Housing only a couple of keepers, Fluorescence might initially feel like another letdown after the end-to-end excellence of Citrus, but that overlooks the challenges Asobi Seksu are up against.

Moments of Ufabulum, particularly the middle stretch, are all but impossible for me to remember after a dozen plays.

It's "Sam Baker's album" by name and ownership, but it's also another beat tape in a very crowded field, one where it's easy to get lost amidst the increasingly innovative producers working now.

It's a tantalizing glimpse of how great solo Harvey can be, but unfortunately, a good deal of the rest of the album is simply unmemorable.

A worthy, but occasionally frustrating album...

If every track on the album had the unforced lyrical clarity of "Little Houdini", Sage could have the album of his life on his hands here. But Sage is still the type of guy to name an album Li(f)e and a song "Polterzeitgeist", and the album comes packed with yeesh-inducing lines

Lacking both the demonstrative lo-fi sprawl of its predecessor and the hermetic perfectionism that often marks long-gestating albums, Jackleg really does sound like the Baptist Generals made it first and foremost for themselves.

There seem to be so many questions stirring inside SOAK, and yet Before We Forgot How to Dream douses them in so much prettiness that they lose their spark.

As put-together as Good Grief’s presentation is, and as ingratiating as its songs are, the record suffers from a distinct lack of identity.

The duo clearly have good stories, but need to expand the range of emotions they use to tell them.

While there are a few livewire moments that recall Meatbodies’ most exciting work—the triumphant riff from “Touchless,” for example--Alice doesn’t exactly come out swinging. It’s a more sedate record; mellow grooves and acoustic strumming make up its core infrastructure.

The Future Bible Heroes' first outing since 2002's uneven Eternal Youth does offer up slightly more catchy melodies and deadpan quotables than Love at the Bottom of the Sea.

This album peaks when it finds room to tilt at larger topics and tinier ones within a few short seconds of one another.

Throughout the record there are subtle hints of growth—both personal and musical—but they’re often dragged down by the redundancy of her thematic concerns.

You'd be forgiven for expecting little more than fan-bait out of a release that gathers the band's between-album singles and rarities. But the big draw of Wooden Shjips is the way they go about streamlining multiple strains of psychedelic rock with the single-mindedness of a band more interested in refinement than experimentation, and there's plenty of refined material on Vol. 2.

For the most part, it settles somewhere unusual, if not original.

While some of these songs can feel regressive or at least undercooked on their own, they’re reframed by the open-hearted sadness that takes over the album’s second half.

It's great that the band can slow down and still hold attention, and one hopes Obits will dig deeper and find new thrills in old traditions in the coming years.

Ventriloquizzing places undue emphasis on David Best's sing-spiel to move the action along.

There's a cocky strut to tracks like "Don't Hustle for Love" and "White Cloud" that suggest this is a band striving to make a connection with a far wider audience. On Dub Egg they fall just short of those ambitions, creating a transitory album that builds on what came before but doesn't feel like the finished product.

While All Hell felt imbued with danger and intrigue, on Me Moan, the people pulled off to highway shoulder are never in any real distress upon closer inspection. They just stepped out to check a map.

There is nothing original or novel about Telekinesis' music, but somewhat counterintuitively, its by-the-books professionalism is what makes it so effective.

Sure, most of Chorus is pretty, but it's only that: Between the glistening guitars, cymbal washes, sighing strings, and electric piano, the beauty LaValle conjures is effortless but ultimately less impressive for not having any sort of contrast.

[Buyers oif the CD will] hear several solid-to-excellent songs that extend the rootsy trajectory of the Magic Numbers' fine first outing, making up in winsome intensity what they lack as far as edginess or sex appeal.

It’s easy to understand why Young felt these songs didn’t fit in with the lovelorn mood of Are You Passionate?, but they’re all worth hearing at least once.

Beck has been working on Colors since 2013, and by the sounds of a recent interview, spent a lot of time trying to get the balance of “not retro and not modern” just so. He more or less nailed that bit, but what’s lacking from his Big Happy Pop Record is some kind of strong emotion that could elevate these songs above the “well crafted but innocuous” camp--something more than an idea.

The best songs on Conversations point to a viable middle ground where earnest delicacy and shadowy tones co-exist, but the band has yet to fully explore that realm.

Rumors buffs away some of the rougher edges that made her so much more compelling than so many of Nashville’s aspiring singer-songwriters. Those albums made the fight sound worthwhile, but there’s too little fight in these songs.

If Sheezus was Allen at her most ironic, Allen’s new album marks a return to sincerity--and its assessments of motherhood, failing relationships, and infamy are penetrating. Sadly, these potent themes are often diluted by antiseptic production.

It's the stay-the-course dancefloor material that proves the most rewarding.

It's best to think of Prins Thomas not as a speedbump but as another iteration, slightly undercooked, of his still-developing style.

Rodriguez is an excellent songwriter when she’s on her game. ... It’s frustrating, really: a hugely talented songwriter and producer, thwarted by trends.

When Cut Copy take a step back from the small details, forget about their perfect record collections for a few minutes and actually expose themselves as human beings, they hit on a sound that really rings true.

There’s nothing wrong with creating a club LP, but when you stack it up against TJM’s other, more adventurous albums, the consistency can’t help but drag.

The band's longtime devotees will find plenty to love here, but the album isn't memorable enough to make its way into most people's heavy rotation.

Saltwater is a pretty record and the songs are clearly heavy with personal significance, but it was almost better when they were a little rough around the edges.

It seems particularly odd that for all the time and sweat Stoltz has put into this music, there's no sense of a real person behind these songs, just a tightly wound bundle of ideas borrowed from likely pop sources.

Unlike ...For the Whole World to See, N.E.W. does not sound like a lost proto-punk classic; it's just a pretty good rock record made by guys who have been at it for a long time.

At its best moments, Sounding Lines drifts in an intriguingly ambiguous space where each member invokes the genres they’re best known for playing while bending generously to accommodate their partners.

After five albums, it’s nostalgic sleight-of-hand for the Go! Team to continually look back on the sounds of the ’60s yet still tune out the underlying noise of that radical decade.

If it's possible to go through the motions while still mostly shouting, Ferrari Boyz would be a prime example.

Not the Actual Events turns out to be so slight, at just five tracks with no dramatic shift in form. It’s the least essential non-instrumental album the band has released.

As a whole, Have a Nice Life stands as a decent collection of songs that, while palatable, casually floats by in a sea of average beats by Jesse Shatkin, who produced much of the album.

His new band might not question him very much, and they may play better or more professionally, than his old crew. But Oceania suffers a kind of rock-star-dictator airlessness.

The album awkwardly divides in two: the first half showcases Wiles' forward-looking tunes; the second takes a brief historical look at his dated earlier work.

Though it rarely makes good on the promise of her earlier songs, Cheap Seats is polarizing, and by now most listeners will have already decided whether or not they can stomach Spektor's peculiar kind of verite, glass-half-full optimism.

As it stands right now, though, it's a nice bit of gauzy, gray-hued racket to throw on when you've only got so much attention to give.

The samples and some of the lyrics feel a little too controlled, on-message, and conceptual, which is unusual since her songs often tease out the dark emotion in mundane, everyday moments. As a result, No Elephants often feels hermetic and occasionally impenetrably austere.

Listening to M. Ward is nowadays perhaps more deeply pleasurable than it ever has been, with glistening strings and big slabs of piano occupying more and more of the terrain once almost entirely populated by his nimble fingered guitar, trashcan percussion, and creaky room noises.

Good Evening is minuscule and precious, both of which are charming descriptors, but its fragility is taken to an almost palpable extent.

Each composition is fleshed out as well as it can be, the end result still a kind of Appalachian wallpaper music that after further inspection and subsequent listens, leaves the record sounding much more flimsy than urgent. What impression it leaves doesn't last.

For Those Who Stay won’t change your opinion either way, and at the most, it might make you feel more strongly about what you already believe.

Horse Feathers are quick to set a mood and diligent in sustaining it, but it's pretty much the same mood they've struck on all their albums.

Working within a framework isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are cracks in the formula. Mostly on the production side, which is incredibly played out. ... Still, even with the stale sound of the album, Durk is such a complex and colorful writer that it’s worth it to stick it out.

Lacking the dynamic cohesion that made its predecessor more than the sum of its tracklist, it feels like merely a collection of random tracks, which, despite their common themes, begin to sound haphazard in their arrangements and sequencing.

What matters most is, with Monochrome, Helmet is back to doing what they do best.

It's never boring, and there's certainly plenty to wrap your ear around. But these sweet songs just feel like they would've been better served by either pulling back or revving up, not the slathering on that takes place here.

Seeming short at 40 minutes, it's a slight album, and it's marred by Blueprint's slavish devotion to his own goofy song-concepts.

While it brandishes a certain kind of insular brilliance, it's music more ripe for conversation or think pieces than headphones or the living room hi-fi.

KOD, with its stripped-down production, snare-drum flows, and focus on virtue and vice, can feel like a pale shadow of DAMN. Unlike the Pulitzer winner, Cole is far more predictable and accessible.

A little more stylistic and structural variety could lead to something special.

Five Roses reveals Van Pelt as a talented producer who knows his way around summery pop songs.

Sidewalks often inflates the worst attributes of Matt & Kim's big sound (overly simplistic lyrics, crude synth melodies, shouty singing) and smothers much of its sugar-rush energy and joyously defiant attitude in studio flourishes.

Lanegan all too often prevents the audience from seeing the artist that lives behind his dour exterior. Gargoyle is most engaging when it invites glimpses, however fleeting.

It feels like a very French-pop-star gesture, extravagant and essentially useless, and perversely enjoyable for exactly those reasons.

Nothing on this EP is particularly awful-- Yo La Tengo certainly can't be blamed for their efforts-- but sometimes things are better left unremixed. The sequencing's overwhelmingly tacky, and really, how often do you think you'll find yourself in the mood for Takemura's epic reworking of a vaulted Yo La Tengo instrumental? The record has its moments of beauty, but in the end, it fails to add up to a satisfying whole.

Battle doesn’t have Jemina Pearl’s charisma, and Tweens aren't as adept or distinct as BYOP in terms of their P.O.V.

The visual [video] gambit falls uneasily between a critique of hip-hop’s relationship with corporate sportswear brands and, once again, a flimsy attempt to muster up attention. Pure Beauty plays out in a similar fashion, committing wholly to neither SHIRT’s appealing raw rap chops nor his grander concepts.

Spelled in Bones, their most polished effort, teeters near soporific. And that's a shame, because it houses some of the band's best songs.

Much of Goldblum’s banter has a you-had-to-be-there quality, like squinting at a friend’s blurry photos from a party you weren’t invited to. That makes The Capitol Studios Sessions feel more like a document of an experience than the main attraction. Goldblum's most devoted obsessives won't need much persuading to visit his club.

While the result is a 12-track standard edition full of potential hits, the brunt of it rests on interchangeable tempos from existing, already-charting singles.

The details of Kavinsky's intended narrative are blurry, and possibly nonsensical, but he succeeds in making an album that suggests that it's the soundtrack to something, and at least making it clear that it has to do with cars and the 1980s.

The main weakness is the same one found on Crazy Clown Time: the songs. As songs, they don’t do much or say much.

Unfortunately, Capture/Release might be the victim of bad timing: It's going to sound pretty rote to American audiences who've been steeped in this stuff for the past couple years, and while it's doubtful that the Rakes are overtly ripping off any of the bands they resemble, it scans as a failure of imagination on the listener's end.

Fans of the mid-1970s lineup should find the most to enjoy on Power to Believe, as it not only finds King Crimson playing with muscular aggression similar to that period, but also revisiting the group improvisation that set them so far apart from other 70s prog bands.

No tens here—sixes and sevens abound, for sure, a few fives, maybe an eight. Even mired among the sixes, though, you can feel the palpable yearning.

The strongest cuts on Con Todo El Mundo are also the standouts on Hasta El Cielo, where they’re run through the usual dub effects: echo, flange, drop-outs, and more.

Like Champagne Holocaust, Songs for Our Mothers puts too much emphasis on setting the smoky, sinister scene--upping the reverb, working in odd yelps or electronic clatter--and too little attention on establishing dynamic, compelling arrangements.

Tidbits keep the sense of fun in The Beths’ music, they aren’t enough to fully invigorate their second album among the more sluggish songs. They’re mostly a reminder of what’s missing.

Despite Isbell’s general aimlessness, The Nashville Sound features several winning moments.

There’s a gauzy thinness to the sound, an inescapable two-dimensionality that occasionally hinders Lynne’s mission. Still, this is a fine addition to their catalog, perhaps not as consistent as 2001’s Zoom but much better than these late-career revival albums tend to sound.

Favoring the easy gravity of images and ideas over well-crafted sounds and stories, Situation finally drowns in its nostalgia.

There’s a stark immediacy to the production on Longwave, rendering the band’s simple arrangements and basic chords without a shade of embellishment. They’d much rather use negative space than a dynamic flourish.

Polymers isn't a total overhaul from the taut and punishing Travels, but it does dial back tempos and lean far more heavily on blaring arcade synthesizers.

They recorded in Nashville with the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney on seven of Underneath the Rainbow’s 12 tracks isn’t something to dismiss out of hand. But another producer is responsible for the album’s best songs.

Weather Diaries is no Tarantula-sized affront to Ride’s legacy, but neither is it a Going Blank Again-style triumph of reinvention and focus. Weather-wise, it is an overcast day with a hint of sun: promising but never quite satisfying.

Those hoping for a trove of overlooked gems will be disappointed, as too much of With the Lights Out sounds like nothing so much as a dull-edged instrument lifting flakes of material from the bottom of a barrel. Simply put, there's enough good stuff here for a solid single disc.

Some of James’ solo songs struggle to emerge from under the shadow of their former selves. ... The merging of Abrams’ and James’ worlds owes more to geography than to atmosphere. That makes The Order of Nature something of an inherent gamble. The two composers end up breaking even.

'Someone Like You' is the stand-out track on a fairly solid album, but how much better would they have sounded with a little judicious editing and a sharper focus.

As catchy as much of Rules is, that hesitancy brings about an imbalance of mood.

Certain elements of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, if given the right amount of attention, can be enjoyable to luxuriate in.

Even though a release like Lady, Give Me Your Key unearths never-before-heard material, it still doesn’t reveal anything new about the mercurial man.

Alegrias is a pleasant stylistic diversion, another in a long series of non-revelations. That's Gelb's appeal: a guy, a thoughtful guy, who won't press you into adoration, even when he deserves it.

While it’s easy to get the gist of every song on Indigo, Tatum never sets an actual mood.

Mice Parade still finds Pierce working in a distinctive space, less jazzy than fellow post-rock vets the Sea & Cake but more atmospherically nuanced than typical acoustic singer/songwriters, but it's hardly the most appropriate release to bear the Mice Parade name.

Despite the burst of creativity that inspired it, No Rules Sandy lacks urgency. The songs that do sharpen into concrete images evaporate rather than carry their metaphors forward.

The Libertines may be running low on originality, but they can still produce a strong tune when the muse strikes.