It’s pleasant enough, especially with the shift away from Broken Social Scene towards a dancier Cut Copy aesthetic, but it’s ultimately forgettable. The perfect connector for a full album, but not strong enough to hold its own.

In theory, there may be nothing wrong with a desire for mainstream acceptance, but Cantrell’s music suffers for it.

It's all so tightly buttoned down that the first listen evokes a certain déjà vu; You haven't heard it before, and yet you know what's going to happen anyway.

Beating Back the Claws of the Cold aims for timelessness with its fusion of chamber pop, indie rock, and popular folk, but falls short as just another likable, ephemeral fall release.

And this is pop music, right? Why is it all so damned unmemorable?

With their new third record, though, Horse Feathers have tightened and thickened their autumnal moodiness with a classicist, chamber-ensemble sound--and stifled themselves in the process.

Extremely unoriginal, but well-crafted rock shot through with tantalizingly brief moments of interest.

Cave never quite summons the lyrical beauty that Neu! was capable of, nor do they rock with the blithering, obliterating tension that Oneida brings to its hardest bangers, but once or twice during Neverendless, they do turn locomotive precision into something transformative.

Candela doesn't represent Mice Parade's most memorable outing, but it does showcase a willingness to expand the expectations surrounding their sound.

Burial doesn’t step into the spotlight particularly masterfully. For the first time, his rhythmic choices get a bit lost, and some of the cuts to silence are more clumsy than disorienting.

While Orcas hits on a heavier emotional level than I'd initially expected, that tendency to drift does endure on repeated listens.

It’s not that these songs are bad, just that they sound a lot alike: elegant, chilled, full of foreboding.

It’s undeniably pleasurable, but dangerously close to being superficial and meaningless.

While Freedomland has all the weakness of live albums, it compensates with one main critical strength: It documents a living, breathing experience of music, improvised on the spot, moved by strong, ineffable currents, never to be repeated again.

Though much of Dilla’s later works were quick jots, Jay Stay Paid sounds too much like the unrevised pages of a journal.

The weak spot, as ever, are lyrics that clasp to cliches without transforming them. So we get a song about a certain four-letter-word, and lines about rain or taking chances. On the other hand, the punchline of 'Men in Love' is pretty great, and Beth’s belting usually subsumes the stock imagery.

American Gong is frustrating. It's not a bad album by far, based on the usual criteria one arranges on the bar graph of goodness: it's melodic, paced well, pleasant and so on. At the same time, however, there's nothing that marks it as unique in any real way or different from any Quasi album of the past.

The music here feels not so much modern as refurbished.

Bill Callahan's latest solo effort is so laid back that it almost never gets going at all.

Like Stephin Merritt, his East Coast cognate, Malkmus’ songwriting chops and eye for upper-middle-class detail are too-available excuses for music that is often unremarkable.

When they’re not trying to imitate the inimitable, Painted Palms hit a pleasant if not ground-shaking plateau.

The album's vocals exemplify the real problem here, which is that while the music is appealing and well-executed, everything feels perfectly coordinated and absolutely calculated.

Ellington and Bean’s voices braid pleasant timbres that sound quite right sailing over the band’s strum and shuffle, but they’re curiously lacking in the chemistry that separates necessary from nice.

Jim is pleasant, polite, listenable, smooth (it’s like Yacht Rock for the nu-soul set), undemanding…and a bit of a bore.

Rather than erupting with new insights, The Mountain sags audibly beneath the weight of its new strata.

Love Is All have turned down the sax, exchanging many of their former bursts of spunk for half an album that’s tighter and more heartbreakingly anthemic, and a remainder that drifts into directionless tedium.

They show that they can write sloppy songs with real hooks and something to bop along to. Something that rarely happens thereafter, unfortunately.

It is a difficult piece to listen to on many levels.

It’s kind of fun to hear Ex Hex experiment with their production, but it would have been more fun to hear them take some real risks with, say, an acoustic number or some synths. Truth is, despite its heft, It’s Real isn’t a huge departure from Rips. It’s more like a bulky rough draft of the record that preceded it.

It's hard to imagine 200 Years standing out, even considering its low-key spirit.

This final tension--between the desire to exceed perceived aesthetic limits and the reality of the artists’ own limitations--is one that is present throughout Futuristically Speaking. Jwl B and Shunda K are, as of now, stronger conceptually than they are in execution.

Unfortunately, The Elephant Man’s Bones is a step back for both the artist and the producer. ... A generic Alchemist production makes for a generic Marciano verse. In short, there is no chemistry between The Alchemist and Marciano. ... The Elephant Man’s Bones sparks hope in the middle with “Quantum Leap” and “Bubble Bath” but after that it regresses again into a second rate lounge-y Marciano.

Though these may succeed as pop songs, Belle & Sebastian ultimately subvert their appeal by contradicting precious, self-effacing sentiments with brash music.

Whether Ferraro’s singing is purposefully amateurish or not, it puts the album in a particular light, one in which NYC, Hell 3:00 AM is either an awkward misstep or a tongue-in-cheek spoof. Actually, it probably falls somewhere between the two, but either way, this isn’t James Ferraro playing to his strengths.

When their sound tends towards the more coherent and homogeneous (even on the excellent title track) they risk falling victim to an imitativeness, or perhaps simply a lack of aesthetic ambitiousness, that threatens to overwhelm the originality that they bring to the table.

There are two fairly strange intermezzo experiments and a few heavier-hitting sing-a-longs thrown in to excite ardent fans of their self-titled debut, but overall the album sacrifices listenability to broadcast and hint at Payseur’s “I will say what I will” evolutions to come.

He's not playing to his strengths; he's succumbing to preciousness.

These songs are ultimately undone by their ambition in an attempt to turn what could be pleasantly ephemeral fare into moment-defining anthems.

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

There’s nothing particular catchy. No song stands out.

Despite the album’s disparate material, it has a lulling cohesiveness. All the songs, wherever they come from, feel like they have been reimagined at the same volume and tempo and in the same wistful ambience.

I'm From Barcelona is fun, but ultimately shallow.

These songs aren't particularly denser or busier than their predecessors, but their burbles and whines serve less purpose than before; instead of sounding overzealous, they sound affected, voluminous for volume's sake.

I feel like Flight of the Conchords could do something interesting if they embraced the absurdity of their act and didn’t stand aloof from it at an ironic distance.

As it is, Cyclop Reaps has the aura of automatic writing, a stream of unfiltered imagery that is, intermittently, quite arresting, but as a whole shapeless and hard to navigate.

They’ve attempted to tighten up where their debut hung slack – shorter, less songs, less room to drag. Yet dragging is all that Celebration Castle does, falling deeper into the garage-meets-new wave dichotomy that looks good on paper but would require considerably more talent to execute.

To be sure, grime is a hybrid genre, but Run the Road 2 often shows how the balance can be weighed too heavily towards American rap idioms.

For a handful of solid pop songs, S-M Backwards adds nothing good to our conception of Serena-Maneesh, historically or otherwise. It’s a boon for the deeply interested, but it fails to make the case for its own existence.

Aside from the chopped vocal of the title-track, the mind-warp of "R in Zero G," and the woodpecker rhythms that liven up "Fraction" on the back end, the album feels dated.

It either needs to at least nod to actual humanity or just be off-the-wall insane, but doing neither, it just comes off as fake. Grey Oceans falls in-between the cracks of the extremes, and while still an interesting album, feels too shallow and too Serious.

Dispensable, and far from groundbreaking.

12 Reasons doesn’t find Coles in poor form, but he’s nowhere near his Fishscale peak, in terms of lyrical depth or the intensity of his delivery.

All these songs drown together, dissipating like wet Kleenex as soon as they're done.

We can see Power as a breakthrough provided that we do not think about the DFA, !!! or Out Hud, or Les Savy Fav. Unfortunately, Q and Not U do not have much to add to what those bands have already done.

For most of its runtime, highlights included, the album is mired in the same self-drowning-out that afflicts the best of its ilk.

Exhausting, energetic and bold – all adjectives apply - except for one hang-up: Ghost has done this all before on their previous album, 2004’s Hypnotic Underworld.

The reissue shows how prickly and difficult Social Climber's aesthetic could be, its arrangements as sparse as Young Marble Giants, though less even less concerned with hook and melody.

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.

Maybe the problem with The Politics of Envy is that these tracks just sounded too good playing back on shiny studio monitors to a roomful of old friends. If he's struggling to say something about the wider world, maybe Stewart should consider a retreat into his own eccentric interior.

Jiaolong speaks in a more comprehensible language because it's not florid psych-pop, but as with Caribou, I do not see a way to become anything other than a spectator of this music.

Ultimately, though, I can’t escape the feeling that there’s nothing much at stake in All the Way.

Aside from the average genre stabs, What Will We Be is a surprisingly sullen and ponderous album. Absent is Banhart’s mania, the zaniness that he always seemed barely able to contain.

English Little League starts with a memorable and high-quality opener in “Xeno Pariah,” a compact showcase of everything the band does right.... They don’t maintain that high quality--the off-key “Sir Garlic Breath” is just painful--and more often than not, the songs fall into good-not-great territory.

Blonde Redhead haven't run out of ideas, but Misery strips them of their eccentricities so thoroughly that the few that remain sound out of place.

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

It was obviously made with care, and, as an result, is pretty easy on the ears. Much of it is also over-saturated, poured on too thick, and it can be cloying in its polite pleasantness.

Lacking a clear story arc or point of catharsis, Kill for Love drifts off into its own gorgeous gloom.

The music is too monochromatically saccharine (whether cheery, wistful, or both) to faithfully conjure anything more than a narrow and fleeting slice of human experience.

Every song in the first half of the album tries so hard to get somewhere, but just ends up breaking down when it becomes obvious there’s no end in sight.

While Jamie Stewart & co. succeed at replicating the fractured nature of their live shows – the mix of sparse and dense, broken and enraged, auxiliary percussion and programming, noise and melodiousness is all here – it's beginning to sound rote.

The problem is that it all sounds so familiar, and they just seem far too comfortable perpetuating stoner rock cliches.

It's always interesting to hear artists develop, but one can't help but question the conviction here.

Too much of The Listener finds Gelb bridging his inspired moments with monotonous jazz piano and dusty crooning.

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.

On earlier albums, Egyptrixx proved the possibilities, but Pure, Beyond Reproach doesn’t live up to its predecessors.

The first half of this album is so annoying that you might give up before you hit a few of the better songs, all tucked away after the halfway point.

Sushi sounds enthusiastic but slight, with generic synths and run-of-the-mill dubstep-inflected bass lines.

It's not really very interesting, bold or exciting, but neither is it ever objectionable.

A nasty, dense and confrontational mess.

It is something of a missing link, and therefore a reminder of the often uncomfortably close proximity, between indie baroque’s earnestness and the pyrotechnic baroque of a lead singer who keeps a “passion coach” in his entourage.

Goat are a bit too tight and knowing to be transcendental or truly trippy, for now at least, although the Afro-beat leanings that crop up all over Commune point at avenues rich in potential out-of-body experiences.

It's a conservative, often misguided assault on mainstream dance music.

A few promising moments aside, most of it hardly resounds at all.

The thing is, this isn’t a bad album. But it is so full of mediocre songs--as are most of the albums since the end of GBV--that one has to ask why he just didn’t save up all the great ones and make one really excellent album.

With his debut album on Shady Records, Conway the Machine shows that he remains a gifted lyricist and a good storyteller, yet hardly offers anything original.

While it’s not bad per say, it is certainly lacking in spark.

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.

It all sounds very much expected, and very much the same. Which wouldn’t be so bad if that didn’t mean putting himself in the same crowd as so many corporatized, for-sale-at-the-mall acts.

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.

Plat du Jour is no great aesthetic success (it is too spotty and inconsistent) and its discursive dogmatism can border on sledgehammer browbeating. Nevertheless, Herbert does ask questions no other artist is wont to pose; for this, he commands our respect.

If The Kills didn't try so hard to be sultry, they might have a similar breakthrough. They're more appealing when you've got no idea what's on their mind.

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

Despite some good ideas and intriguing moments, tracks like “Inside World” feel unsatisfyingly aimless.

It blunts and softens its influences, whether heavy rock or soul or krautrock, and delivers them in a medium-temperature hippie haze.

Unfortunately, the observational heart of the disc's best rhymes are obscured by manicured eccentricity and musical dilettantism.

Volume is fine, fuzz is good, but it shouldn’t obliterate the songs.

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

The good news is that this is, in fact, a throwback to their earlier work. The bad news is that it’s not throwback enough.