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.

Taken as a whole Shy Pursuit feels like a flat amalgamation of post-millennial indie-pop tropes clean-cut from the quirks and charms of their creators.

Most of these songs would make for a devastating end to an emotionally charged, disturbed album. But ten songs like that in a row?

The other moments here retread instead of reform, so while the trio's stubborn vision for their music is abmirable, its limitations become glaringly clear as you get to the record's end.

On the whole, Anxiety lacks the addictive quality of its predecessor, and it's certainly less musically interesting.

Black Mesa ventures deep into individuality but it's ultimately a fever dream that's more accessible to the man who created it rather than to an audience.

Adventures in Your Own Backyard is about as confirmatory of an artist's status quo as an album can be; it takes Watson's style in no new directions, preferring instead to bask in its own childlike exuberance and to demonstrate all the trappings of ambition but little in the way of earning it.

Only Place doesn't say or feel much, which would be fine if it didn't sound like it was trying so hard to say or feel a lot.

Despite all his sonic island-hopping over the years, Krug has an aesthetic noticeable as his, and unfortunately his backing band here doesn't quite have the same unique musical vision.

While groping for a consistent aesthetic, Young Prisms provide moments of delightful ascent, only to seemingly let their worse angels drag them back into staid, self-inflicted sludge.

What's missing, though, is the familiar sense of deft control over the album's arc, the lyrical intrigues, and the instrumental detail that make his other work so indispensible to the indie folk canon of last decade.

Both Lights, for all its faults and successes, remains a worthy exploration.

What results instead is a solid offering full of familiar noisy-pop that with a little branching out might help the trio do something special next time around.

Valentina spends much of the time spinning in circles instead of plodding onward.

The results are hit or miss going forward.

The ideas it presents of consequence and scars, and the deep pathos with which they are conveyed, are often compelling, but the songs themselves work better here when they sand down the fangs a bit, a concession Stewart is rarely willing to make.

It ultimately lacks cohesiveness and direction to evolve into something truly outstanding, but still remains intriguing enough to possibly earn points with the more adventurous listeners.

If that presentation doesn't always hit the mark, the sentiment behind it often does, and the album never completely derails.

A polite, undemanding excursion--frustratingly stuck to its own sonic landscape.

I Am Gemini is all jerky distortion, an endless sputtering, as if Cursive set out to intentionally make ugly music.

Her melodies sound tired and her deliveries sound rushed.

Most of the songs on Ester are like partially frozen ice cubes tossed into a drink on a warm day: they work for a little while, but they never turn into something truly solid, and end up dissolving pretty quickly.

Mux Mool has managed to produce another album as solid as it is thwarted by its limitations.

On the whole, the jams and spaced-out scuzz rock of circa-Sweet Sixteen Royal Trux might most closely represent the vibe of Black Bananas' debut.

If Hotel Sessions had a layer of banished songs or the context of label-drama, that would be one thing, but as it stands it's a very boring, commonplace, and unneeded part of music-biz procedural that never needed the light of day.

After that highpoint ["Video Games"] things head downhill quickly.

What we're left with feels like a big blur--an entertaining and wacked-out trip to Wonderland, but not one that I feel particularly compelled to return to.

Vanity Is Forever is understated and bare, an oxygen-deprived world with only super-sized synths and O'Connor's bleak narratives.

So while this new set of Civil War-era songs is an often beautiful listen, they end up obscuring Kenniff's musical vision rather than illuminating it.

It's hard to view Radioactive in any context that doesn't label as it a total artistic failure, to see the totality of Yelawolf's rolling over to commercial demands as anything but truly disheartening.

This is a carefree release that is meant for our "reptilian" brain.

Fuck Death, compelling as it is, never quite finds the same charged feeling of purpose [as Skin of Evil].

Mostly though, Pusha seems lost.

Hello Sadness offers the lumbering and deflated version of Los Campesinos!, hiding away their most alluring energy in favor of glum inactivity.

The Vision shows that thus far Joker works better pushing out erratic singles than within the format of a full-length.

The EP does have some great moments, and ironically it's when Blake drops the dubset and channels his classical piano roots.

Producer Brian Eno has guided them towards more expansive instrumentation and bombastic atmosphere, but the center of the music often lacks real heaviness.

There are great pop songs on Tape Club, and it does remind us there is life after the hype-dam bursts, but most of us are better off picking up Let It Sway to see what Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin are all about.

So while it sounds pleasant throughout, and sometimes awfully beautiful, it won't stick with you as long as it could after the album's final notes fade.

On Neighborhoods, blink-182 took [Dude Ranch/Enema of the State/Take Off Your Pants And Jacket's] sonic template, updated it, and made an album where they tried to understand what it means to be a member of blink-182.

Don't let Miller's presence detract you from buying an otherwise perfectly adequate album. Let the rest of the stuff that's wrong with it do that.

This mature Ryan Adams gives us 11 songs on Ashes and Fire that are perfectly fine, a few bumps but most of it is solid with a few that really stand out.

With Howl of the Lonely Crowd, Comet Gain will likely continue to lack recognition.

These are just the outcast songs with edges too elusive to polish. And while you're unlikely to fall completely in love with them, it's comforting to know that Lekman felt similarly.

Things jump back and forth from there, and never seem to build to very much. Shadow may want to cross back.

It trades the organ liquidating power of Crack the Skye for a collection of songs that sound as much like a B-sides compilation as a new LP.

Work (work, work) sounds more like a laborious task than a bracing trip into emotional bedlam and sexual anarchy.

The album is nothing like a career-killer, but it is a career-worrier.

These mid-tempo songs sap some of the group's natural energy from Dracula.

Mostly, Hysterical is lost in a hazy cloud that is more Dan Bejar than it is David Byrne.

While Seasons on Earth turns out not to be the sort of stoner's delight diehard psych-folkers might be looking for, neither is it looking in any direction other than straight ahead, evocations of another era notwithstanding.

Mountaintops is a decent pop record, and will surely add a few fan favorites to the live set, but for a duo that did so much with just two instruments, they too often do less with more here.

Complaining about a lack of hooks can be painted as unrefined, but frankly Era Extraña hasn't shown me why it deserves hallowed deconstruction, it may be weightier, but there's absolutely no question which Neon Indian album has the most stick.

The flashes of the old Rapture are far too few, but when they're there, In The Grace of Your Love proves that the Rapture have lived long enough to outrun their hype.

Despite the missteps, the band still emanates a certain cheekiness that's rare these days, especially for a lot of oh-so-serious psych outfits.

Jeff Bridges is all quiet and sepia-toned, dripping like molasses in dollops of hammy pedal steel, placid acoustic guitars, and Bridges' cracked vocal chords.

There's too many synths, too many hooks, and just too much happening for us to enjoy it. The charm is gone, and we're left with a mess too muddy to understand.

The lyrics meander, often failing to offer so much as a hooky line or even a coherent narrative.

Legendary Weapons is fine enough for diehards, but doesn't reduce the general desire for an actual Wu-Tang album.

When Fish Ride Bicycles was probably never going to be as good as hearing "Black Mags" for the first time, but no one could have bet that it would be this boring.

OX 2010 lacks a clear vision and focus.

Gaga has always been able to anchor her haughty conceptual undertakings with simple, catchy tunes, but with Born This Way, the persona and the message are starting to bleed into the songs. It's not a good look.

As with any Teddy Bears release, this is all meant to be a sort of pastiche; lots of genre jumping, lots of smooth transitions, lots of hooky goodness mixed with a plethora of guest stars and vocalists.

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.