Without Burnett directly quarterbacking the affair, the sepia overlay that tinted Life Death Love and Freedom and No Better Than This is too transparent this time around.

Above all, uneven though the collection of songs may be, the spirit of this life-force of a band will always uplift and restore--in an unsettling world (to put it mildly), we need that.

False Priest doesn't do enough to reel folks like me back into the hype machine, mainly because the lyrics are simply too dense and abstract to enjoy in this setting.

Phoenix has created an album that is easy to enjoy whilst listening, but desperately hard to love, and impossible to remember.

There's a lot of lulls in the course of Country, God, or the Girl, and the pounces are sometimes scarce after a reassuring slice of defiant afro-reggae rock crunch to begin with.

Hotel Shampoo is the sound of craft triumphing over inspiration.

Balance is a tricky thing, and Eyelet is an album about the difficulty of finding balance. It's something of a letdown that the listener gets just as muddled in that search as Islet does.

The band rolls out another solid, if slightly unspectacular album.

Despite the change in scenery, the results are the same intense, fraught, pretty/ugly postpunk mishmash as ever.

Wondrous Bughouse doesn’t expand Youth Lagoon’s sound so much as pour neon-colored Kool-Aid onto it until it’s diluted to a point where it’s almost difficult to hold onto much of anything in these songs.

Even if Lavigne intended to make something short and silly, it speaks to a larger mainstream conversation of the supposed limits surrounding women’s ability to remain interesting in pop culture. Love might indeed suck, but we know that Avril is capable of so much more.

The weakness of On My Way to Absence comes with the lack of dynamics. Jurado leaves the recording so restrained as to vault highs and lows. Because of this, it is a less compelling listen.

For a group of artists who regularly color so far outside the lines to such dazzling effect, the whole of Own Your Ghost registers as just a bit too rote and predictable, a journey back to grounds already thoroughly explored and reaping much richer rewards the last time around.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with a formulaic sound expertly executed, especially in metal, and in spite of a dearth of truly ambitious moments, Lamb of God sounds as consistent as ever on their fifth album Wrath.

[It] doesn't mean there's anything bad here, just an absence of anything new. To evoke another obvious comparison (and obvious Earle reference point), there's something of the late Springsteen syndrome.

The band really comes alive on the final two tracks, both of which are cover songs.... After the disc finished, I found myself wishing that Farrar's own songs would have been approached with the same heated fervor.

It's easier to respect the ideas behind the music than to love the music itself.

In places it's an absolute doozy. And in other places it's bloody awful.

Quiet Nights contains a few surprises, even if they are dressed up in slow finery.

Steal Your Face, while still maintaining its fair share of robust moments, can often feel a bit second-tier. Perhaps it’s because Watersports felt more spontaneous.

In the one-sheet that accompanies the album, Alias (born Brendon Whitney) explains that the album was primarily inspired by the birth of his daughter, and it's easy to hear his exuberance, which comes through on even the quietest moments.

It only leaves one hungry for a real Mates of State record.

Ultimately, Red only has a couple of catchy moments, and seems like the kind of thing that you can listen to in the blink of an eye and it's over before it makes any sort of impact.

Unfortunately, the ethereal aura dominating the record is not always a good thing; it drifts so much that it seems indicative of lacking focus. The songs tend to bleed together, sounding too similar.

What you’re left with in Dereconstructed is an odd dichotomy. On the musical side, it’s your standard, albeit energizing, clamor. Lyrically, however, it’s admirable for the poignant and pointed glimpse it affords into an underrepresented southern point of view.

From a critical standpoint, Lights Out is long on songs and contributing credits but falls short of measurable artistic growth.

Jettison the Valley doesn’t quite hit the highs of Freeclouds, but it remains a strong, consistent record from start to finish.

The five tracks combine for a mostly engaging night, devoid of thunder but not lacking for intrigue.

Finn has succeeded in differentiating his solo material from his Hold Steady work, but sometimes I wonder if his low-key musical approach highlights the depressing nature of his storytelling a bit too much. But most listeners know what they’re signing up for with Finn at this point.

Sound Mirror is the mark of a band in it for the long haul who will undoubtedly get better and better as time goes by.

Wainwright may still be a pacifist; he's a clever enough lyricist to give to give his words more than one meaning, but he's outwardly aggressive whether his subject is war, family, love, or contemporary society.

Whether it is a last gasp from an unusually consistent band or merely a palate-clearing exercise pointing the way towards a perhaps more experimental direction to be found on a follow-up LP, Minotaur is buoyed by an excellent front half and a less stellar back end.

Bastille is only two full-length LPs into its career, and in that time its world has gotten bigger. It’s a shame that it hasn’t gotten any wilder.

Meaning falls by the wayside in favor of mood and atmosphere, ethereal and dreamlike as the album sounds like the soundtrack to a Zazen mediation session or some New Age trip-out.

It's when they forget themselves, when the mood deepens and melodies tighten, that the Beets show who they really are. You see it often enough on Stay Home, but you'd also think those talents could shine brighter if they got off the couch and stepped outside their safety zone.

[A] worthless attempt at mainstream love.

Deer Tick could have done a lot with their plethora of strong songs: made painful cuts to release a regular album, or shoehorned an overarching narrative in and called it a concept album. But the simplest solution was the correct one. They just put out two good records on the same day, inviting but not forcing listeners to associate them.

When Mahjongg works out the mixture of its sound to its own advantage, the band is able to inject funk into heavily processed music, a noteworthy feat. If it only stayed with the noisier elements of its composition, Mahjongg would produce a more satisfying compound.

[The album] feels so different from his past catalog-in a generic, slightly unexciting way-that it's hard to celebrate as a listener. There are keen verses here, and the production generally deserves more than praise, but as a total package the most exciting pieces have nothing to do with the artist credited on the cover art.

Sadly, with Anti the intent and promise is more admirable than the end result. There’s a certain dreary joylessness to it that saps any energy the songs might possess.

While they are clearly the work of a developing artist, these precocious but consistently pleasant songs are also a testament to her natural talent and hard graft.

Their vision is charming and lovely and idiosyncratic, but their slavish devotion to their mission statement is starting to feel like an anchor on their talent.

Snow Patrol sound terribly awkward when they play loud and fast.

An uneven album with moments of thunderous fun and more than a few flatlined missteps.

Overgrown Path is clearly a confident record from a music lifer, though its heavy fuzzy layers and more eccentric moments sound more like unfinished trials than fruitful experiments.

Most of the songs on The Diary work far better in isolation than they do when treated as part of a unified whole.

It’s a beautiful, often striking temple, one with some wonderful surprises. In the end, though, you’re outside that temple listening in, the visitor that never quite gets to come inside.

From moment to moment, III has trouble distinguishing itself.

Despite all of these hallmarks of "feeling", this album ends up sounding empty.

While it is true that there are precious few surprises on J.A.C., there is also a satisfying professionalism that leaves the listener with a refreshing cosmopolitan buzz.

For a band that is now nearly a decade into its career, to release an album that retreads their superior earlier material with far less passion and conviction is about as depressing as the music is.

Payseur's vocals take on a uniform slack as this album rolls along. At first, it's an affecting choice, where we get to hear both his ennui and the fatigued relief he finds while escaping it. But as the record goes on, his delivery holds its monotone and, as a result, loses its effectiveness.

At the album’s best, Henley conjures up the push-pull between restlessness and contentment in a way that jibes well with the musical interest in the traditions of the genre. At its worst, the album makes me want to throw it out the window, either for the cliches or more often the way the persona of the album comes from a lecturing place of “wisdom”; an I’ve-lived, so I know attitude.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra is an ambitious debut, there can be no doubt about that. But too often, the careful distribution of musical allusions and sonic ambiguities devolves into perfunctory assertions of individuality.

Somehow, Arcade Fire have created an album that’s one half an exciting return to form and the other a continuation of their worst impulses.

Despite their success in covering themselves, a cover album truly lives and dies by the songs that the band chooses to cover, and in that Yo La Tengo flourish.

From the onset of the album, we know what we're in store to receive. Whereas DAMN. finds Kendrick Lamar twisting and turning through wickedness and weakness, wrestling often through the same issues found here, Cole delivers it straight.

It will never reach the dizzying heights of any previous albums, nor will it gain the critical appeal of his debut. However, Gravitas was, at the very least, one of the better albums released in 2013.

Over the course of three fuzzed-out discs, there’s one solid Oneida album to be found in here. You just have to wade through some indulgent, excessive, and flat-out boring instrumental passages to get to it.

Stadium Arcadium is perfectly capable and occasionally ingratiating, but whatever goodwill it musters up is trounced by its redundancy.

Pinback can't be faulted for trying to capture a larger audience with their new record, because the fact of the matter is they're a good band with tremendous potential and ability. But for fans that have been following the group for some time, you'd like to see them get there already, and get on with it.

Lyrics are far and away the album's weakest point, consisting more often than not in pat, stock-sounding phrases.

A lot of bad music is plenty catchy, though. To give Kinsella a pass just because Life Like is begrudgingly more melodic would be unfair to the hardworking musicians everywhere who dare to have a better attitude towards sex, music, and everything else than he can ever seem to manage.

Volcanic Sunlight is a solid, finely-tuned album that reveals new turns and tricks with every listen.

The slower tracks feel out of place and disrupt the flow of the album, but the highlights, especially the opening tracks, are as good as anything Pontiak has done before.

In spite of improving on his past few records, Mondanile goes back to writing a technically sound and agreeable effort that falls back on familiar concepts.

This approach leads either to a powerful, palpable intensity that's unremitting, or to a suffocating bathos that's maddeningly distracting from the words of the songs themselves, which ultimately prove inventive and compelling by anyone's standards.

The songs across this double album aren’t always particularly memorable, but they feel suffused with the warm glow that obviously accompanied the recording process.

I find that I want to like this record more, but with the overall sound lacking in presence and depth, Tan Bajo is by and large mere paint-by-numbers retro garage rock, with a few cuts resembling the Jesus and Mary Chain with the white noise stripped away.

The band is tight and talented, but while each song is surprising, the album doesn’t vary enough over the course of its length.

Renacer paints a clear portrait of a band lacking the courage and will to abandon the tendencies they have clearly grown out of and no longer stand behind.

Maybe Clarkson’s a bit too eager to prove she can still wail out the money notes, and maybe the dearth of edge will disappoint those of us who love “Addicted” and “Hole”. But Wrapped in Red doesn’t need edge; it’s just dynamic and varied enough to be satisfying.

This record is boring.

Neither a direct, honest pop album nor a truly bizarre, experimental art record, Minus is a meandering mess that tries to say everything and ends up saying very little.

To live up to the legacy of a cult classic is a daunting task; while The Soul of All Natural Things isn’t quite up to the challenge, it does add a number of memorable songs to her catalog.

Although Pundt demonstrates an interest in styles beyond the common denominator of ethereal pop, as on the doo-wop-inflected 'Quicksand,' the album’s strongest moments are those that exploit the similarities.

It's not groundbreaking, it's not shocking, but it is solid, fun music. It may not be a classic, but it's damn sure a good soundtrack for those warm, sunny days.

11:11 will placate Pinegrove’s dedicated fanbase. It’s unclear whether it will harvest many new ‘pinenuts’, but it turns our faces to the flora, and in 2022 that’s far more rewarding than emo’s usual nebulous yearning.

True, this is not an easy album to warm up to, but despite initial hesitations, repeated listening may reveal more nuances.

The Minimal Wave Tapes Volume 2 loses a bit of the first volume's vitality. Furthermore, by suggesting that this music can be replicated in any era, the collection betrays its former thesis that there was something particularly special about the historical circumstances that lead to all this music coming into being.

Knuckle Down looms as both a pleasing musical achievement and a disappointing move.

The key takeaway from None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive is simply that the Streets is still around and making music. Given the raging dumpster fire better known as 2020, that's not nothing. But in a summer full of triumphant blasts from the past, it's certainly not enough.

Avi Buffalo have achieved this in theory, but the product is a mostly unremarkable follow-up to a promising debut.

Threadbare is a bit of a slog to get all the way through in one sitting. The simple addition of two or three more upbeat songs would have gone a long way to breaking up the album’s monotony.

There's a lot of either-you-like-it-or-you-don't on Deer Tick's latest, The Black Dirt Sessions.

Uptown Special isn’t quite special enough.

Ultimately, Human Ceremony is unremarkable despite its flaws. Its moments of vigor and excitement are repeatedly undercut by the overwhelming familiarity of it all.

Despite being unsure whether or not to cater to the academic impulse of hardcore funk enthusiasts, Earthology is still a unique release that unabashedly flaunts its contradictory influences.

Its vision, however good-intentioned, is a bit overambitious, while its execution and production are a bit undercooked.

Great Lake Swimmers’ pleasures are deceptively simple, but one can’t help but get held up by the tactile surfaces of their elaborate simulacrum of shamanistic folk.

McLagan has a pleasantly conversational voice. He’s a tasteful keyboard player. While he may not rock out, there’s a nice sashaying quality to the music.

Fall to Pieces gives the impression of an artist struggling to sustain his vision, leaning on his collaborators to make up for its lack.

There is a very fine line between contentment and the utter absence of feeling, and while Zebra's production and mix is flawless throughout, it falls too often on the wrong side of that line.

Heartworms has some songs that longtime Shins fans will appreciate, and they should seek out those songs. But in the age of unlimited audio streaming, it is hard to make a case that the entire album is worth their time.

Though Folie a Deux is still riddled with problems (ending the disc with the Survivor-esque closer 'West Coast Smoker' makes for a somewhat hurried conclusion), it’s still a musical leap in the right direction for the band, as it adds just enough new elements to keep things interesting while not straying too far from the sound that made them big in the first place.

All We Grow is surely the work of a confident, able composer. However, Carey seems to need more time with his ideas, more of a willingness to take risks and break his songs out of their initial molds.

With a darker theme comes a darker sound.

Samson doesn't break any new ground on Provincial; it's familiar stuff, warm and well-worn. That means it can be alternately immediate or unexciting, sometimes within the same song.