On most of Keep Your Dreams, Canyons are trying too hard to be everything all the time. It's obvious they have all the tools they'll need, but it'll be a little longer before they build something really worthwhile.

His songs are built around solid hooks and show enough dynamism to keep the listener from hitting the ‘next’ button, but when the album is through playing, there’s no pressing need to hit ‘play’ again.

The release’s awkward format and patronizing presentation are among the least of its poor qualities: Even for the heads, Kaleidoscope offers very little not already heard elsewhere. ... In addition to the previously mentioned Chainsmokers pair-up, there is the very ungainly Big Sean feature “Miracles (Something Special),” which, wearing more than a few embarrassing, auto-generated reverential name-drops.

This album is no disaster, no Moonbeams and Bluejeans, but the benign flatness here suggests the ineffable whatever that made The Fall fascinating has fallen away, and it looks very far gone.

It isn’t life-changing, genre-defining, seizure-inducing, or any other clever hyphenated compounds, but it is a thoroughly enjoyable, rewarding listen.

As Damaged Bug, John Dwyer exposes new horror, though perhaps that’s not quite it. Perhaps horror is hyperbolic. Perhaps as Damaged Bug, Dwyer exposes anxiety as ambience. Inescapable static.

The key to The Dodos isn’t their lyrics, but their melodies. And on Time to Die, they’re strong and sufficient.

The Fiery Furnaces have delivered another great American novel via guitars, drums, bells, and whistles.

It may not be exciting, per se, but it speaks to the ultimate appeal of Work (work, work); even in its drugged-up, mournful state, it holds your gaze.

There's something inherently adolescent about an EP that veers sharply from genre to genre, each song an island, completely separate from those that precede and those that follow.

He has always played it warm and safe, but in this album, he is playing it warmer and safer than ever....Lukewarm this album is, indeed.

The Outsider screams to be downloaded in sections by fans of specific genres.

The listener is unfulfilled at the album's end. We learn nothing new about Sole, who's the only character on the album.... There's nothing to grip on to. All the lyrics are observations twisted into weak witticisms.

None of the other songs are as instantly arresting, aside from “Plenty of Girls in the Sea,” which proves to be just as fruitless and repetitive as the aforementioned single.

There’s enough pulling power to draw you in, just not enough to get you hooked.

Boils with energy, excitement, and a passion to experiment.

For a solo artist obsessed album-in and album-out with delivering a product alien to the mothership, this move represents a regression, a willingness to tread ground he's covered, almost note-for-note.

Introducing Brilliant Colors doesn’t go so far as to challenge this tradition, but it throws in enough wrenches to make it an exciting addition to the catalog.

During some of the more composed moments, the album manages to shine out in semi desolate wonder; but most of the time, Monsoon sounds too much like the Jonathan Richman two-piece band from There's Something About Mary to outrun the malaise of mediocrity that blankets it.

Crazy Clown Time isn't a groundbreaking work in the way that Lynch's films are, but that's not to say that there's not a lot of darkling pleasure for the intrepid and the curious.

I have done my best to place the album, as a series of utterances, in its agony and vacuity.

Contains a set of willingly - and often tedious - half-finished songs, forming a clumsy collage (cover art reference) that is actually more coherent and better enjoyed when contextualized within the band's 34-year trajectory.

Some will rank it among other gimcrack releases, like Dylan & the Dead. Still others will categorize it as an oddity, like Self Portrait. It’s all and none of these.

It's end-of-summer music.

If anything, it's nothing: a dark, expensive, teenager programmed, radio-friendly, MTV-destined nothing.

While that combination [hip-hop beat, industrial trudge, start-stop synth] yields some moments of blissful jitteriness and pop rejiggering, Mr. Impossible never gets too far past being big, dumb, and unquantifiably creepy.

It isn't life music, unless you live in a camp permutation of Gold's Gym. The Air-like, Gary Numan-lite instrumentals popping up between the songs with hit potential are way lighter than air. I don't mind 'em, but also don't love 'em.

The tracks are disaffected exercises in barren repetition and arrhythmic progressions that feel truly tossed off (improvised would be an insult to people who are actually accomplished at that) and indulgently "arty" in the worst sense of the word.