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.

This is the sound of a band in transition.

They've got all the right footnotes and they know their way around a hook, but A Thousand Heys doesn't carve out a distinctive enough place for itself amid this year's crop of guitar-wielding miscreants.

It's just a little sad to hear Mike giving in to conventionality, even if he does do it better than most.

Replacing the kitschy DIY aesthetic with intentional roughness and bloating each nook and cranny with some sort of sound, what’s emphasized is its production, not its songwriting.... At the same time, however, it’s the production that makes the album somewhat interesting.

When the boys aren’t treading water, they’re still treading a fine line between memorable and anonymous.

His style, somewhere between Leonard Cohen and The Velvet Underground, offers little in terms of originality, and often the sappy and stoically emotional quality of the lyrics comes off as snarky.

Although I quite like some of the tracks here, overall there just isn't enough here to keep me interested. [combined review of both discs]

You can’t hear The Feeling in his voice, which is still one of the most infectiously beautiful in the industry, because as his faith has saved him from his pain, his production team has saved his voice from Justin. It makes for a series of unbeatable mainstream and crossover singles, and a desensitized, unnerving album.

While Mars Volta distinguished its high-volume concept and freak-out-the-neighbors formula with its apocalyptic wails and catastrophic soundscapes, Sparta has developed a middle-of-the-road rock entity, seldom swaying away from its new and unimproved sound structure.

MAYA's many false starts and dead ends also place M.I.A. on shaky ground aesthetically, and with no coherent message to fall back on, the album feels alienated and disconnected, perhaps ironic for an album attempting to evoke the hyper-connectedness and sensory overload of culture in the wake of iPhone and Google.

NewVillager have the potential to expertly toe the line between unkempt ambition and childlike fascination, and bridge this unfortunately large gap between big ideas and big audiences in the process. They just aren't quite there yet.

It may be more accomplished and accessible than its forebear, yet it mostly comes across as a tad inconsequential, running through one nice song to the next without ever really being anything more than “nice.”

Perhaps what is most obvious is that Untogether may have benefited from Blue Hawaii turning it up just a notch or two.

This new album is relentlessly dark, disjointed, and disturbing. While there exist elements of his pop past -- gorgeous string sections, delicate guitars, bombastic drums -- there's nothing like a song here.

Unfortunately, not all of the experimentation works.

The album's distinctly lacking in structure or direction.

I find myself disappointed with Plague Park despite its elusive initial luster. The good news is it’s an easy fix: Hire a band.

Harbors feels mannered, genteel even; the aesthetic is humanness within mechanical complexity, as the jet wings, lungs, and eye on the album art suggest.

To be sure, The BQE score isn’t an utter failure on its own, but it’s clearly missing the dramatic effect found in the rest of Stevens’ eclectic seven-album catalogue.

Riceboy Sleeps is an elegiac set of powerfully evocative songs, functioning at its best as lovely background music while flipping through the pages of the art book it's bundled with. Listened to unaccompanied and in its entirety, the experience is frustrating and unpleasant, and its bloated feel renders a lot of it impotent.

The execution may be on point, but the personality is absent, the ideas are fewer, and the experience is all-up flat, no matter how raw and flashy the playing.

It all seems a bit too canned and contrived.

Amputechture, though not near as spam-handed as Frances, is a bumpy ride, registering somewhere between the latter and debut full-length De-Loused in the Comatorium.

Despite Shame’s lyrical foibles, they evince a prodigious adeptness for musicianship, and though Songs of Praise isn’t the most arresting debut by a garage band, there are far worse places to start.

This album will please a lot of people looking for a more “punk” twist on past minimalism, but while that’s great, my ears are on a search for something fresher.

Yet, for each of these highlights, there’s a much weaker counterpart.

I listened to this CD quite a bit, and it took some work for it to grow on me. I’ll admit that it finally did, but I’d say Knapp and Koster’s experiment was more failure than success.