Unfortunately, what starts out as emotionally drenched bop-along pop eventually gets tiresome.

His singing, an acquired taste, could have been used more sparingly. Nevertheless, his odd chants keep the weirdness levels appropriately high, and we wouldn't want it any other way.

The Past We Leave Behind is lovingly crafted but too vague to live up to its title.

Oberst's political criticism is most effective when he's humble and straightforward, yet his overwrought poetics seem laughable, childish and blinkered when applied to world affairs.

The lack of instruments coupled with Sandoval’s unvarying singing style lead to mind-wandering and reminiscing about her past work, like the killer hook she added to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Sometimes Always.

Someday World is an fully realized blend of electronic and acoustic sounds that elevates the mundane, austere details in the lyrics into a state of ecstasy.

This is a top 40 pop record after all, and thus errs toward deafeningly loud vocals that occasionally obliterate some of the year’s smartest pop songwriting.

Recorded in various New York studios, it has a live, intimate feel despite its overdubs.

It's easy to get lost in the pleasant, euphoric drone, but at 47 minutes the album is more of a marathon than a sprint.

There's still a welcome sense of spontaneity in the way the songs unfold; it just occurs at a Sunday-morning pace, which should make Meek Warrior the perfect soundtrack for watering houseplants.

Though he stays within his comfort zone, frontman Travis McCoy is a gifted MC who usually upstages the rest of the band members, who sound like hired hands. And Daryl Hall sings on a track. That's gotta be worth something.

A Place to Bury Strangers are adept at capturing a certain kind of aggressive energy, but too often they bottle it in middling pop songs.

There's plenty to enjoy here, but very little to get worked up about.

Its darker, brooding electro, like the mesmerizing distortion-filled Round The Hairpin, represents a newer, grown-up force for the Sheffielders that’s even more seductive than lip gloss and vintage heels.

While Morissette’s weaknesses are the same--her lyrics are still overwrought, as though torn from some broken-hearted schoolgirl’s diary-–this disc is an easier pill to swallow than her last couple.

There are some great moments, to be sure, but there are too many spots where the lyrics induce cringing and the electronic interventions sound more like gimmicks than real song elements.

There are great production touches all over Beams, but unfortunately the songwriting is just okay, and the arrangements often bury the best sonic details.

Live fails to replicate the experience of seeing Eels.

It's unlikely that anyone will prefer the covers to the originals, but Isaak's fans will find plenty to enjoy in this rock 'n' roll love letter to a bygone era.

Thematically it's overboard and at 16 tracks over 60 minutes repetitious and ham-fisted. But musically, Year Zero offers moments of industrial brilliance.

The record lags a little in the middle as the songs start to blend together. There’s enough differentiation that you don’t want to skip them altogether, but it’s a kink to work out on later records.

It's not exactly a fun listen, but fans will eat it up.

For the most part the newfound earnestness is balanced by quirky arrangements and Chris Connelly's unpolished yelp reminiscent of Destroyer's Dan Bejar.

Even though the production is immaculate, featuring amazing work by Lex Luger, and the guest list is impressive, the album falls flat. The problem: Ross takes himself too seriously.

Not the rock assault Gibbard thinks it is, but certainly more hard-hitting than ever.

The album is full of the group's signature dreamy arpeggios, massive drum rolls, epic builds and breaks--expertly produced with Stuart Price. But it's the push and pull between the sociopolitical reality and urge to escape into nightlife, where dressing up, social cliques and the pounding beat of pop music can feel life-saving, that fuels the drama.

Emphasizing rhythm more than melody, the songs throb along on funky bass lines, repetitive drumbeats, spacey sci-fi synths and hushed, whispered vocals.

Cudi deserves credit for such an audacious high-concept debut. It falls a bit flat, but at least it falls forward.

Some stand up to the violins and mandolins, but others get overwhelmed.

Nothing here is going to become a live-show staple, but after an underwhelming covers album earlier this year, fans will be pretty happy with this solid collection of original works.

In beast mode, they conjure that rare mix of accessibility and contrarian, uncompromising power, helping More Faithful transcend its flatter fare.

What it lacks is an interesting emotional--and thus truly cinematic--dimension.

Mike McCready’s guitar solos mostly take a backseat to the band’s meaty rhythm section, and, sure, some of the 12 tracks are victims of awkward construction. But Lightning Bolt resonates, especially the band’s jarring (if kind of clichéd) conclusions.

Sometimes the lack of definition and the deluge of words grow tedious, but in these songs, all lushly arranged, as is the entire album, the effect is nothing short of riveting.

Now the songwriting is more ambitious, cerebral and not always out to attack, and third vocalist Wade MacNeil is increasingly putting his stamp on the sound. It doesn’t always come together.

It's nowhere near as offbeat as they'd have you believe, but if you're looking for catchy, danceable rock, it does the trick.

As is Fidlar’s style, nearly all of the 14 songs are deceptively rollickin’, sounding more like a call to arms for bored suburban teenagers than the confessions of a 28-year-old man going through relapses.

A few flashes of brilliance, but no sustained heat.

On her fifth album she mercifully avoids the monotonous dance-pop trend in favour of a timeless pop-rock sound that occasionally flirts with the dance floor.

While they’re great at the dreamy soundscapes, Toy are not as strong with fractured pop songs, and the vocals could still use some work.

His social commentaries occasionally overwhelm the music, as on Bottled In Cork, a doozy that might elicit an “I get it, I get it, the world is fucked” response. And though he also stumbles on the underdeveloped, raspy, pop diversion One Polaroid A Day, Leo’s still built a sturdy addition to the band’s discography.

Snoop plays to his storytelling strength, crafting a record to show he still cares about the music.

Some songs lack raw emotion but have sombre vocal melodies and engaging lyrics.

The album is missing an emotional, drawn-out, heartbreaking ballad, but inspirational anthems like Retreat! find her sassing as loud and proud as ever.

At his best he reminds you of everything that makes Miike Snow's self-titled debut such an addictive listen, but at his worst he comes across like an electronic music dilettante.

Surprisingly, it’s a light and catchy bunch of convincing hip-hop- and R&B-influenced Timberlake-esque club pop.

Things pick up in the second half, when the lyrics become more surprising and the beats less radio-friendly. Despite some perplexing moments, there's a lot to like.

There are some great garage rock tunes, but too much filler to make for a great album. Maybe they should have trimmed a few of the 16 songs for a shorter but stronger work.

It's wrapped in a confused concept--future lovers (the album title's characters) under siege by some kind of dystopian oppression--but several tunes will surely ignite stadium masses.

If you can stomach the contrived slow jams and the sensitive soul-baring, there are a couple of decent joints produced by West.

The Vampire Weekend crew, who met at Columbia University, have clearly heard enough soukous and highlife to cop a few guitar licks to cloak their orch-pop pretensions, but almost by accident, the way their chamber strings are played over jaunty grooves makes for an engaging concoction, at least for a few spins.

There’s not much new here, but Springsteen has always traded on a maudlin permanent nostalgia that only works because it’s so fucking earnest that it blasts through our attempts to be cynical about it.

On slick, feckless romance ballads like I Belong In Your Arms, that rooted-in-the-past sound can seem like empty nostalgia, but it blooms with freshness when used as a springboard for experimentation.

With a name as dumb as Hockey, these Portland hipsters tempt me to dismiss them as having overdosed on irony. But to their credit, there are a few decent new-wavey pop hooks here.

Sustained by romantic tension, they walk a strange line between being mesmerizing and washing over you like sonic wallpaper.

Having three creative forces acting on the music from different angles leads to frequent twists, turns and stylistic shifts--showing they can roll like Dr. Octagon one minute and Sly Stone the next.

Individually, the songs are absorbing, but when listened back to back, they begin to lose their magic.

Be Your Own Pet attacks with enthusiasm, and everything here rocks sufficently, although some remedial songwriting classes may be required before they make the move to sports arenas.

Still, despite his naive imitations, Costa has a gift for catchy hooks, and once he figures out who he is musically, the results could be remarkable.

It gets tiring trying to figure out what Lew is saying (mostly, her vocals are mixed a touch too low), but the themes are hinted at in her sober delivery.

Nine Types Of Light is mostly mellow, slow jams and funky, upbeat love songs.

KRS-One's wordplay remains clever and topical, especially on the anti-Auto-Tune anthem Robot, while his sanctimoniousness has been toned down to more tolerable levels. Black Moon’s Buckshot is a comfortable pairing and, although his street-savvy sound may not have aged as well as some of his Duck Down Records brethren’s, he still finds a familiar dynamic when rapping alongside old cohorts.

These tunes tend to meander and often feel like they should be going somewhere we never get to. But a lot of it is very lovely.

The uniformity of song structure, tone and tempo, though initially captivating, soon becomes monotonous.

Yours To Keep is kinda like an entire disc of that Lust For Life riff. Fun but a bit flat.

What stands out more than the production is how consistently solid the album is, and how effective the lyrics and songwriting.

A few songs are too long and self-indulgent (Do You Want What I Need, Hold Me), but the fuzzy synths, minor-key melodies and subtle worldy percussion make it very easy listening on the whole.

The results are mixed--a few brilliantly sleazy moments but too few to make this album as good as we’d hoped.

Death Vessel have come up with a uniformly bland set of delicate ditties for Nothing Is Precious Enough For Us that are lightly strummed in a way that’s so frightfully fey, it could make José González want to rip Thibodeau’s guitar from his hands and smash it against the wall John Belushi-style.

If you love car culture, traffic, suburbs or Stevens’s lyrics, this might be where you turn off.

He remains a confident and commanding rapper, full of agile double-time flows and verses that skip from biographical vignettes and life lessons to boasting. But, given he rarely has more than one verse per song, Diaspora gives us a fragmented window into his thoughts.

There are rhythms and sounds that instantly come off as nostalgic, but in the best moments the beats and textures merge to form something wholly unidentifiable.

And Agnes, the gloomy, anticlimactic closer, ejects the listener out of the edgy world that much of the album finds strength in by relying too heavily on a mainstream radio sound that feels too safe. Nonetheless, as a whole, HTBAHB is thrilling enough to achieve replay status.

Too often, Jenkins's use of melody fails to create sticky songs in a pop sense, but it does offset his gruff baritone and stern messaging. ... Jenkins is at his best when taking everyday scenarios and cutting to their emotional core.

There's very little here that ups the ante (or matches the highlights) of the original Illinois disc.

There's a little too much consistency across the album -- too few moments stand out, and too many of the hooks just blend together.

The problem is that all this stuff sounds terribly dated already.

Steeped in country, folk and pop, Desveaux errs on the side of understatement; her rich lyrics sometimes inadvertently take a back seat to the band’s nuanced musicianship, anchored by lead guitarist Mike Feuerstack.

This is one of his best albums in many years, although that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Despite some cliched lyrics and cheesy moments (Bootful Of Beer is pretty goofy, the groovy Wheels is straight out of a steamy 80s-rock-chick video), the album--the Wilsons' first in six years--is both tough and tender, and makes a girl like me dive into the YouTube archives to relish the ass-kicking awesomeness that was and still is Heart.

This is his first time as producer, and you could argue that he neutered the band's crunch to a degree. But it fits with the album's mature mood.

Bad Brains can still blast with ferocity, but the jarring changes in tone and tempo could prove more of a problem than the lo-fi production for many listeners.

The aggression is still there, now tempered with lighter numbers like Feathers, but the whole thing still reeks of comic nerd sci-fi awesomeness.

Springsteen has trouble leaving well enough alone. No matter how small the song idea, he whips it up into a sweeping epic with lavish choral accompaniment and blustery solos all building to some grand final flourish.

The 10-song album ricochets between great – the grammatically playful What You Is, the countryish Hurry For The Sky – and just okay.

The sparse songs are free of drums, bass, riffs and obvious choruses, and are often pushed along by just two, sometimes three, chords.

Like the elder statesmen, the teenage California quartet offer skewed good-time indie pop that won't change your life but will sound fantastic blasted from a front porch on a summer day.

The half-hour run time makes the relentlessly cerebral approach more palatable, though the ending feels a bit too tidy.

Like most eccentric geniuses, Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes is as frustrating as he is brilliant.

Many moments are reminiscent of big-room progressive tunes of the early 00s, which sound dated at times. Nevertheless, there are also plenty of undeniably pretty melodies, thick tones and pleasingly warm textures, not to mention impressive flashes of innovation and creativity.

Too bad that so many of the instrumental tracks are pleasant but forgettable downtempo jams that dilute the impact of the highlights.

Satellite feels very much like a transitional record in which Kid Koala is exploring new terrain. Not all of his tangents are successful, but his enthusiasm for stretching beyond his turntablist roots is refreshing.

What's immediately striking about Challengers is the unabashed mellowness of it all.

They're not at their strongest when echoing the reverb-filled harmonies of Fleet Foxes, but when they drop their instrumental restraint, they achieve an alluring balance of plaintive folk and upbeat bluegrass.

After a while, the microscopic detail underscoring each turn of phrase, delivered with such delicate poise and precise drama, is suffocating.

The record is full of earnest female backup vocals and frequent reminders (like wind chimes all over the place) that the music is homemade. Yet like a lot of modern folk, the songwriting sometimes gets lost in the shuffle.

Shaking The Habitual is full of thrillingly percussive highs and brilliantly deranged vocals, but overall its anti-pop move is more typical than radical.

For fans of mid-tempo 90s R&B hungry from something new, Keyshia Cole is about as close as it gets to Real Love.