After that early-onset dizziness subsides, Girl With Basket of Fruit loses its power and makes little impact, as if these songs were menacing storm clouds that simply drift into and out of town without leaving a trace. It is heavy but hollow, muscular but oddly meaningless, built with streams of images that, however vivid, are the lyrical equivalent of inert gas inside combustion chambers.

Too top-heavy to sustain its momentum, yet too fleeting for its thematic framework to cohere, Uptown Special is that rare beast: a concept album that actually could use more fat.

Admire finds the band's balance shifting significantly; the rhythm players often seem more like glorified session men than integral components of a sleek post-punk machine.

Let It Beard's structure, its scope, its knowing nods to an earlier era's excess.

Mitchell’s voice is gorgeous and rich throughout, a piece of high-pile cotton velvet warmed in the daylight. She renders “Both Sides Now” with the wisdom of survival, the “up and down” having still somehow delivered her here. But too often, her patient approach is swallowed by the tide of well-intentioned boosters, associates who make Mitchell feel like little more than an honorary guest at her own party.

The album may be hard to connect to on anything other than a cerebral level, but sometimes that's the best way to connect.

Like many spinoffs from the Odd Future machine, it's a small piece of a larger puzzle, useful for obsessives concerned with keeping their catalogs up to date.

It's ultimately a spotty album from a guy who has released a lot of spotty albums.

If his eccentricity was tamed and the pained attempts to hop genres were avoided, Luke Steele could just produce something close to sublime. As it stands, Lovers is a fairly pleasant application of some charming reference points, but please, let's stop pretending that that's good enough.

Antiphon is still a likeable, pleasant listen that will always wait for you by the hearth after a long day. But for a “forget everything you know about Midlake!” album, it's almost exactly how you remember them.

Considering the band's taste for zoning out to infinity, One Track Mind really needed a harsher edit. With some tightening and pruning, it could have burst into bloom.

Atheist's Cornea maintains an urgency that’s palpable even for those who don’t speak Fukagawa’s native language.

The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, maximally bloated with 15 (15!) additional songs. Those that stand out mostly do so for the wrong reasons.

Jel's music here doesn't focus your attention to a laser-point the way Them did, but neither is it big enough to saturate it-- it lurks comfortably in the middle distance.

This is a merely pleasant album, and especially after 11 long years, pleasant is a low hurdle for such an inimitable singer.

Foals’ problem is that they have the same ambitions as just about every other large-font rock band these days and thus the same pitfalls. Making apolitical art feels borderline negligent, and yet it’s easier than ever to feel desensitized to the doomsaying when everything just seems to get incrementally worse.

Frankly, it could be much worse.

When they stop arching their eyebrows and put some work into doing time-tested pop stuff, they can be great.

The biggest detractor here is the band's lack of focus. The record is downright messy at times, even if the thick, murky quality does, in some instances, work to considerable effect.

Wire never wanted to be a satisfying band, yet they somehow became one--which leaves the otherwise bold impulse behind Document and Eyewitness curiously inconclusive.

America Give Up is inconsistent and derivative yet promising, and not nearly as impressive as some early adopters would have people believe.

Feel Something is a so-so listen that never rises above the band’s influences.

Friendly and nondescript.

In 2001, their Brit-derived goth-punk was just gaining a foothold and still felt like a novel reinvention; now, its dreary slog is as commonplace as three-chord punk after the millennium's turn.

What once was exciting is now a bit boring, and it’s hard to say exactly why. Stott is still a wonderful sound technician of unerring good taste, but something seems to go slack at the center of Never the Right Time.

Kanye’s tenth album arrives barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.

Here, blocky synth structures feel mismatched to the themes, and heavy-handed arrangements sometimes threaten to overwhelm the lyrics.

Clear Heart is just good enough to keep us listening.