Portastatic is exactly as advertised: catchy, sometimes dumb, occasionally rockin', but always at least competent pop.

Ekstasis is a lovely record. Bedroom pop that floats and swoons, it has a lightness to it at the same time as a real sense of seriousness and ambition.

Harmonicraft is a short, sweet collection of pop-metal confectionery, irresistible if not unforgettable.

In the end, it’s the vague, shapeless, and undefined nature of the fancies her protagonists chase that partly undermines the album’s substance, since without any clear delimitation of their supposedly particular aspirations it’s a little hard to sympathize with her characters and see in them anything more than cowardly, flighty children who ought to grow up.

Until the Quiet Comes isn't bad, exactly. It's just definitely not good either.

Here, Cloud Nothings move past the slacker touches that marked their first releases, their gestures getting bigger and broader as they make attempts at emotional universality.

Poetry aside, none of these 14 songs are highlights of any of the three artists’ vast catalogs. The stories and the production alike are pure sunshine, which often passes into the saccharine.

Listening to Faking the Books makes you feel utterly alone; and maybe that's the whole point.

The Walkmen are that rare band that can stretch into all manner of different shapes and retain their oneness with the rock gods, and they've held onto the zeal that made them stand out like a diamond among the other jeweled NYC bands with impeccable resumes in the early aughts.

Rival Dealer might be an intrepid leap for Burial, but the music is ultimately obscured by his intention to share a positive message through the most glaring of means.

This is not going to appeal to a wide swath of people, but DJs who take advantage of the late hours of a petering-out dance party to play dubstep and spacey ambient techno will surely appreciate the vibe here.

Arrowhead is unfortunately not among the stronger things he’s released.

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.

Because the album can’t be one complete thing, Age Of is its own archenemy; its own princess stranded in a high castle; its own climb up the Holy Mountain. A radical incompleteness haunts it.

So when the repetitive rhythms of 23 don’t bowl you over like the first synth lines of Melody, allow yourself the opportunity to sit through its entirety. What you’ll find is an album that reveals its true personality slowly, surely, and yes, lovingly.

Of course, songs like the playful “Lost My Head There” and the searching “Dust Bunnies” could just as easily be about the consequences of excessive drug consumption or no-less excessive levels of modern stress, yet the persistence of the self-alienation motif amid slanted nods to his career in music end up strongly insinuating that his growing status as a rock icon is weakening the already weak hold he has over himself.

This is the new big British band? This is barely inspired enough to make it off campus.

While Eden’s Eastern flavor is certainly enjoyable, it walks a thin line between cultural exploration and exploitation.

As it stands, the album sounds like Panda Bear at the height of his unchecked, uncompromised (and, therefore, at times uninventive) powers.

A Vintage Burden is well-executed, spare, and in the simplest terms, makes wonderful Sunday morning background music.

Half a good album, half disastrously wrong.

While I am not one to fault Kilgour for slowing things down a little, an impatient listener might argue that Frozen Orange shows Kilgour's age in the same ways Yo La Tengo's Summer Sun belied theirs.

Elverum is reveling in his honest moment of awe. In doing so, he has sloshed away the Norwegian frost with a mittened hand, a frost that kept these songs so chilling.

Compton itself is a part of this little something too, because even though it fails to make a clear artistic statement, it houses some of the finest hip-hop production Dre has turned in for years, and proves that the city has much more going for it than just a bad reputation.

Although you'd be hard pressed, but very pleased, to find a shindig entirely amenable to FlyLo's relentlessly eccentric experiments, Pattern+Grid World is certainly more pillow fight than lounge party.

With nary an aural step forward from their hitherto records, Painted Ruins ends much in the same way it begins, not with a bang, but with a drone.

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.

Like ghosts that don’t know they’re dead, the songs on Deerhunter’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? wander about in a well-produced limbo almost in mourning for the death they can’t die. But they don’t know it, so--and this is the saddest part about it--they become what they deplore, all loss glossed over.