What's frustrating is that beneath the surface of LP4 there appears to be the basis for a great record. But its execution is too rote, too much the result of being so entrenched in the band's Ratatat-ness that the material is suffocated.

Parish is good at what he does, but I suspect he'll have a hard time finding an audience with patience to watch him do it.

After several spins, it appears that 'edginess' is precisely what's missing here; in fact, the listener is left pining for it, as almost every track floats along at its own pleasant, blissful pace--easy to swallow but difficult to digest.

If Snares is complexity incarnate, Lanois is distilled modesty. These are strengths that are realized individually but create discord in tandem. Their pairing is like eating apple pie topped with cheddar cheese: some are sure to find enjoyment in the combination, but for the rest of us, these pairings are best avoided.

Kweli still has an ear for beats, and despite some particular low points here, his lyrics were always overshadowed by his flow, which is as sharp as ever.

Lackluster sound quality, predictable track construction, and the utter absence of emotional push and/or pull yield a record that comes off more like a product placement than a work of art.

They are pros, the best at what they do, but this is running on empty.

Linkin Park’s The Hunting Party is a difficult, painful, rarely rewarding album.

Sleep Forever, if anything, is an assurance of their staying power; they could probably get away with releasing this same record throughout the remainder of their career.

For all of their wonderful contributions to modern pop music, McCulloch and Sergeant aspired for too much this time around.

For the most part, there is little here to take offense to.

Underneath Lil Xan’s disengaged delivery, TOTAL XANARCHY ends up slogging through his sketches of abandonment, addiction, and, conversely, fame and success, with total listlessness.

On the whole, these tracks feel partially-realized, like demos that didn’t get wholly fleshed out.

This album has been done before and lacks the originality or quality of songwriting to merit repeated listens or set it apart from the scores of others playing this type of music.

This is the sound of a thin stench of burning bone coming from a kebab shop’s dumpster.

Is the Is Are, like its title, conjures up a nothingness that is suffocating, especially coupled with the way that the band sells this music as if it were some kind of spiritual exercise.

There's a professional, assured feeling [to] it, but its nagging lack of innovation or [a] truly memorable melody leaves me a little cold.

Not great, a few catchy moments, certainly not god-awful, but just bland enough that after three listens, all life is drained from it.

It's rare when rock of this ilk misses the mark, but somehow Pearls and Brass have accomplished just that with ease.

But as difficult as it may be to overlook the flaws on this record, May somewhat redeems himself with, heaven forbid, mere quaintness.

T.I. vs T.I.P. is mercifully light on the requisite skits illustrating its dichotomy, but you almost wish there were more of them to explain the album’s weird alchemy of simultaneously overwrought and undercooked production and flaccid, self-absorbed lyricism.

100 Lovers baffles with the breadth of its misfires; from sequencing to packaging design to instrumentation, this is a band taking bold steps in the wrong direction.

Essentially, the band only seems to have bit off a little more than could be chewed, and Outside Love feels like a slight misstep.

Repo runs out of ideas so quickly it starts to appropriate its own ideas.

While definitely not an ideological Plan 9 soundtrack, it’s not an unearthly eyeful either.

I would stress that this conglomerate of half-baked songs should in no way reflect on the rest of Cursive's canon -- there is a reason most of these songs have gone largely unnoticed and unappreciated.

A flimsy and disposable album.

Flumina does exactly what it's meant to. Which is not very much.