These are just the outcast songs with edges too elusive to polish. And while you're unlikely to fall completely in love with them, it's comforting to know that Lekman felt similarly.

There are great pop songs on Tape Club, and it does remind us there is life after the hype-dam bursts, but most of us are better off picking up Let It Sway to see what Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin are all about.

After nearly seven years, to churn out an album with three highlights and eight overblown odes (among them, 'Here It Goes,' 'Carry You,' and the forced empowerment of the title track) is disappointing.

The ambition to put out a decent club album is a laudable effort, but Thunderheist falls into many of the same pitfalls that a lot of the genre's output does.

Johansson simply lacks the intensity to stay afloat in Waits's whirlpools of ear-drummed madness.

The album's second half is still woefully lacking, one big mess of boredom and monotony.

Foxx shows some real talent on this album, and he doesn't embarrass himself - except for when he embarrasses himself.

The Rapture has made a safe record.

Dressy Bessy is a one-trick pony, and twelve songs of the same fuzzed-out retro-rock riffs are too much for one person to take at once.

Shows off the group’s ability to transform into a neo-classic Brit-pop band, lush layers and dark undertones intact.

Unfortunately with No Witch, there just isn't enough excitement to hold the listener's attention for long. And while the group is to be commended for their artistic efforts, it could benefit from a more aggressive fusion of sounds on its next album.

She seems to be lost among her new surroundings, pulling in old styles and dated arrangements to seemingly express her dissatisfaction and confusion with where music is going.

As a stand-alone collection though, it's vexingly stunted, and padded out with a few unnecessary additions to fill out its barely 30-minute run time.

As a document to a breakup, it's all a bit middling and lifeless. Sadness is one thing, but it's spring for Noah and the Whale. Where's the color?

Adventures in Your Own Backyard is about as confirmatory of an artist's status quo as an album can be; it takes Watson's style in no new directions, preferring instead to bask in its own childlike exuberance and to demonstrate all the trappings of ambition but little in the way of earning it.

A Hundred Miles Off needs a single or a hook to balance its trebly extremes, and Leithauser's good-ol'-boy tenor has lost some of its edge, tripping too easily into the whiny nether regions.

Everything finally does come to a rewarding payoff with the ringing lone guitar work at the end of "Triangular Pyramid," but the long drive to get there is rather boring.

The choice tracks, the tracks that redeem an otherwise eternally frustrating album are 'Cannibals' and 'Modern Dislocation.'

This album is so ripe with hubristic self regard and musical monotony that most of its worth gets crossed out.

Somebody’s Miracle is a collection of pleasantly catchy, if unremarkable, pop songs.

Unfortunately, Richards doesn't play to her strengths often enough. Too much of Light of X slips out of straightforward and into simple.

It's unfair to saddle Dead Confederate with the burden of the entire Athens tradition, or look for it to be anything other than a band making a record. But Sugar would have been much more interesting if these guys had focused on that instead of trying to be five or six bands at once.

While the definable hooks are definitely more present than on most metal records, that doesn't necessarily make a better, or even more accessible album.

When the members of Mastodon decided to make an audiophile's wet dream of a metal album, they abandoned the vein-bulging spontaneity of their former selves.

So while it sounds pleasant throughout, and sometimes awfully beautiful, it won't stick with you as long as it could after the album's final notes fade.

[The songs] demand reconstruction that can only come from multiple listens. Unfortunately, the initial impact of the record is so muted that only an artist as challenging and road-tested as Beck warrants such effort.

Sia's voice can be affected, and when the songwriting sags and the production becomes more generic toward the middle of the album, she struggles to keep the listener's attention.

There isn't a bad song on the record, but neither is there a particularly good one.