Flawlessly rendered and unoffending to a fault, the perfection of All These Dreams is its greatest shortcoming.

E·MO·TION is still a very pleasing album if not just a shade overambitious, clearly trying too hard to make the same genius pop moments that Kiss churned them out with effortless flair.

There are enough highlights to make And the Anonymous Nobody worth revisiting, but as a whole, the album is just barely above average. A valiant effort, De La Soul, but no dice on this one.

Taste of Love is a good album, but it’s too “good” and not enough “wow” for its own good. TWICE can do better.

Furfour is packed with widescreen synthpop ballads like this [“Acid Ali Khan”], which is either a misstep or an admirable commitment to aesthetic consistency, depending on your taste.

While Day Breaks can be relaxing at times, it also borders on being sloppy on rare occasions such as these.

Geraldines is still rife with the inevitable “bad” Tori songs that seem to be a mainstay for Tori records lately.... The bright spot is that there are only four of these songs, one of which is still fairly salvageable, making the number of great tracks far outweigh the bad ones.

Not all of the compositions here strike gold.

For longtime fans, it will likely be a welcomed batch of new material. The uninitiated, however, might wonder what all the fuss is about.

Creatures is by no means a bad record. It's just not very imaginative, especially from a band that has staked a career on the endless scope of druggy, quasi-psychedelic imagination.

Plainly put, there's something missing in Have You Fed The Fish -- something fresh and whimsical, a tie that binds the songs together, and that endearing twinge that made The Hour such a masterpiece.

For better or worse, it seems like Mice Parade would rather not do things the easy way.

Neither an audio-verité release or a fully-fledged, star-studded duets album. It's quite interesting, but that's all. Now, with this out of her system, she can move on.

These songs all sound like they’re going to turn into something special, but only one or two actually do.

As fun and pleasurable as many of Paisley’s big-screen pop melodies, sharp guitar hooks and detail-filled songscapes on Wheelhouse can be, those two supposedly challenging songs ["Those Crazy Christians" and "Accidental Racist"] point out again how intellectually limited Paisley’s wheelhouse is.

Where The Wild Things Are has much to offer fans of wide-eyed, unpretentious indie-pop, but I can’t help but wish that sentiment could be applied to the soundtrack as a whole.

Taken individually, the album is full of moments of tiny decadence, and though it never really coheres as a whole, there’s a sense of being taken aback by this album.

Despite its open orchestration and more experimental bent, it is Modern Nature’s least interesting release.

With all that early potential, the rest of the album sometimes can’t keep up. The record, though, never loses its way, remaining a convincing and mysterious sonic space throughout, one often worth getting lost in.

It’s a fairly dark record overall, musically and lyrically.

One of the satisfying attributes of Strychnine Dandelion is that the production is raw, yet nuanced enough to perfectly evoke the original feel of the sounds the assembled musicians are immersing themselves in. However, that also means that the Parting Gifts constantly straddle the line that divides homage and pastiche.

Ambulance finds the Amazing pushing forward, trying new angles at their established sound. But these later songs make the band seem uncomfortable in new, spare settings.

Isn’t It Now? summarizes some of their best attributes. It also shines a harsh light on their self-circumscribed limits.

No doubt, The Route to the Harmonium is an impressive artistic statement. Too often, and especially when compared with Yorkston's previous work, it is something less than enjoyable.

Essentially what the Juan MacLean have here is a straightforward pop album, but as with the worst pop albums, the amount of filler overwhelms the killer.

There’s not a whole lot here that really distinguishes itself from similar material. However, the Lovely Bad Things do their shtick fairly well, and there are some outstanding moments as outlined above.

For major label singer-songwriter stuff, not bad. Moore knows her way around hooks.

It could use a bit more dynamism, but its sophistication almost makes up for that.