It makes a stunning case for a silent nod of the head: sometimes it’s good enough to enjoy an album, taking it take it all in as it comes, without attempting to articulate its majesty.

Do the Bambi proves that art rock can be both obvious and alien at the same time.

It’s too bad more songs don’t skip the sophomoric lyrics. Tinker around with your equalizer - you may be able to drown out the vocals and save the otherwise interesting CD.

The creativity on display here is jaw-dropping.

The band is learning to play their instruments better, but they’ve lost some aggression, which was the key to the little charm they had from the get-go.

Neither the songs’ structures nor their lyrics offer rich rewards after close listening and dissection.

Futures is the sound of a band playing it safe.

Dents and Shells is human in the best and truest kind of way: it is the work of a man, appreciative of feeling and progress, warts and all.

Crimes is the latest in an evolution that has seen the band complicate their sound without losing any of the confrontational nature or acerbic tone of their previous efforts.

Dangerous Dreams is a passable album that never achieves greatness, nor does it fail miserably, rather residing with the mundane.

Love Songs for Patriots sounds just as one would expect an aged AMC to sound: with mature, yet loose arrangements with an edge but without balls back up Eitzel’s gloomy, brooding voice, taking wry bitterness to familiar but novel highs and lows.

Even the songs that rise above the simple looped-beat formula don’t have much to offer.

The overall sound is a bit too polished and loses some of the raw power edge that previous albums rode to critical success.

When you boil Real Gone down to its tracks, you’ll keep finding more reasons to love this man – more than anything, you can sense his easy grin.

The Grind Date is almost shockingly excellent. This is De La Soul at their most focused – no skits, no filler, no weird interludes.

For such a tortured swarm of piercing feedback-drenched feedback and electronically-manipulated electronic manipulations, this record feels surprisingly coherent, almost to the point that it’s comforting.

So if some of the songs sound a little too catchy, it’s because they’re supposed to. Kweli’s trying to draw you in for something important.

A blueprint for where hip hop should be headed.

One of the finest pieces of pop music to drop this decade.

While this is definitely a likeable album, and an extremely contagious pop effort at that, it's a hard one to get attached to.

Overly polished and far too artificial.

This is deceptively simple, back-to-basics rock music that no honest American can help but enjoy.

Björk shrouds Medúlla in mystery and darkness, but it's far from gloomy.

While Joan of Arc’s latest is a relative failure as an album when compared to everything else coming out in indie-rock these days (dropping them under .500 in my book), it is a winning effort, relative to the whole of the Joan of Arc/Tim Kinsella catalog.

Raw beats, sick rhymes, nothing obvious or tired.

The Equatorial Stars renews a partnership of a more than historical value.