Alone II just isn’t as strong as the first volume.

There are moments, like “Catastrophobia” or the overly hazy “Hot Swells”, that feel overly indulgent, expanding on textures already fully formed in other songs. Overall, though, Hubba Bubba is a solid record, reminiscent in ways of early Oh Sees records. It’s scrappy, scuffed, and full of promise.

Eating Us is at times agreeable to the point of innocuity.

No big entrance here. It’s just a low-stakes rock record made by some buds.

As such, like Blue Carpet Treatment, Doggumentary is an album that reminds us all why we like Snoop so much, and pleases us through his taste for good music more than his talent for good rhymes.

They found new ways to get to the drama and even paused along the way for some subtlety. You won’t find such traits on La Petite Mort. And although it resulted in a good James album, something tells me that they probably won’t be able to get away with this again.

The chemistry between the two is undeniable, but the format is more suited to Farina's strengths than MacKaye's.

This is the sort of release that can be really appealing to a band's biggest fans, the completists who want absolutely everything a group puts out.

A few tracks on Shock Value are exactly what you’d expect and hope for from someone with Timbaland’s recent track record, a few are straight-up awful, and most get your head nodding well enough as long as you’re prepared to turn off your brain.

Animal Joy falters where it mistakes crude simplicity for reinvention.

At certain points, Thorburn tries to add more gravity to the proceedings, but he needn’t have. The two more downbeat songs that close out Islomania sound a bit labored.

Though not perfect, there’s much grist for the mill here, and it’ll be interesting to see what kind of direction Mas Ysa goes in when it comes to delivering a full-length album, which is something that appears to be in the works for later on this year.

Education, Education, Education & War is an album that gets better on repeated listens. That must mean that the best bits--and there are many--increasingly obscure the mediocre parts--and there are several of those too.

Well, setting the bar that high that early on makes it nearly impossible to follow up with anything that could be better, let alone on par with how great that first track is.

Fact is, a good song's a good song, no matter how derivative it is, and Free All Angels is loaded with them.

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

Your enjoyment of this record almost completely depends on if it sounds good to you in writing. If a slowly moving, patient, and weird Avey Tare record sounds appealing, it almost assuredly will be; for the masses, however, some sections may register as too playfully weird.

Tracer is full of traces of melodies and snatches of ideas on its instrumental tracks, and they are ... interesting, if not wholly successful.

Although So You Are... So You’ll Be doesn’t shoot for the furthest reaches of the cosmos, as White Hills has done in the past, it does contain enough psyche-warping moments to make for an enjoyable album--just not the grease-streaked, galaxy-gazing, guitar glory we were hoping for.

This is an album of mostly good songs by a mostly good band.

Lynn Teeter Flower may not be intense, edge-of-your-seat musical expression but it’s not intended to be. It is, however, a fundamentally strong pop record with enough atmosphere and beauty to ensure it resonates with a definite segment of record buyers.

Playing Robots Into Heaven is ultimately a flawed but, at times, interesting and worthwhile foray for Blake into more beat-led, dancefloor-friendly music.

This is an improvised quartet of light noise, static, and hum. It isn't a polished piece, composed and meant to be taken in pieces. I accept that and judge it thusly.

Sunday leans towards more straightforward, more folky arrangements, losing some of its punch.

There's still a lot of fun to be had at this Nursing Home but it's pretty clear that the party is winding down. Whether or not Let's Wrestle can suffer the slings and arrows of young adulthood to fight another day is entirely up to them.

It feels like Williams is trying on a few different costumes to see what she likes, and only landing on material that feels natural maybe half the time. The good news is all of these songs are catchy and singable, and Williams strong vocal performance makes everything work even when a song doesn’t feel quite natural for her.

The return-to-roots exercise that is The Dreamer isn't bad; it just seems unnecessary. This is a good album; on a song by song basis, I'd even venture to say it's great. But given what Miller has shown us in the past, this can't help but feel like second-rate.

Sometimes I wish that the puree were a little less smooth, a little less like wallpaper, and that’s the case with Big Sur. But it’s still a lovely experience, made by one of the masters we have with us in this age.

While Myths of the Near Future is far from revolutionary, the creative, layered production on their debut is definitely worth checking out.

The stage part of Stage Whisper, despite offering little in the way of riveting moments, does act as a nice compilation of Gainsbourg's greatest moments from IRM and its predecessor, 2006's 5:55.

From Deewee is undeniably good, but it’s not great. With any luck, From Deewee will be remixed and reshaped into a juggernaut live set or a follow up album like Nite Versions.

Sure Isles coasts at times, snoozes on occasion and pales if compared to, say, Taken by Trees’ similarly tropical but superior Other Worlds but its bonhomie and infectious, wide-eyed perkiness still warrants a good ol’ holiday-romance romp in the dunes.

The album’s structure collapses under its own weight thanks to questionable production and a plot that never becomes cohesive. Still, Monch’s bars are among the best in the game. Put his words over shoestring production and your jaw would still drop.

Foster has proven her mettle enough times to excuse a slight misstep, which in comparison to previous recordings and some of the works of her contemporaries, isn’t so much a misstep as a slightly less imaginative showcase of her talents.

Folds seems to want to please everyone on the disc, making the listening experience a bit haphazard, if not a little predictable.

This debut EP shows confidence.

Senor Smoke, luckily, is catchy and fun enough that the lyrics don’t entirely sink the album.

While these lighter moments feel necessary over the course of a casual listen, one can't help but wonder if a whole album of the doubt and discovery of self-examination would have made for a more compelling statement.

Like its concluding song, The Age of Adz is occasionally transfixing, but overall inconsistent.

Though the record contains some moments of banality, Oblique to All Paths is a strong indication of why this band will continue to conjure in listeners’ minds a dark, melancholy place.

The Tourist is a good record, and this newest iteration of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sounds very promising. The Tourist reflects the transition from a quintet to a solo project.

Had the fish-minded emcee trimmed some fat, Fish Outta Water could have been the album we were all craving from the 2na.

A serviceable debut, it has some interesting ideas, though it won’t change the game.

This is a collection of eight and nine-out-of-10 rock songs that come together to make a six-out-of-10 album experience.

Songs is solid when it sticks to what it knows best, the crisp beats, playful bass wobbles and shuddering tempo. His commercial experimentations are still hit and miss, enough hit to make these departures worthwhile, but also enough miss to make you wonder if Rusko is out of his comfort zone when he branches out.

It may not quite match up to their best work—which is, for my money, The Ghost of Fashion—but it’s a sure sign that they’re on their way back to that high-watermark.

Above the City also sounds worryingly familiar in places, sometimes brazenly so. Yet where it shines it radiates “Pop Deluxe”, even if it’s not always Club 8’s “Pop Deluxe”.

On King, O.A.R. play with even more radio-friendly structures, a move guaranteed to alienate some fans while gaining plenty of others.

Freak Out!, for all its fun, is the sound of a serious rock band that could stand to take itself just a tad more seriously.

Obits are good at what they do, especially with the volume pumped up loud, but on the whole I think I’d rather just give Kick Out the Jams one more spin.

When the Going Gets Dark seems stuck in a rut precisely because it is an album about being stuck in a rut.

Ultimately, something about this album feels a bit slight.

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

The closest Morlix gets to criticism is his poppy anti-gun rant, “Bang Bang Bang”, that notes the problems of too many bullets flying without really identifying why or what needs to be done. Sure, music should not be propaganda, but it needs to offer some insight.

[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.

Even though Finn has earned his place in contemporary Beatlesque pop, FOMO feels regressive, almost like the work of a rookie. And it's not as if this rookie has struck out, it just sounds like he ticked off ten foul balls in a row.

Their care in assembling their lush, provocative sonic palate means that the chemically altered or simply slow-witted should find Dreamed as warm and comforting as a fuzzy pillow.

Allowing themselves the creative freedom to explore a wider variety of sonic textures and moods will give AlunaGeorge the outlet that their ambition deserves, but such self-actualization cannot be found here.

The album is filled with strong pop-punk turns, offset by a handful of regrettable ballads.

As an artist, he’s always lived and died by the principle that the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts. High Hopes, by contrast, is precisely as good as its best material and as bad as its worst, nothing more and nothing less.

No, the elements Lanterns on the Lake are using are not new or novel ones, yet something fresh is still at work here.

Sadly, more than stomping around old ground was hoped for from this tinnitus-inducing power trio.

The 11-song, one hour set is packed with all the hits from those classic first three records. However, as you would also assume for a band taking the stage well after midnight, the energy isn't always there for the entire set.

Four (Acts of Love is a bit like a love affair that didn’t quite live up to its potential.

Their approach is too fragile. Even as High Places grow up, seeing darker realms, leaving behind youthful nostalgia, they are not yet able to reach the top.

Comparisons to the Smith Westerns (“Be My Prism”) and Yuck (“Dust”) may be inevitable, but the Jacuzzi Boys retain enough of their previous humor and urgency (“Rubble”, “Hotline”) to stand on their own.

Pocket Symphony is downright somnolent, like Talkie Walkie on Quaaludes.

It's clear that even though these tracks are outtakes, Zomby knows how to cater to his fans and give them exactly what they want.

The album’s biggest failing is that it sounds too much like his past three albums. But this also gives this record strength.

Making Mirrors offers plenty of evidence the guy could be capable of just a little bit more if he'd focus in on pop music at the expense of his more esoteric impulses, or at least learn how to separate the two more efficiently.

House of Love offers an album that will likely satisfy whatever quiet hopes its fans have kept safe for the band.

A little more quality control and commitment to conciseness could have made Our Nature the explosive re-affirmation of talent Savoir Adore deserve. As it is, this party feels a little burned out, with two few great memories amid the haze.

Go Outside is definitely an enthralling and sufficiently unique record... It's a nice mixture of elements and styles that any fan of punk or quirky pop will surely enjoy.

Some minor, targeted deviation from the formula would have pushed Depression Cherry to an unprecedented level of novelty for the band, but as it stands, the record falls into a creeping, achromatic daze far more ambitious than it is visionary.

Taking the piss by playing against type, Hitchcock’s The Man Upstairs is devoid of any mystery or humor, refuting the claim that “A Robyn Hitchcock album always sounds like a Robyn Hitchcock album.”

[The song "Up All Night"] is generic, but takes a somewhat different turn, which is true for the entire LP.

SVIIB make good on the promise of their early seven-inches and EPs with this debut full-length for Ghostly International.

Despite a lack of variety, the Rifles' third album offers enough sugary-sweet and catchy guitar-pop to satisfy a certain craving.

Simply put, Enjoy the Company isn't an overly grossly spectacular record; it is just good time rock and roll.

Mugiboogie is an exercise in emotional indie that de-crescendos from brooding psychedelic thrash metal to indigenous melancholy ballads without hesitation.

The base problem is that Temples’ narrow sonic pallet holds them back from being exciting rather than just being good. For now they’re a fun, talented, and faceless rock band.

The way Never is rendered is too claustrophobic and vertiginous, rarely giving you a chance to find your bearings within the tightly packed soundscapes.

Run the Road Volume Two works as a fun soundtrack to a dimly-lit, vodka and Red Bull drenched basement party. But if you really want to kick the party into gear, the album’s older brother is still the one to podcast.

The entire disc is pleasing to listen to even if a great majority of its hooks can’t be recalled less than an hour after the closing title track finishes playing.

There’s no denying that, musically, Freedom’s Road is authentic and inspired.

When it comes to the vocals, though, Cronise never delivers on the same level as the rest of the band’s work, and the longer Gods of the Earth goes on, the more distracting this weakness becomes.

Minor, but charming.

It’s the sound of an artist trying to go on the rebound. That he partially succeeds may be cause for a quiet, at the very least, celebration, just like the sound of the album itself.

Overall, the album is a mixed bag, but it’s worth persisting with for its moments of beauty and always fun energy.

A memorable, albeit inconsistent, record by an unabashed futurist steeped in funk, jazz, electronica, and everything in-between.

Petra Goes to the Movies is creative, weird, often wonderful, sometimes irritating, and certainly the work of a terrific and inventive musician.

Time Traveller is an excellent exercise in skill that lacks a certain amount of soulfulness.

Nothing here is quite as tuneful as the stuff on Red Hash, or as fully formed, but it's a compelling set of early songs that show where his later, better stuff came from, as well as showing a raw, emotional purging of sound from an impressive player.

There are good songs here to be sure, but a measure of skepticism shouldn’t just arise from the band’s original fan base.

Overall, the compelling outweighs the tedious.

Manages both annoyance and perfection.

Sounds like Deerhoof-in-theory: zero standout tracks, an abundance of groovy sonics.

There are a lot of fascinating, really good pieces on Anthology, and several of them work well even removed from their film context. But the ones that don’t work as stand-alone songs end up calling attention to Carpenter’s limitations as a musician.