Melodies are practically nonexistent, leaving the music almost completely ignorable.

It’s a perfectly respectable, fun dance record, but I just wish its grooves came more naturally.

While the songs here are not memorable in the buzzer-beating manner of a title shot, no one would prefer a world where all-star matches were missing.

The flesh on the 11 ghosts of Strangers is heavier than on lots of Nadler’s past work. And the sonic space mirrors the lyric meat; this is corporal, forward locomotion.

It’s hard to imagine a few stellar tracks and a well-flowing album being taken as a negative, but the result just isn’t enough to make these lads stick out.

Listening to Slaraffenland find their way, as they approach indie-rock from a rarified angle, is enjoyable enough in itself to cancel out any inhibitions.

The one thing the demo and the remix have in common is they both put Francis' voice in a more prominent position than on the Pixies albums, and that is certainly not a bad thing.

There is a poise about Scintilli in its strongest moments that was absent even from those early blazed trails.

Ibeyi is an uneven but sturdily promising debut.

The record resists you making sense of it. It hits, laughs, ends.

The Phoenix is, ultimately, a collection of immersive and impressively well-produced analogue techno tracks, bound up in a package with overt cultural references that tend to distract rather than add to the experience.

Beams, like Asa Breed, is front-loaded with the atmospheres and vocal manipulations that are bedrock to his best work. But Beams fails to evince the kind of songwriting growth that the vocal minority of his fans have been waiting for.

Taken as a whole, There Is No Enemy is a solid album on par with the band’s more recent output.

There is a natural grace to these compositions that's difficult to deny.

Witch is a solid heavy metal album that is nearly as much fun to listen to as it probably was to record.

Anti-folk or not, the band exudes confidence and camaraderie, and The Bundles surely won't disappoint their longtime fans.

It's end-of-summer music.

There’s still enough innovation and experimentation among the banalities here to suggest that they might have a great fourth album in them.

Antidotes is really a pleasurable record that found itself displaced by its worn-out, second-hand clothing

Drift is a step up from Devil’s Music (2016), which attempted to recreate Leave Home’s career-making abrasion with little of its viscerality. On the other hand, with nearly every song on the album performed in a different style, Drift lacks the cohesion of The Men’s less acclaimed albums.

If there’s a problem, it’s that this batch of songs doesn’t quite show off Donovan’s gift for weirdness as much as previous Sic Alps outings.

It’s refreshing to hear such heavyweight harmonies being shipped out by a modern act, especially when relatively crunchy guitars and urgent drums act as the styrofoam packing peanuts, ensuring things never get too messy or convoluted.

The sounds sometimes crash and collide rather than meld together, whereas elsewhere, paradoxically, they slide off the ear, a little over-anonymous yet falling short of the unique grey palette of an act like Japan.

While the lyrics at times retain the smarts and wicked humor that we've come to both revel in and expect, the romantic ballads more than flirt with cliché.

Though it'll never be powerful or earthshaking, Weathervanes seems to have found its place among the clouds.

Like a good term paper, much of Graduation sounds great in theory but flounders in its execution.

While I am not one to fault Kilgour for slowing things down a little, an impatient listener might argue that Frozen Orange shows Kilgour's age in the same ways Yo La Tengo's Summer Sun belied theirs.

It is still mostly sickly sweet sounds from Tennis, but the band must be commended for talking a bolder step the second time around.