Hotel Valentine is a fine addition to the limited canon of colorful post-punk all-girl trip-hop records, but can’t avoid sounding like the relic that label implies.

While Deal's music has often been enhanced by its try-anything roughness, here, she sounds like she's just hoping something will stick.

As with every other Sun Araw album, appreciating the 80-minute entirety of Ancient Romans requires a high level of patience in order to uncover the record's best moments of mysticism and wonder. But while Ancient Romans doesn't always make captivating music, it does create awesome scenery.

It doesn't take long for her aimless acoustic picking and postgraduate lyrical poetry to dissipate into a dull gray haze.

It's a passable album of mostly neutral jams and bare-minimum production.

At points, Universal High finds a hook and rides it somewhere new, but for the most part it’s content to time-travel to safe harbors, layering clean, jazzy guitar over simple grooves or dabbling in yacht rock.

This is a prettier, more heartfelt record than Sheezus, but only a slightly better one.

Without the gripping autobiographical elements of recent Mountain Goats releases (or the tape hiss of the band's lo-fi days) to justify them, Darnielle's idiosyncratic, occasionally annoying vocals and elementary folk melodies fall a little flat.

Perhaps hip-hop's hottest production duo, The Neptunes can claim credit for many of the best moments on Let's Get Ready, from the Spaghetti Western guitar of "Danger" to the nervous sonic aggression of "Jump." Mystikal's whirling-dervish flow has seldom sounded better, but like Snoop Dogg's otherwise-excellent No Limit Top Dogg, Let's Get Ready is undermined by monotonous production from the producers formerly known as Beats By The Pound. Though off No Limit, Mystikal has brought his old team (now renamed Medicine Men) with him, and their six tracks pale in comparison to those from the album's other producers (OutKast, PA, Bink, The Neptunes).

Fambly's flabbiest moments sag pretty low, to the point that the album's midsection is almost entirely skippable.

For the collaborative LP Country Club, Doe and the Goods take a fairly reverent approach, mixing just a few pastichey originals into a set of well-worn C&W covers.

Too much of Silver Eye keeps something back. But if “Zodiac Black” signals the next step in the evolution of Goldfrapp, maybe that reluctance will eventually prove to be worth it.

Trampin' hardly counts as a misstep, but it's her least impressive showing since her return.

A steamy, boozy, looser take on the amped-up miserablism of the band's overly rigid 2002 debut The Big Come Up.

Total Decay's main drawback is its lack of contrast.

It's a textbook example of a promising debut from a humorless band that has nowhere to go but down after the opening cut.

Only five years ago, Turner was a fresh-faced quipster hopefully eyeing a crush on the dance floor, but now he's playing into the tiredest archetype: the jaded, sunglasses-shaded rock traditionalist on the hunt for an easy lay.

In fleeting moments, Gray's remarkable charisma dominates The Trouble With Being Myself, but the missing ingredient is too often a simple lack of hooks.

But for all The Donnas' ongoing charms, Spend The Night tempers them with a faint whiff of predictability.

Beneath such a surface, a band needs to keep screwing with the formula to hold interest. Bodies Of Water gets around to that often enough on its second album, A Certain Feeling, but lets the clever bits sit naked for too long.

In sum, Zombies On Broadway compiles some worthwhile ruminations and life lessons, but McMahon needs to search a little harder for compelling ways to package them.

On Me Moan, he stretches too far. It’s a shame, because his beautiful voice is one made for quiet crooning, not bold wailing.

For the most part, the musicality--much sparser than the maximalist sonic feasts of his earlier work--still holds the same synesthetic power of the past, even for those who don’t claim to have the ability to see sounds.

Working In Tennessee is often sleepy to the point of being narcoleptic. Still, even when he strains to hit notes, which he does often, Haggard sounds like he's enjoying himself.

It’s a weird fucking album, in other words, neither as crowd-pleasing as it should be nor as experimental as it wants to be. The drums sound great, though, and the Rihanna track is as good as N.E.R.D. gets.

A handful of tracks manage to convey some sense of energy and urgency. Few of them, though, rustle up the dark hooks that used to be HWM's greatest strength.

If Camera Obscura weren't roughly the thousandth band to recombine the pastoral sounds and adolescent exploitation of the '60s, it would be easier to work up some enthusiasm for Underachievers, especially since the group's melodies are catchy enough that they don't need the cutesy trappings.

Duds and semi-duds aside, Now You Know holds together okay, with plenty of high points, mostly huddled together in the first half.