Everything Now doesn’t stretch out so much as it spreads itself thin, which is why it won’t ripple out like other Arcade Fire records. In the end, the band that made neighborhoods sound endless makes Everything into a cul-de-sac.

Ultimately, Harris appears to have simply swapped one formula for another, and if there’s to be a Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2 he will need to discover at least a few new tricks. ... [But] there are encouraging signs here that the Harris of old hasn’t been entirely lost for good.

No one will ever get sick of Love Songs--they're an essential product of the thing we call the human condition. But it's easy to get sick of these.

Tamborello's textural sensibilities remain, but his ability to supercharge glitch into something intoxicating and luminous seems to have dipped out the back.

All the Why? hallmarks are there, but the album just lacks effusive energy or emotional rawness needed to bring it all to life.

Other posses succeeded because all members contributed to a central sensibility and ethos that made the whole greater that the sum of its parts. G.O.O.D. Music just obscures the greatness already there.

For those who never liked That Guy Who Plays Acoustic Guitar At The Party, Babel's gonna sound like the dentist's drill. For others, this still may be the point at which you put down your makeshift tambourine, get up from the half-circle and find a better room in the party house.

For every standout near the beginning of the album-most notably the catchy girl group-aping "All Kinds of Guns"-there's a sorta-tedious ballad near the end.

About seven tracks in, 119 settles into a series of mid-tempo jogs that fail to really go anywhere.

Unfortunately the album as a whole, modulo a few bright sections, fails to come to life.

California Wives' music is soft and pleasant and fully formed and vague. Their lyrics are ciphers.

The album, sweet as it sounds, is so polite that to keep from offending listeners it stops short of saying anything to them.

[There] are only the few standouts on an album otherwise comprised of facile dance tunes with overwritten lyrics.

Like OMNI, this record seems a bit trite.

Koster's songwriting and arranging is growing by leaps and bounds, and Mary's Voice is his most assured batch of songs to date, it's just too bad that the production can't catch up or exude the same kind of progress and confidence.

Like the subjects of these songs, the music itself wanders.

For better or for worse, Stephens and Tyson Vogel have thrown in their lot with that angst, and thematically, The Bloom and the Blight is less of the departure it hopes to be.

What you get, then, is an album that may have a sonic breadth, but really only two sides: one of sweet pop tunes, and one of strange goof-offs.

Bloc Party once came with something to prove, and the conviction necessary to prove it. Four takes the audience's interest for granted, and refuses to step out of line to draw more interest. So much for a revolution.

A pleasant and inoffensive endeavor, it'll do well to keep any Foxes fan satisfied for the remainder of the season. But don't be surprised if boredom sets in by fall.

Yeasayer's only triumph here is perfecting a niche they've already seemed to master.

An album that while fun, often stagnates no matter how much the trio push things into the red.

The Tarnished Gold is often nebulous and obtuse, trading in atmospherics more than the countrified terra firma of the band's past.

They're an insipid, uninspired mess right now, but the Hives aren't done as much as they are confused.

It's a boring album, it's a depressing album, but it's also a deeply cynical album.

More often than not it just comes off as either needlessly melodramatic or watered down to a state of vanilla

This is stadium schlock of the highest pedigree, the kind of thing that can make you feel desperately cynical about rock music.

This is almost selfishly indulgent, and unless you haven't heard the previously released "Dr. Marten's Blues," you have very little to learn from the rest of the album.