Let it also be said that Jemima Pearl’s voice has improved in a myriad of ways; throughout Be Awkward, she wails, rally-cries, and (especially on 'Becky') croons with a range of emotions that were bereft in previous recordings. If there’s one thing Be Awkward has in common with BYOP’s first effort, it’s the fact that it runs a bit long.

Rapor doesn’t push any boundaries or break the speed of light, but it constructs its fragile, fervid, and elegant confections with laserlike precision.

There's a ton of great music on this release, but Kinsella ultimately ruins the focus.

Depending on how one looks at it, The People's Key might even be understood as the culmination of a long and troublesome trajectory Bright Eyes began as a teenager's bedroom project in the mid-90s.

“Wild Strawberries” and “Enchanter’s Nightshade,” which occupy over 30 minutes of the album. They are mid-tempo, trad-to-the-max, predictable clean-tone psych-music.... Yes, there’s strong guitar playing, and the bass and drums plod capably, but it stays in the background and never enters the head. The record suddenly feels awkwardly escapist, and the listener is reminded that the whole disc actually feels rather laid-back.

Whimsical waltzing and barefoot stomping, warm 'n' fuzzy resurrections of soothing old-tyme indie-baroque-pop shimmies for sunset revelry, splashed upon buoyant, Northern African-influenced rhythms and shining with the silky gloss of a keyed-up, Eastern-Euro-tinged lounge sashay.

All the things that give an album its personality--the sound of a band finding its feet, the little tempo fluctuations, the requisite "are we rolling, Bob?" fits and starts--are here in spades.

Audio, Video, Disco is simply too unfocused, too half-baked, and too busy hiding its inadequacies with superficially interesting window-dressing to fit in either of those settings--or any other.

Ghostory is well on par with the strident ephemera to which followers of this project have become accustomed.

The music won't knock you on your ass, but the overall delivery is a real treat, if you go in for this sort of thing.

There is indeed more good than bad. Unfortunately, there is also more bad than there should be.

When Joyner’s at his best, he can break hearts in the most hopeful way possible; in these moments, he is as reinvigorating as a much-needed cry. But most of the songs on this album lack this quality, instead coming off as contrived and, as a result, harder to relate to.

While MU.ZZ.LE isn't thrilling, in the suspense film sense, it manages to strike a rewarding middle ground between comfort and pain, simplicity and difficulty.

Maniac Meat births a few new wrinkles, but it's the same old Linus blanket: comforting, yes, but worn and approaching threadbare status.

Culture II is very long, yes, and vulnerable to momentum-killing duds like “Beast,” but to assess the album as an irreducible work is to cling to an entirely outmoded conception of how music is consumed.

Lonely Twin is a unified creation, concerned from start to finish with existential idee fixes like death and despair, and how humanity deals with those universals.

Nothing can be a comfortable resting point, not only for Zomby, but also, symbolically, for the whole dubstep scene, a brief and peaceful pit stop for mental refueling and contemplation of the followed path in the vertiginous, intricate, never-ending electronic music circuit.

Throughout Invisible Violence, Ortiz traffics in the kind of sea-and-eye-centric imagery and bloated abstractions that might cause an adult listener to strain whatever muscle is associated with rolling ones eyes.

The majority of tunes on offer here do very little to build on the ideas and panache exposed on Soft Control.

Infinite Arms is a confusing, schizophrenic work. Several of its earlier tracks find the band clicking like never before and exploring fresh ideas while sounding more aerodynamic than ever. But so much else seems to have been haphazardly thrown together, as if the band never even entered the same room during the recording process.

Brightblack Morning Light retain a signature, singular, salient sound and still refuse to nudge their songs forward at anything but a crawling pace.

A casual, only slightly-different-than-usual release smothered in atmosphere with one solid R&B song (that’s reportedly been kicking around in a vault for a while) left stranded in the album’s penultimate slot.

It is somewhat disappointing that they would play it so safe at this stage in their creative life.

Austere without the compulsion of self-restraint and experimental without the drag of formlessness, The House confirms Porches’ primacy as indie-dance mavens.

Pyramids would serve as a helluva soundtrack to a dream I once had, a lucid dream around age 10 wherein I woke up within the dream, realized I was in a dream, and acted accordingly. Super accordingly.

There's a great, brisk evening stroll quality here, drifting imperceptibly between wistful and paranoid.

This is their best album in years, but there’s no real progression here. Ono’s mindfuck of a performance is proof: when a band needs to include such bizarreness as their record’s experimental centerpiece, perhaps they are working a little too hard to prove their expressive worth.

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