Kairos is not an album completely devoid of charm. The R&B influence gives the songs a weight they might otherwise lack.

Bird’s simultaneous engagement with the words and distance from the material free his delivery to keep the album feeling lighter than I’ve implied.

The songs on Begone do not unfurl, nor do they climax.

On an album that quite simply comes up lacking in spots, they provide a healthy dose of the same brilliant elegance found on "Furr."

Although it does falter at times with a seeming complacency ("Meridian," "Colony"), it is mostly characterized by a quiet ambition. It’s gutsy and its gutsiness pays off.

The joy of "Fur and Gold" has vanished and taken some of Khan’s potential with it. This is request for their safe return, no questions asked.

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 Dropouts tend to the same dynamics and tones, and even at 30 minutes, it gets a bit tedious.

His music’s dynamic, but his voice lacks range and variety. Krug sings emotionally, but not responsively.

Kensington Heights matches up each spectacular moment with an equally mundane one.

No Más has three-fifths as many tracks in the same amount of time [as Jamz n Jemz], and for the most part, each track outstays its welcome.

Aside from these conceptual assertions that it evokes, Feed the Animals is a good record. Though it’s broken up into 14 tracks, it functions best (and as Girl Talk intends) as a single 53-minute mash-up.

It’s a clarification--leveraging an assemblage of evocation, of presentation, perhaps of curation, but one that’s built from the fragments of the most beautifully uninteresting bits of what’s contemporary.

The flesh on the 11 ghosts of Strangers is heavier than on lots of Nadler’s past work. And the sonic space mirrors the lyric meat; this is corporal, forward locomotion.

Using a combination of brilliant textures and powerful, atypical chord progressions, Mogwai paint a picture equivalent to an auto-stereogram, popularized in those Magic Eye books 15 years ago. You almost need to loose your focus to let the music really sink in.

As the album unfolds, there is a genericness of atmosphere that, while not unpleasant, fails to blossom into anything more

On the whole, Manners mostly evens out into a consistently listenable experience, the joy of one absurdly successful track spread out in variations and reformulations across the entirety of an album with inevitable dilution in the process.

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

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have retained most of what we loved about them while also finding new ways to dazzle us, to make us swoon.

Religious Knives’ latest recording doesn’t implore repeat listens the way "Resin" did and still does.

Wilco (The Album) isn’t a failure--not by any means--but when a band has become so attached to the notion of change and then stagnates, it casts a heavy shadow that’s hard to escape.

Unfortunately, Let Us Never Speak Of It Again barely registers any of the emotion or punch of the debut and, worst of all, goes ahead and adds positively dreadful lyrics to nearly all the songs.

The concept understood, no longer intriguing, no longer as unique as it's presented, runs out of interpretations on the final induction of every theory and concept highlighted.

As progressive and interesting as Wilderness the band is, Vessel States is not a great leap forward for them, and those who appreciated [their debut] will probably be underwhelmed with the band's latest offering.

Whereas The Fiery Furnaces used to suffer from a lack of restraint, they suffer here from having too much.

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

It sounds dismissive to say that Farm is, undeniably, nothing more than another Dinosaur Jr. record. Yet it is, and if that assertion carries with any ideas of complacency or stock “rock action,” it should also denote the superb craftsmenship inherent in Mascis, Barlow, and Murph’s work.

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.