He sounds like the dude from Blink-182 - just another suburban punk whining about this and that.

The results are surprisingly tame, if not un-rocking.

Transference, the Austin band's seventh full-length, will serve as another whittling down of the singular aesthetic that has made them one of the most engaging American bands of the past decade.

What BYOP now lack is the element of surprise that made their debut such a kick; they no longer sound as if they had something to prove, and that drains their music of much of its charm.

While lukewarm as a whole, The Messenger doesn't suck nearly enough to bruise Marr's status as a guitar deity on wheels.

Ire Works is good science tarnished slightly by one bad experiment.

The downside of this open-armed approach is a lack of sonic specificity; OnMyRadio occasionally blands out into a nondescript stew of melismatic vocals and slow-jam beats.

Minus the Bear seemed more serious about their music than about its presentation.

Listening to the new MGMT album requires similar preparations to those for a prolonged psychedelic experience: you may want to leave some time in your daybook for unexpected detours, and it'd be wise to erase previous experiences from your mind for fear that heightened expectations may not be met and mass bummerage will ensue.

Blackout may be more a tribute to the skills of the A-list producers who guided her through the disc than to any of her own talents.

No one song here will change your life, but there are some that could come close.

Factory doesn't entirely squander the goodwill built up by their recent excellent reunion tour, but it's not significantly better than the standard Pollard solo album of the last decade.

It works, sometimes.

Future This is ultimately more melodic than its laborious predecessor. But around the "ballads" in the second half, you start longing for a point.

Only the nuttiest of fans will find any new details (the more-present backing vocals on Agaetis Byrjun stunner "Svefn-g-englar," or the beefed-up church organ swirl in "Ny Batteri"), even if the band's live majesty is captured in full-force.

This, their third album is as ambitious as its predecessors but mutes the joy in favor of a more serious tone and tighter focus--well, as tight as an album with a 10-minute number called 'Dragon's Lair' can be. The results are mixed.

Inasmuch as Stereolab have accomplished pretty much everything they could, Not Music feels like a passive retread.

Frontman Ross Flournoy and his mates kick up a ramshackle jangle-pop racket that gets its energy from always sounding as if it were on the verge of falling apart.

Gira's career has been one of violations and risks; there are plenty here. However, his trademark brand of post-rock/ambient alienation may finally leave listeners indifferent.

Even though the album's zany unpredictability can be thrilling, it often feels like Banks is adorning vacant tunes ("Arise Awake," the plodding instrumental "Another Chance") with bells and whistles.

Fans and detractors alike get exactly what they expect with bratty rockers like 'Outta My Head' and 'Rulebreaker,' but things seem to “get real” a bit with a more-introspective (if you can call it that) track like 'Murder (I Get Away With).'

For the most part, Ten$ion is a letdown in its utter normalcy.

This Pleasure is known, but in the end it overstays its welcome.

Much like the show’s second season, this second disc fails to build on its predecessor, rehashing the same digs at male bravado, emotional insecurity, and musical eccentricity.

Cosmogramma is decidedly more, uh, cosmic, than his 2008 "Los Angeles," in its atmospheric spiral away from the beat and toward a more free-flowing collage of instrumentation.

Breakout is a puzzling mishmash that makes sense only if you read between the lines and see the 15-year-old trapped in a machine that is partly of her own design.

I had to make several return trips to the lyric sheet to clear up which songs were love letters and which were screw-yous. But this sort of tone-deaf emotional bludgeoning tends to work in her favor on monstrous power ballads.

As Real Estate grinds on, it settles into a monotony of its own, until you can hardly distinguish one hazy nod-off jam from another.