The songwriting is capable, it’s just somewhat predictable, and the lyrics are cheeky.

Every song is serrated with pixel edges, and Alice Glass’ sometimes morose, sometimes lilting like a Valley girl vocals vibrate with such catchy and violent gloom that it’d send any human/marmoset/sentient being into an epileptic dance session.

Through it all, Green’s show tune-y vocals are at center stage, and though the compositions are often too busy and can detract from his rolling lyrical intricacies, Sixes and Sevens is a very good record, if still a step short of great.

Alopecia, their third full-length release and second as a full band, is a darkly tinged juggernaut.

Lackluster sound quality, predictable track construction, and the utter absence of emotional push and/or pull yield a record that comes off more like a product placement than a work of art.

We get tiny tastes of levity, but scarcely the sort of wit we’re used to.

Bozulich has amassed a band and baptized it with the name of her last record, and together they careen through a broken itinerary of radiant darkness.

Even when the album gets really flaccid, as in the clattering breakdown of the turgid story-song 'Hopscotch Willie,' Malkmus is still annoyingly good at writing stuck-in-your-dome-piece melodies that keep you humming the tunes you don’t like just as much as the highlights

After many detailed listens, the record feels like their strongest yet, a bold statement considering the importance of their previous works.

Pemberton’s lyrics can be long-winded, but on the whole, they display a postmodern reflexivity that is profoundly mind-boggling.

I’d rather be listening to Magnificent Fiend’s antecedents.

These United States sidesteps what could have easily been part of a superfluous boy-and-his-guitar genre by folding classic standards and varying its instrumentation and pop arrangements enough to create a warm and subtle structure, making for an altogether fresh and uniform interpretation of railroad folk introspection.

Sea Lion is a delight.

Shots isn’t a perfect record by any means.... However, by the time the epic closer “Ghost Blues” enters its nasty twin-guitar breakdown, you’ll want to pour yourself another drink and hit Shots’ high points anyway.

It is a welcome return home to a band that had been on quite the bender.

What is most impressive about New Amerykah is that Erykah simply breathes life into these tracks.

Devotion has that same opiated warmth that left me lying in a bed of rose petals for long stretches last year, and though I would have preferred a bigger growth spurt from the Baltimore duo, they shot up at least enough to warrant a new pencil mark a half-inch/inch above where I placed them in ‘06.

Press down on the ambiguities of Lust Lust Lust as much as you want, and you’ll still be trapped in a world of surfaces.

While the band have shed much of their aggressive musical past, they are able to bring an edge to a wealth of genres that otherwise struggle with balancing a new audience with an older, AOR-accessible set.

It all adds up to The Mountain Goats’ most musically sophisticated endeavor to date. In fact, the music is finally beginning to hold its own with the lyrics.

The most subtle incorporation of drum machines, horns, and vocal effects transforms Bon Iver’s music from the quiet afterthought that characterizes much of today’s indie-folk into a sonic landscape of moods and nuances.

Each song has a distinctive quality that stands on its own. However, when you back away from the album as a whole, you begin to see that all these individual elements unify to make a greater holistic product.

They play a very recognizable breed of avant-rock or indie-rock and are doing something that has been done over and over again in New York City.

But even with Brooke’s uncharacteristically romantic epiphanies, The Grand Archives still occasionally tends toward predictable sentimentality.

Ghost Games is nothing so profound, but it certainly is something to bring out of the closet once a year or so.

The fact of the matter is, despite lesser numbers, they have demonstrated progression as artists.

BSP aren't going for a concept album here (or concepts at all, really), but you'd be forgiven for expecting one given how beautifully the collection of songs coheres into a singular piece of work and retains momentum through its movements.

Hot Chip sound like such a broad swath of pop music on this album that you can’t quite call them out for biting any single obnoxious influence too much, even when they do get so hyperactive it’s annoying.