The reality is that Bitter Drink, Bitter Moon is the musical equivalent of a grape soda--it tastes familiar, but it's just not quite a grape.

Messy yet polished guitars surge through swathes of melodic white noise while the tracks are still able to maintain an impressive sharpness.

The North Carolina natives mix the boisterousness with the balladry well, while delivering image-evoking lyrics in between.

At points, the overly sappy lyrics are sung with fervor and match the passion put into the music, but ultimately, the album doesn't feel cohesive.

Woodland tunes are not rare and only a few tracks here get the heart racing and stave off a bad case of bradycardia.

Nick Weiss and Logan Takahashi sadly lack their forefathers' mastery for emotionalizing machine-made sound.

Inoffensive to the nth degree, this is a sleeping pill, not the double espresso we ordered.

There's not nearly enough of Aesop living up to his impressive talent.

[Class Clown is] like all GBV releases, a mishmash of melodic, A-side-worthy compositions and half-formed snippets.

It gives us songs more memorable for their grizzly narrations or the occasional doo-wop harmony than the steady performances of mostly standard-format jams.

Caulfield continues to showcase some seriously well-crafted shifts between proggy meandering movements and pop hooks.

A faceless debut; a din of the same guitars, horns and urbane 20-something tropes--and lichen--as "Rules," but immobile and, sadly, ambitionless.

The result is an album that is altogether pleasant, but just doesn't do enough to distinguish itself on the map from the rest in its genre.

It's a mess--not without some tidy bits--but what's better: these songs could be the death throes, finally, of these guys' unfettered id.

It's hard to say what it all amounts to apart from a collection of partly-cloudy-late-afternoon-sunshine, on-and-off '80s jams.

I Am Gemini is more of an auditory theater piece than a traditional record.

Six Cups of Rebel isn't bad, but it is heavy-handed--and nowhere near his strongest.

She never gets quite where she's going, but it's good to have her back.

It's somewhere between impressive and impressionistic how Glover inhabits each style, but pit between street chaff and crooner cheese, between respect and restless imitation, one can't help but wonder where all of Glover's talent is headed.

Mastodon's most accessible album to date finds the ATL-iens as unfocused as ever--and out of gas.

Modern Art remains behind the veil, smoke and mirrors of nostalgia-not wholly accessible to audiences, modern or otherwise.

Not one drop of Dracula is dance-friendly. In fact, it sounds just as disparate as the last Nurses effort.

The band proves once more that you can't get by on just clever quips and happy-go-lucky hooks. It's too bad, because these catchy compositions would be worth replaying if only they had more substance.

The altered states of Cameron Stallones' latest Sun Araw effort Ancient Romans are an acquired taste.

While the Malaysian songstress' charming vocals are easily the main attraction, Avi's unexpected stroll through different sonic territories-hopping from pop ("The Book of Morris Johnson") to R&B ("Concrete Wall") and reggae ("Roll Your Head In The Sun")--is a close second.

Blue Songs is a sophisticated and club-ready sophomore effort, even if--at times--it nearly crumbles under the weight of its own decadence and self-indulgences.

The Globes do a nice job of grabbing and keeping listeners' attention throughout the album's 35 minutes of music.

The result is a melancholy brew.