For a record titled Action Adventure, it’s surprisingly short on excitement.

The results are compelling, though a few cuts are more sound collage than song.

The bulk of The Great Escape is polite and pleasant, but lacks something indefinable. It would be foolish to expect Stamey to come on like a snarling punk-rock dervish, but this record, while having a certain charm, doesn’t really linger long in the memory.

What the record-buying public arguably doesn’t need is an EP that sounds a little rough around the edges, lasts for precisely 12 minutes, 4 seconds. ... But wait, there are moments of brilliance on the rest.

It’s clear that the group attempted making an album that was ostensibly un-Django Django, but the result is sometimes a tedious slog, much like a journey to a far-off planet.

There are likeable moments. ... But even for the most effective songs, the impact is largely due to familiarity. [Apr - Jul 2023, p.82]

Although the band cites Gentle Giant, Focus, and early King Crimson as influences, True Entertainment sounds a lot like Feargal Sharkey of The Undertones fronting Men Without Hats. An interesting combination, I’m sure you’ll agree. Occasionally, it works.

Maybe How to Replace It is a tentative return to recording and the baby steps will be replaced by giant strides.

Gorillaz was once a creative outlet that allowed Albarn to explore new territories. But Cracker Island suggests that the concept has grown stale. Those lovable animated creatures feel like they’re on an island of their own, isolated and untethered to what’s actually been churning the project forward all along.

One gets the vaguest sense that Shook is meant to inspire hope in the face of despair. Unfortunately, that hope is intangible for the majority of the album’s runtime.

Kudos for trying to expand a tried and tested formula, but a lot of La La Land sounds like dozens of fragments of tunes crazy glued together in a hurry.

Hakim has a knack for crafting songs that burn slowly and steadily, and while they lack the depth and development needed to reach a full fire on COMETA, fans of Hakim’s previous work may still find the gentle glow of his latest effort enjoyable.

Inessential but pretty darned good. [Oct - Dec 2022, p.86]

While FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE sounds more like spa music, which, after three or four tracks, makes the listener want to get horizontal, it is a welcome break from the structure and form of contemporary music. Eno is attempting to make you pause, and think, and feel.

Hold On Baby certainly has its hits, and Straus’ star power is no less evident even when the music doesn’t measure up. While her sophomore record is somewhat of a slump, King Princess’ talent still reigns.

It’s as if all of these songs are the equivalent of a nutty tossed-off filler track that might close side one of an album as a joke. None of the songs are developed beyond the point of cartoonish posturing and none have much to recommend them musically.

There is always an intimacy and an emotional immediacy to what they do as a band, but more often than not it stays too much in that one place, their comfort zone. It causes an album like this to come across like a collection of demo tracks by a very accomplished band that lays out their aural plan, but doesn’t ever fully color in all of the spaces available to them. It doesn’t evolve into what it could be.

The collective boasts no shortage of remarkable musical talent and vision, and one longs to love the album based on this alone, but Peacock Pools is simply too middling to merit such passion.

You can do a whole lot worse than Unlimited Love, its main sin homogeneity rather than insufferableness.

Whether or not you can stomach this will depend on your schmaltz tolerance. In truth, the sum total of these seven songs is insubstantial. They sound like spring only superficially, the Vivaldi connection isn’t carried past the first song, and Cuomo’s lyrics rarely ascend above cliché.

With such important and epic thematic material, the band’s historically climactic builds and stream-of-conscious writing are sorely missed. But the record succeeds when it gets gritty and passionate.

The album starts off gamely enough towards the same agenda [as 2018's Endless Scroll]. ... Sadly, though, much of the album is given over to high school level observations. [Dec 2021 - Feb 2021, p.151]

In their effort to defy categorization by creating sonic pastiches from fragments of widely varying genres, along with their aversion to capitalization, they too often stray from creating compelling processed sound portraits such as “Dark blue” and instead end up with bristly and frazzled sketches, rendering the album as an auditory adventure will neither wow the listener nor will it disappoint.

Where Forever was inspired by the excesses of Drake et al, wherein an album is more a morass of disconnected ideas, the suitably titled Small World narrows Mount’s vision. But without the creative divergences of its predecessor, you’re left with a fairly forgettable mush, saved only by its brevity.

For those that grew to love EELS from their early beginnings in the late ’90s through the early 2000s, you’ll understand the shortcomings here. Fortunately, a sub-par EELS is still better than most but even a couple of the better tunes on Extreme Witchcraft such as “Good Night On Earth” and “Stumbling Bee” sound like re-hashed songs from a previous EELS record.

This group recording in-person—a first for Gahan & Soulsavers, who recorded their two previous albums remotely—has brought out an even more intimate feel to songs that feel almost excruciatingly intense already.

In Virus Times isn’t going to be anyone’s release of the year, but it’s unfair to judge it by that criterion. The recording is a time capsule, cathartic for its creator and a candid audio tour through the living room of one of alternative music’s best ever guitarists. He just doesn’t sound like it here.

All in all, I’ll Be Your Mirror can be skipped by even the most devoted fans. It may be worth returning to The Velvet Underground’s legendary discography instead, especially for uninitiated listeners.