It’s a noise-rock album you can play without annoying your friends, but it won’t aggravate the Tortoise worshipers in your group, either.

METZ is, in short, an almost-amazing album, an album of extremely well built and executed rock songs undone by a production that all too often calls attention to itself.

Maybe it's because we've come to expect these guys to knock us out with each album, but Smother can't help but feel like a misstep.

The Con is a mostly mature collection of solid songs.

If you like rock tunes with sharp melodies and earworm choruses, Researching the Blues isn't likely to give you anything to complain about. It's an album that feels, at its best, effortless. Other moments, however, feel too effortless, and as a result there are some missed opportunities.

Without the threat of squalls of feedback (like on Palo Alto) or serious climaxes (like on Rook), most of Golden Archipelago ends up as beautiful as the cover of the album, but with as little context.

Although Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy has the dizzy invigoration and winning enthusiasm of an excellent first album, it also suffers from a kind of first-disc immaturity, an urge to pack everything in at once and as early as possible, rendering it top-heavy and inconsistent.

The good thing is that for any misstep here, there's a success that overshadows it. But for those of us waiting for him to really knock another out of the park the way he did on The Animal Years, it might be a let down to realize So Runs the World Away isn't that.

In a vacuum, Hats off to the Buskers exists as a charming, innocuous piece of work, perfectly fine for mass appeal; in the real world, Falconer and company are gonna have to grin and bear just a few more Arctic Monkeys references.

The album conjures up equal measures of frustration and dejection, especially as it bears all the hallmarks of a band growing in stature, who may have just delivered on all that untapped potential on a finely honed fourth or fifth record.

Rossi's music doesn't offer some great payoff, but the nice thing is that it suggests that we should keep listening because there will be one down the line.

There's a lot more discipline present on the band's second album, Leave No Trace, but it's not clear if that's an encouraging development.

The remixes that constitute the second disc are less intriguing than the B-sides, but none of them are horrible.

Lust gives them the most emotionally substantive material they’ve ever had to work with, and yet there’s still that sense of detached restraint.

Each song here, when attention is paid, is gut wrenching, honest and unabashedly sad while maintaining a sense of resigned acceptance... The arrangements and production, however, tend to drown out Perfume Genius's ability to juggle his subject matter, leaving songs that just don't quite break your heart.

Unfortunately, there are moments on Busting Visions where Zeus succumb to the weight of their considerable forefathers.

A handful of these delicious earworms deserve to be on the radio. The mismanaged sequencing of Konkylie robs its melodic impact, but the ability to write a great tune is definitely with these Saints.

Fol Chen's debut, Part I: John Shade, Your Fortune's Made, is end-to-end melodrama and that's fine; so far, they're doing it right. Instead of the kind of melodrama that produces sugar and hooks, Fol Chen appears to opt for storybook.

There's still plenty to like about the insular production and engaging melodies of Wild One, but I can't help but think North Highlands have a lot more to offer that doesn't always show up here.

This album is a detour from the straightforwardness of Per Second, which means that comparatively it also often feels disjointed and uncomfortable.

The album sticks very much to the template of ambient keyboard pop and an atmosphere of disappointment that past Lali Puna and Notwist albums traded in. That said, it's effective in what it sets out to accomplish and has a silent ambition that is fairly admirable.

Mark Kozelek is surely a distinct voice, and a dynamic guitar player, but there's a difference between playing solo and playing to yourself. And he stumbles over that line just enough to hold this album back from greatness.

The songs blur into one another, edited to form a metal-machine grind of music that, while certainly exhausting--there’s even a disclaimer on the album: “Do not attempt to listen to all at once” -- maintains a kind of lurid appeal in its dogged attempts to capture a three-year journey within the constraints of a double LP.

Malice N Wonderland is not, by and large, very ambitious.

Despite the band’s mechanical leanings, they’ve always been able to let emotion seep through the swell and walls of distortion and static; it’s a trait the band shares in common with few of their louder (current) contemporaries. But the opening half of the album is not powerful enough to convince the listener of much of anything.

It's poppy, it's quirky, but it's also shrouded in forebodingness and unease. When the group achieves that sort of balance, AttentionPlease is close to perfect. The album fails when there is too much dance, too much party.

Beal's lyrics proves to be the major sticking point for an album that is quite successful. Most of these tracks follow the kind of topsy turvy logic of a Kaufman film.

This is a solid record, at times sparse and moody, at times lush and hopeful, but always chill. Very, very chill.