They try their best to make a staggering number of genres their own, but ultimately prove themselves to be jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none.

The Bedlam in Goliath is an exhausting and overwhelming effort that fails to leave any tangible impression.

By the end of the album’s blissful, sparse, empty-Saharan-landscape closer 'The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance,' perfection doesn’t seem to matter much anymore--especially when your mind’s too preoccupied on starting Vampire Weekend again from the beginning.

The songwriting of its back-half just doesn’t stand up to its front-half or the rest of the band’s catalog.

The Helio Sequence have finally produced not just a collection of songs, but an album.

Unfortunately, what starts off like clockwork ends up as predictable as the inevitable passage of time.

When all these cuts add up, we wind up with an album’s worth of pleasantries.

Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it before... it’s taking drugs to make music to take drugs to, or something. But it’s still pretty damn fun, and Black Mountain do it with a higher idea-per-song ratio than most of their fellow fetishists.

Jukebox is a big, bold kiss-off to the indie ghetto that’s braver and all the more interesting for the approach she’s chosen.

Simply put: the lyrics are simply too vacuous and cliched, the production tinny and lacking any real thump, and Scwhartz’ charm? Nowhere to be found.

While Oracular Spectacular has its sophomoric moments (you’d be wise to avoid the nasal whine of 'Weekend Wars'), a listen to 'Climbing To New Lows'--a catchy demo set from their undergrad days--will make anyone see what attracted the bigwigs at Columbia in the first place.

The one knock on this record is that it just isn’t very dynamic, as too many of the tracks fail to strike with the impact of truly great efforts. There are exceptions, of course, and the drumming on the fantastic 'Skeleton Man' propels the track with a driving momentum that’s too often missing on The Evening Descends.

Distortion does not reinvent the wheel of alternative rock, but it may have just started it spinning again.

8 Diagrams is a paradox of track selection and pacing.

The album has more than its share of bangers and certainly beats last December’s leftovers casserole More Fish on the killer-to-filler ratio, but Ghost veers too close for comfort to the feel of his worst albums

Jay-Z has rebounded to make one of the year's most interesting and engaging rap records with a sense of immediacy and wordplay that no Denzel Washington film could match.

Far from essential, Hvarf/Heim can merely be looked at as a stop-gap before the next proper record.

While his contrived sonic and visual aesthetics do much to explain the thinness of Smoke, they do not justify it.

It seems as though the quick release of Untrue restricted Burial from burying his emotions underneath layers of alternatively sparse and overwhelming production as he did on his debut, resulting in an album that instead wears them unabashedly on its sleeve.

His ambition’s got the better of him this time, though: it’s tough to care about the overarching (and admittedly interesting) theme when the component songs aren’t satisfying themselves.

Possibly the most confident and successful of this third phase of Black Dice, the pieces here make no claims to exist as anything but the welcoming and obtuse freaks of rhythms gone awry.

Even his lyrics, a mix of front-porch reflections and impressionistic images, are more sound than sense, the stuff of ambitious art-rock, not folk.

A supernal set of tracks ends Preparations, movements of pure reverie that complete the album in fitting fashion.

While this release is ruminative in nature, the temperament isn’t far removed from the classic record with which this release shares a striking visual resemblance.

Amazingly, it lacks any pretense: their aesthetic is organic and fluid, indicating a band that responds honestly and artistically to circumstance, rather than one that imposes a rigid, stagnant aesthetic for more idealistic purposes.

The Flying Club Cup is a good album. If you’re a fan of "Gulag Orkestar," it’s probably a great album. But aside from 'Cliquot,' it’s more of the same.

Widow City is by far the band’s toughest-as-nails record yet, with Matthew incessantly setting fire to the stage.

His music’s dynamic, but his voice lacks range and variety. Krug sings emotionally, but not responsively.