravity of "In the Morning" to serve as a point of access, but the best way to experience Junior Boys’ music has always been total submission.

While not really better or worse than their previous albums, Summer in Abaddon is at least pretty good -- more of exactly what fans wanted.

Morgan Delt is too academically rooted in the past to really disconnect from it. Still, as a debut, it shows some promise.

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.

Aside from Church Gone Wild’s best moments, there’s not much material here that can compare with the intelligence and distinctiveness of the duo’s best work.

While not without its pleasures, particularly in its first half, the album seems to find the Bonnie ‘Prince’ just a little too much at ease for his (and our) own good.

What A Place to Bury Strangers creates is satisfying, nothing more.

That shiver of foreignness adds interest to what is essentially a frothy pop sound, as does the occasionally mesmerizing distortion.

In the end, there is nothing too paradigm-shifting to be found here, just a nice genre pastiche from two unique talents who won’t disappoint their fans.

Voxtrot hew to the genre standards to consistently pleasing, if never thrilling, effect.

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

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.

The problem with Golden Void is that it sounds so much like the Black Sabbath, with its intricate, chopped up time signatures, its big-footed riffs, its surprising facility with tunefulness even during mayhem.

Fans might enjoy the history lesson, while non-fans are probably better off waiting for the next full-length.

It’s a magnificent mix, of course, and a great summation of everything we came to accept about this group and "encapsulating an era and putting it to rest.” That’s what makes it feel like such a hollow gesture, a pat on the back they deliberately rejected for years.

The problem with Since We’ve Become Translucent is that it doesn’t measure up to the standards Mudhoney set with the undeniable gripping music they produced in their heyday.

Lights certainly has its charms--cribbed Afropop, bits like A Rainbow in Curved Air, and a general poppy through-line--but those charms wear thin when placed up against an entire album’s worth of monotonous, mobius strip dance beats.

The Fallen Leaf Pages settles comfortably into the band's canon, delivering no surprises, no gimmicks, no gags, no quirks and no affectations.

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.

Alpers is smart, you can tell immediately, yet the album feels carefully scrubbed of identifying marks, swinging between Flaming Lips-size pomp and Laurie Anderson-style catatonia.

Bands like Eternal Tapestry ask listeners to slow down, to be less antsy and goal-oriented, and to simply let time and musical texture wash over them. That's fine, but wouldn't you rather have an instrumental psych track grab you by the balls? Let's have more galactic, more derelict, more excitement next time.

“Dayvan Cowboy” is almost worth the price of admission, but it makes the remainder of the album seem derivatively “New Age.”

While it’s a solid follow-up to "Neon Golden," The Devil, You + Me falls short of its predecessor in that, taken as a whole, it doesn’t amount to more than the sum of its parts.

In gaining power and speed, Secret Machines seem to have lost a sense of pace. Now Here is Nowhere rocks hard, but compared to the EP it contains half the ideas in twice the running time.

New Moon contains a handful of good songs, just like The Men’s prior two albums for Sacred Bones. The main difference here is that the stellar tracks aren’t embedded amongst thrilling instrumentals.

While nothing on TNT or Standards was as influential as Tortoise's earlier work, those records succeeded largely because they marked new stylistic departures for a group that sounded genuinely excited by that prospect. Too many moments on It's All Around You lack that excitement.

For now, the experience of listening to Magic Chairs is a frustrating one: the sound of a group with one foot remaining in art-pop territory and the other pointed toward an arena-sized sound. Efterklang might pull off either mode, but their occupation of the same space is a source of unwanted friction.

Daughters of Everything is a fine, fun rock ‘n’ roll record that struggles with a gimmick it didn’t really need.

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.

El Khatib's voice is good and scrawny, and yelps out Tennessee hiccups just right. But he works too hard at selling the whole show.

There's enough to enjoy here in the murky atmospherics and occasional surges of melody, but Shots can’t be the Ladyhawk album fans were hoping for.

They seem more interested in perfecting what they've already shown they can do better than anyone else.

Mister Pop doesn’t quite measure up even to the first few Clean records from their third return (Modern Rock is an overlooked gem); it feels a bit haphazard at times, the instrumentals don’t need to be there, and Robert Scott’s song isn’t as potent as usual.

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.