Reflektor doesn’t contain any actually bad songs (the closest we can peg on the collection would be a small amount of filler material), but the impact of a full listen is one of catchy excitement and impressive pop rock which slowly rolls downhill into the murky sonic depths of the more somber second half without any truly punctuating final moment of the record itself.

South is very much a mixed bag. A strong mood is set early on and maintained through to the end, and the good songs are strong. The weak ones, however, are unmemorable indeed.

Maybe it's churlish to hope for more than the sound of two friends doing something they enjoy but Sunn O))) have delivered so much more than that, over such a significant period, that it means the biggest surprise here is that a band famed for discovering the nuances and unseen potential of repetition, finally sound repetitious.

Electric Balloon lacks the consistency needed to catapult Ava Luna beyond the indie blogosphere.

When Andrews focuses on her own story, she's an immensely compelling songwriter. It's when she speaks in a general sense about heartache that her powers are weakened.

For anyone who loved Emergency and I, or any of the Dismemberment Plan's other two records, Change sounds like The Dismemberment Plan on Quaaludes.

What we get with Skins is a mildly pleasant album that's easy on the ears, and is utterly predictable.

What I would like to hear from Eulogies next time 'round is some beefed-up production, some extra layers of sound, and a more melodic focus. I can hear they have what it takes to achieve consistent excellence; for me, it just didn't happen on this effort.

Unsound is simply the sound of a band retreading what it did 30 years ago, even if they put conscious effort into making a few distinct changes to how their sound was delivered.

It’s disorienting and congealing at the same time, so it’s very ‘John Maus’, as in it is simple but oh so complicated.

It makes me ponder what a gorgeous album they could make if they weren't also trying to maintain a career as country music superstars.

The songs on At Least for Now run the gamut to extremely engaging to extremely overwrought.

Magic Hour won't blow your mind but it conjures enough spectacle to highlight why Scissor Sisters remain one of pop's smartest, most entertaining bands.

While Major Key proves that DJ Khaled is not simply a meme, Khaled swings too hard and misses too often with each attempt at a radio hit.

The album drops off a little. It doesn’t falter, but it’s never as inescapable again.

If Whiteout is an imperfect album, it is one that also evinces Howard’s refusal to stay in a single musical lane.

When he recorded King of Hearts, Camu Tao knew he was dying of lung cancer. His solo debut feels urgent and incomplete. It's a collection of electro-rap songs with barely any rap verses. The songs are brief meditations on death and love and arguments, but as dark as this music can sound, it's never bleak.

With their second album, Cryptacize have given us something much more sure-footed, and with a little more depth, than what we’ve heard before.

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.

He's gone for a sound that's somewhere between '50s and '60s rock and musical theatre, halfway between Buddy Holly and Broadway.

It’s just a shame that as entertaining as such popular revisionism can be, his 1989 will be remembered more as a curiosity than it does a full-bore artistic statement.

Ultimately, My Other People feels like the work of a band in progress that hasn’t entirely figured out how they operate as an ensemble.

Resurgam is pleasant and occasionally quite captivating ear candy from an artist who may nevertheless have to work harder in the future in order to remain distinct.

As sophomore efforts go, Form & Control is a great success.... Unfortunately, what it lacks are hooks.

These moments feel like indulgent outliers to a typically controlled and compelling record, but even at its most indulgent, this record remains a solid and charming set, one that marks a fresh and exciting new start for Doug Tuttle as a solo musician.

With a new full album on tap for 2009, the advance four-song EP Festival Thyme seems to indicate the band may finally have found their footing again.

Wolfe is as uncompromising a poet as she has ever been on She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, and while her disparate choices of canvas give us a bumpy ride, it’s one worth taking in good faith.

The problem with Everything Goes Wrong is that the song structure at its core is very, very good. But that same song never varies.

Even as this lyrical and conceptual vision remains compelling throughout All Ashore, it manifests less immediately in the music itself, which lacks the dynamism that animates Who's Feeling Young Now? and The Phosphorescent Blues before it.

Fragrant World is an uglier, darker affair [than Odd Blood], full of tangled synth lines and hyper-compressed rhythm tracks. It's sometimes brilliant, too, with at least two hooky standouts ("Henrietta", "Reagan's Skeleton") – but it's also the first Yeasayer album that threatens to collapse under its own teeming weight.

He’s still poetic and hard to pin down, but if there’s one criticism, it’s that his fondness for the midtempo-to-slightly-uptempo range risks making things run together.

Whereas the highlights of Occult Architecture, Vol. 1 are artful in their simple arrangements and concepts, stretches of the album could be fairly characterized as too straightforward and simplistic.

There’s a more defined sound about their sophomore than to their debut, but in opting to clear up the blurred focus and smooth the edges of "Cuts," they also instilled in their music a thirst for hooks and melodies which they don’t always provide.

Regardless of your perspective, it's a solid "pretty good".

It reminds me that equilibrium, in chemical terms, is stasis -- I get through the whole thing without hearing much chemistry at all.

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.

While the new elements of the band’s sound make this an interesting record, it’s not as strong in its execution as "Declaration." The negative changes detract more from the album than the positive changes add to it.

Solid, but inconsequential.

The Golden Record is a hushed but exciting new album, one that delivers some brilliant moments but, perhaps more importantly, promises a bright future for Little Scream.

If you can get beyond Garcia's new-wave-icon posturing, Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid is a modestly enjoyable, pleasantly lean-sounding record, the kind of thing that would make you rest on the radio dial as you drive.

Bridwell's small-town observations have previously had a shallow yet quaint quality to them, but Mirage Rock goes far too heavy on the clichés.

What Matters Most ends up being a mixed bag. Musically, this is a strong record. .... As much as I like Ben Folds, though, hearing him come back with a new pair of songs about women who are borderline crazy is disheartening, and it casts a pall over the rest of the album. Some longtime fans might not have that same visceral reaction, and they’ll probably enjoy What Matters Most more than I did.

Former Lives also falls prey to typical solo album problems, like stylistic explorations that a band might correctly veto as ill-fitting throwaways... and songs too slight to appear on a major release.. Yet [other] songs hint at how good Former Lives could have been had Gibbard simply indulged his pop storyteller side.

This record is where it all began before they [Welch and Dave Rawlings] (with the help of producer T Bone Burnett) put out their first disc. In other words, Gillian Welch fans will appreciate hearing the original sounds of the band.

Ultraísta is inventive but it overloads on likeness and similarity. There's enough here to warrant several listens and maybe even an impulse purchase but not quite enough to suggest that a follow-up record is necessary.

All in all, The Mosaic of Transformation is a slightly uneven record. It generally transcends the tropes of its genre, but occasionally substitutes substance for style. The songcraft is not up to par with Smith's past work, but the album offers plenty of rich textures and unique sonic flourishes.

Dungeon Golds reeks of Record Store Day--it sounds like something that a super fan would hoard away. This doesn’t mean that the tracks are really odd or even deviate much from the overall output from the band, it just means that a fistful of really great songs were paid too much attention over too long a period of time.

Unfortunately with the addition of the Notwist’s awkward electronic sections Close to the Glass becomes frustratingly uneven.

Big Echo is hardly a bad record, and is not without its charms. It contains a clutch of songs and moments that long-time fans will cherish for years to come, yet is grievously unable to sustain that excellence in light of such a wealth of new circumstances.

Lesser Evil is not without its merits, and there’s something here for those willing to wade through the murk and warped, fractured imagination of Woodhead, and you may come to realize that he’s doing something truly challenging.

The curious should still probably go back in the catalogue to Flood, but for the rest, Join Us is a serviceable, albeit inconsistent, stab at shooting for the moon in sheer zaniness.

He still enjoys bouncing his gruff voice off tropical beats, a vocal conguero, but all those 4x4 stomps from the Continent give him fewer opportunities to do so.

At its best, it's a fantastic album, with amazing musicianship that's emotionally striking. At it's worse, it's empty.

Rakka contains some of Ripatti's most thrilling and unpredictable sound design, but taken in one sitting, it's hard to know what to do with it.

While it might be a stretch to call the women behind one of the most revealing Twitter accounts matured, Discipline & Desire is indeed much more of a fleshed out and comprehensive effort.

The identity crisis of Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast has less to do with the schizophrenic thrills of Cornershop's best-known work and more with a surprising lack of individuality. Much of the album goes retro in a puzzlingly rote and even deferential way.

There should be little doubt as to whether or not the Depreciation Guild have managed to refine their sound here--the question is if, in so doing, they’ve managed to obfuscate those qualities that made them stand out in the first place.

Despite its imperfections, Light Asylum is a must-listen for those interested in synth-pop or the Brooklyn scene in general, and Light Asylum are a band worth keeping on the radar.

This is a decent snapshot of a great band doing what they do best, but instead of providing a three-dimensional, in-depth picture, it's a two-dimensional one that only hints at the actual greatness the band achieves.

There's a fair amount of stuff here that does work here and works well.

However a hard sell this album may be, though, it’s a satisfying trip down memory lane.

Maybe while stoned it makes sense, but sober, Mind Elevation is more confusing than uplifting.

He's produced an album that takes his current style just about as far as it can go. At the very least, those who have followed him this far should be satisfied.

Despite being culled from different projects, far from feeling like a smorgasbord, the songs are undoubtedly all of a piece.

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.

Another accomplished, warm, and welcoming record, one whose open-hearted generosity of spirit ultimately proves hard to resist.

Chapter II is enjoyable, it’s worth a listen through once; as given it’s so broad and diverse, it would be hard for the listener to not find one song they could listen to again. The disappointment for many will be shining through though, and while Benga may gain more exposure, many will feel he’s compromising his art in the process.

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.

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 record doesn't entirely succeed, but these tracks are built on durable structures and sentiments that make them deserving of the focus they'll likely receive.

If it's not a leap in the right direction, it's at least a big step.

There's a compelling musician under all these layers--of sound and worry--we just need a few more peeled away for us to see him fully.

Celebration have made the type of record about which it can be said that when it's good, it's very good, but when it misses the mark, it misses it by a lot.

By the end of the album, the listener will surely be overwhelmed by Arie’s earnestness, both musically and personally, but like her previous albums, Testimony is for those who seek a motivational guide for living a conflict-free life.

Fierce Bliss has a few breakthrough moments, but overall it steps back to familiar ground: too much thunder and not enough light.

Jamie Woon seems to honestly prefer the slow observation of growth to the harsh, quick mistakes of an unobserved life. And yet, in the process he seems to prove the point: a watched pot never really boils.

In the final analysis, none but the most diehard fan will find this to be a more pleasurable listening experience than any of the excellent studio records he's put out over the past decade. It's not bad, necessarily. It's just inessential.

Overall, Off the Record is a solid album with plenty of attributes, though not necessarily an exceptional one.

Too much of XXXX is spent recycling tired dance-punk moves for it to succeed as a whole.

On the whole, a lot of the material here, whilst well produced and well written, is sadly not outstanding enough to challenge the firmly seated royalty of UK dance music just yet.

It's a Corporate World is a solid first full-length album that gets stronger the more you listen to it.

This style shift does give Ealom some more flexibility in her range. But if the chipper, twee sounds of "I Found Out" and "Jenny Come On" were your initial draws to Dressy Bessy, then you might find the more punky direction a bit confounding.

Any listener looking to spend a reverb-drenched summer on the beach revisiting the golden age of AM radio could do far worse than spending the season with She and Him.

Clearly, Heavy Love isn’t the emotional grab bag that the title suggests, but regardless, it’s an affecting effort that leaves a lingering impression.

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.

Departure is an ambitious and brave debut, one that reveals a lot of promise and an awfully big sound for just two players.

I like this, but I have a hard time recommending it to others, unless they are more interested in righteous political discourse than in actual songcraft, and unless they are huge fans of unsubtle screeds.

Molnar and Nelson’s production enhances the intimacy of the recordings. Like the old cliché says, it’s just like being in the room with the artist.

Perhaps that’s a tad cruel, but to their credit, what the Von Bondies lack in originality, they make up for in style.

While Wilco (The Album) has its strong moments, it does not have many innovative ones.

It’s strange to say, but the older the Black Heart Procession gets, and as their playing and instrumentation matures, their minds seems stuck in the past.

Rather than ending the record with an emphatic statement, the band sounds confused and adrift. Which is a shame, because for most of its passing, Robert Ellis is an exercise in confident songwriting, creative arrangements, and strong playing.

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

Aside from the wonderment that might be induced if you saw this setup create the music live in concert, perhaps it’s best just to say that this is one of the good but not great Pat Metheny records, which ain’t bad at all.

These Stars is a promising debut and one that rewards repeated listens. There is warmth in this coolness.

If only the rest of the album were as good as the lead single.

Strange Disciple finds Nation of Language’s devotion to their craft and the acts that inspired them admirably intact, even dogged. It is probably their most listenable album from start to finish. Still, it leaves the sense that, cool as they are, a bold new turn may be coming due.

If this were the kind of queer red disco deconstruction that it almost is, it would be excellent, but that's not even half the record's runtime. There's a quarter-hour stretch in the middle where it almost catches fire, but that's not enough for an album.