Cults is mostly just an album of girl-group signifier piled on top of girl group-signifier.

It's unfortunate that Tan Bajo is so over produced by trying to be so under produced, but this is a document of a band experimenting with the hurdle of translating their famous live shows into a studio setting and over-calculating their sound in the process.

As a result, Thao & Mirah is a nice side-project for two great performers, but not as revelatory as it could have been for either of them.

With no clear-cut standout like "Nice Train" or "Dolphin Center," the record fights to find its footing on slacker-rock ground and never quite gets there.

The most powerful moments here reimagine their sound at its best without ever retreading. The rest of it, however, glitters far too much for its own good.

While the slog through the mostly interchangeable mid-tempo, spoken-verse tracks on the first twenty two minutes of the album is a lot of saminess to deal with, a couple genuine pleasures await anyone patient enough to make it through to the album's final moments.

The album's lows remain limp and strangely clinical, making its true promise all the more disappointing.

Most of Angles finds The Strokes trying as hard as possible not to sound like The Strokes. This is done, in part, by recycling the least palatable parts of their last LP, and interpolating them with weird, near-atonal choruses.

Unfortunately with No Witch, there just isn't enough excitement to hold the listener's attention for long. And while the group is to be commended for their artistic efforts, it could benefit from a more aggressive fusion of sounds on its next album.

What you read is what you get here: an album full of small Scott-Heron samples bolstered by production from a member of the xx. Nothing more, nothing less.

Esben and the Witch sure can make a racket, but parsing out the minimal substance is the real challenge. Better than Salem? Definitely. A perfect debut? Not quite.

Hard Times… unfortunately spends most of its running time inadvertently showcasing the delicate difference between stylistic variation and tonal inconsistency.

As a stand-alone collection though, it's vexingly stunted, and padded out with a few unnecessary additions to fill out its barely 30-minute run time.

Until he learns to translate the raw, confessional edge of his music to his work in the genre, the results will always be as unsatisfying as III/IV.

No Mercy is a valley, not a peak, in a career that has seen plenty of both.

Pink Friday lives or dies on Minaj's ability to fully embody all of the various personas she toys with, the singer, the rapper, the lover, the fighter, the tomboy, the girly girl, the big sister, the bitch. But she isn't always engaging, and she doesn't always sound at home with this material.

Novak and company are capable of writing great hooks and snotty lyrics, which prevents this album from being a total waste. This time around, it just seems like they got a little too tied up with exemplifying some sort of glam-rock, don't-care-about-anything attitude.

Cotton Jones is comfortable, but that comfort can be tiresome.

In its essence, Death To False Metal is competently put together, and adequately celebratory in its own way (as the album title might suggest), but there is very little to latch on to as far as a reason for existence.

Now that Cuomo is older and singing about things like fame and the alienation of age, it's become harder to empathize.

Phosphene Dream's real achievement is that it takes the band's earlier murderous attitude and makes it impossibly bland. It might be the first time you fall asleep during an album with copious references to toxic gas, hauntings, death, blood, and killing.

All too often Shadow Temple falls short and is flat out boring when it should be actively engaging. It took Rama 14 years to rise to the throne and bring peace and harmony. The band members need to do more than this if they want to if they want to outperform their namesake.

There isn't a song here that truly rises above the rest, and nothing here is as offensive as anything you'd hear at a stop on the Warped Tour.

Where they used to sound like the crackling of a subway car rounding a bend or the seediest alleys of New York in the pre-dawn hours, here they sound like alt-rock renderings of what moody post-punk is supposed to sound like.

It's unfair to saddle Dead Confederate with the burden of the entire Athens tradition, or look for it to be anything other than a band making a record. But Sugar would have been much more interesting if these guys had focused on that instead of trying to be five or six bands at once.

A case could be made that this is a newfound maturity, and without a doubt Rivers is no second-hand attempt. However, sans even a single convulsive whirlwind, Rivers is more musical wallpaper than a masterpiece.

It's more or less a corporate-rock distillation of nu-rave, three years too late.

On their third full-length album, Alive As You Are, the members of Darker My Love drop the whole neo-shoegaze, Jesus And Mary Chain worship of their first two albums and instead engage in a sampling of different '60s sounds.