This should go down in Mountain Goats lore as "The Quiet Album." [Sep 2006, p.82]

Track after track is slathered in layers of horns and guitars and synths until the songs underneath are no longer discernible.

Its ideas tend to outnumber its hooks. [Apr/May 2006, p.102]

But cliché is not the only thing that mars “Thames” and other tunes... It’s the lethargy of the tempos, the navel-gazing compositional complexity, the empty flashiness of the acoustic-guitar runs and over-enunciated words.

There’s some beautiful string parts, synth that rolls off sullenly into a distant horizon, and a pretty mean glockenspiel on “For You Always,” but the vocals ruin it. They don’t fit at all. It makes the album hard to swallow in the end, like an amazing deep dish pizza covered in green onions.

Too often though, the digitized productions act as ?ller, sounding forced.

The end result is an incredibly inoffensive album, one that’s perfectly lovely without offering any striking new ideas or features that make it memorable.

Its coda features a lone, breathy synth that unfurls like a tattered flag planted high atop a snow-covered peak, and, like the band’s best work, the song is comparable to little else in the pop/indie landscape—a far cry from the tepid feel that permeates too much of this Mess.

Rome does sound like the result of five years of Very Serious Effort, except instead of honing a few rough spots, the hubris-driven tinkering ended up chipping away all the soul from what could have been a jaunty and lively homage to some of the best movie music ever made.

Narcissistic, repetitive, underpowered and yet strangely compelling in its quirky construction and directness.

A Wasteland Companion is Ward's seventh proper solo album, and it certainly has it moments, even if many of them are fairly derivative.

Strangely underwhelming. [Apr/May 2006, p.100]

His grittiest, least-ethereal long-player to date. [Feb 2007, p.58]

While One Day is a passable throwback rock recrod, it doesn't rise to the level of a true celebration of the Doll's legacy. [Sep 2006, p.80]

Occasionally, their ambitions get the better of them. [Oct/Nov 2005, p.135]

The great thing about Weller at this point is that he'll shuffle the deck every other song and often (if not always) come up with a face card. [Feb/Mar 2006, p.103]

Recall's Johnny Cash's recordings with Rick Rubin. [Apr/May 2006, p.111]

On Beal’s first album, he moved between child-like ambience, songs suitable for weird film scores and stomping blues.

Electronic music edges ever so slowly toward nausea, a tendency to turn music into math. The best artists fight this with loving restraint. Bayonne is close to the mark, but there might be a few times when you reach for the volume and just say “enough” with the looping. Then there are times when it does work, as on the song “Spectrolite” with a heavier emphasis on analog instruments.

just as the sequel-ness inherently implies, faithfulness to their past work sinks Event II, as just the sound and goals of the album seem out of place in 2013 and overly nostalgic, without adding much to the conversation that seemed long finished.

This time, there are a couple of solid songs surrounded on all sides by wandering experiments which never quite form into a whole.

The mood of the disc is no less overcast than his usual material; it just makes more use of the celesta setting.

Learn to Sing Like a Star threads together Hersh's myriad musical guises while striving for some of the immediacy and distinctive yelp of her Throwing Muses heyday. It mostly works. [Mar 2007, p.69]

It’s an occasionally comical throwback to when they were at their biggest, with a few good-not-great moments. One can only hope they chill out and come up with something better in a few years.

The monotone delivery on Ideal Lives undercuts the urgency characteristic of Rahim's best performances. [Sep 2006, p.81]

In song after song there are moments where it sounds like the band is weaving its way into a fantastic instrumental jam section, only to have the new idea abruptly cut short by the track’s end or an obligatory return to the next verse.

No less than four producers--Mike Elizondo, David Kahne, Jeff Lynne and Garret “Jacknife” Lee--contributed to the album, and their collective efforts have resulted in a mid-tempo muddle of pseudo-lovely tracks plagued by a hovering cloud of meddling strings, slappy drums and perfunctory triangle chimes.

An album that needs a bit more of its own personality, but it’s sung with the confidence of someone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out.