Trans-Continental Hustle is an honest effort, but one that pales a little when compared to the Technicolor explosions of Gogol Bordello's back catalog.

Thistled Spring seems a really lovely idea; the lyrics are beautiful, the musical texture is auburn and wood-hued, smooth-sanded and multi-faceted. But there’s nothing that speaks to me.

We know he's capable of better. Whether it ever comes together on a Carter release is anybody's guess, but the prognosis isn't good.

in the end, most of it turns out hypo-real, turns out less enticing and engaging than its eroding object, and this more than anything else is what makes On Oni Pond such a disappointment.

So while Penny Sparkle might constitute yet another step forward on the band's musical journey, it's not one that I feel compelled to follow them on.

The album is not a total loss, however. When Bad Religion turn to more interesting subject matter, the results are more than worthwhile.

While it’s clear that the album harbors a sign of affection, there’s just no room for the audience to revel in the appreciation that makes it so.

I admire the boldness of the album's sequencing more than I admire any of its individual tracks.

While stripping back the instrumentation, so went some of the ambitious structures and much of the angularity that draws the ear into their gorgeous textures.

Between the overlong, overstuffed songs and arrangements, ridiculous album concept and lyrical conceit, there's no room left for the vicious, hurtling energy that first impressed me on Hidden World's best songs.

Seabed is drained of an expressive self.

After a great start, Faded Seaside Glamour loses its way and ultimately fails to inspire.

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.

It simply lacks even the remotest kind of emotional weight, favoring that emo-lite, predictable kind of melodic progressions that make you swoon the same way a hot muffin on a cold day might.

Overall: Fair.

I’m deflated again, as all Gonzalez does with this blank canvas for electronic experimentation is cycle two chords over and over with a little synth sprinkled on top.

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.

I sense a more natural sense of songcraft here. Banks is still trying too hard, seemingly attempting to write songs he thinks people will like rather than songs that, whether simple or arpeggio-filled, he and his mates like.

Kozelek spends a lot of time on Common as Light giving us his broadly “common sense” liberal pluralist live-and-let-live shtick, punctuated by grumpy bashings of “hipster” culture and its parades of regenerated tenement buildings and juice bars, music journalists, and Father John Misty, but it’s only on 10-minute opener and standout track “God Bless Ohio” that he really bares his soul.

The Next Logical Progression, is evidence of a serious identity crisis.

An album that, despite its hallucinogenic tendencies, is painfully boring.

Sadly, there aren't many moments on An Argument With Myself that register strongly.

Hymns, unfortunately, does not mark the logical next step for the band, nor does it exactly tread new ground. Rather, it denotes a descent into self-indulgence that’s paradoxically reckless and complacent.

Where the dog-eared, snapshot ambient wooze of Twoism and Geogaddi once harbored a feverish throb, Tomorrow’s Harvest now prickles with hollow spaces: a fragmentary, pixelated symbolism has been lost in the construction of an outline of a broader system.

Chalk this one up as a failed experiment, albeit one that ups enthusiasm for explorations to come.

With 13 songs to sit through, it all sounds like the same riffs, verses, choruses, and rhythms in slightly different contexts. It also sounds like a big disappointment from a band that roared out of the gate with several nice 7-inch cuts and a strong debut album.

I'm all about brevity when it's effective, but S-M 2's patchiness makes its 38-minute length feel much longer. The record isn't unlistenable or even awful, but it's filled with lackluster songwriting, ripe with pastiche, and drenched in a wall of effects that do nothing to mask these flaws.

Pink is muddy as a bowl of bad split pea soup, and twice as hammy.