In its many moments offering something warm and comfortable, Into the Blue Again might have been able to gain the status of one of those albums that could settle restless nerves, but this undercurrent of coldness counteracts this idea, leaving some tracks unsatisfying, passable rather than pleasing.

I catch myself unknowingly enjoying Lights Out whenever I quit trying to overtly "listen" to it.

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.

They’ve just created a good version of a great record, which may have been their intention all along.

Sonic Nurse neither disappoints nor surpasses expectations.

Even ignoring the tectonic shifts in music over the past decade, this is by no means a novel or inventive album.

There isn’t a single moment on EWBAITE when I wasn’t second guessing my feelings, and that makes it interesting to me, if not necessarily as interesting as some of their other post-reunion records.

Musically, End Times approaches Everett’s best work yet, but due to its narrow focus and exhausting reliance on theme, it falls just short of it.

When it Falls, while not a masterpiece, is a nice album which will likely appeal to a very broad fan base.

The grand message that The Underachievers seek to spread musically can get a little boring, though, especially when they pretty much rap about it on every song.... AK and Issa Gold are getting better at rapping, and rapping together.

Cryptacize have made an album that sounds welcomingly familiar for fans of Cohen’s aesthetic, but it won’t likely gain them a much wider fanbase.

But by continuing to relentlessly mine the same fundamentally limited descriptions of groupies and Schedule VI narcotics, The Weeknd risks coming off as bored as its debauched narrator.

The Year of Magical Drinking strikes me as an album with something interesting to say, a quality only increased by knowing where Flournoy is coming from.

On Sauna, Elverum’s attempts to mimic heavy metal rock ballads, Tim Hecker, and certain so-called “holy” and unholy minimalists alike, feel inconsequential and compositionally uninteresting. That’s not to say that every citation falls flat.

Unfortunately, the bright spots are weighed down by fodder that would fill the troughs of many, but coming from Cohen feel perfunctory at best.

Its purpose is to cement Underworld as elder statesmen of minor-arena-filling, rather than “floor-filling,” amorphously electronic music. It’s not hip, but it’s not square either.

A subdued effort.

Taken within the context of !!!’s (and, by default, OUT HUD’s) legacy, it doesn’t feel like a step in any particular direction so much as a million ideas left to duke it out.

The album’s pervasive sameness hinders sustained interest.

You Can Have What You Want is an insular recording, but it invites us even as it turns a shoulder toward us. And that insecurity is what makes it compelling.

The combination of this 'throwback to '96' sound with confident restraint, and that Quasi have already proven themselves to the die-hards, I'm going to call this timeless underdoggery.

Painting With lacks the consistency to be that work, but its moments of glory provide a welcome return to the melodic mastery of golden ages past.

The very thing that animates the structure begins to ferociously explore, digging beneath its creations in order to observe itself. It is unclear whether the exploration of the structure’s depths is motivated by curiosity or by a need to undermine itself and to challenge its own creation.

The thrill of Flux Outside is that, if it had its way, it wouldn't stick around either.

Equivalents is similar to a lot of the post-Coast/Range/Arc material, but decidedly reduced. The faint stuttering high organ sounds that pepper the opener feel curiously threadbare, with none of that contented percussive effervescence swimming up to give it any harmonic sweep.

R.E.M. do sound like a band again, but they don’t sound like a band very much apart from their peers.

The results of this experiment are not blasphemous by any means, but they have clearly lifted their collective leg to the fire hydrant of their former selves, in favor of cleaner and hipper pop.

It sheds their debut’s pastoral psych for a spacey romanticism, and in the process, its airy synthesizers and reverb’d guitars evoke a yearning that’s too vague and indeterminate to be a yearning for anything in particular.