The songs rarely cohere into anything greater than the sum of their individual parts.
Is it just me or is Hamilton Leithauser beginning to sound like Chris Martin?
Stuart has been playing this same hand since 1999’s The Pilgrim.
There’s very little power behind the power-pop here.
Only occasionally does Sene’s earnestness come across as naïveté.
Jack White embarks on tangential excursions that have familiar roots but end up in unexpected places.
Candy Salad lives and dies on Suckers’s ability to deliver the quintessential payoff: a high-energy, riff-laden chorus.
Elliott Yamin moves in a much more natural sounding, vintage soul-inspired direction on Let’s Get to What’s Real.
Beware and Be Grateful is music that resists easy classification.
In the Time of Gods’s backstory is ultimately incidental to what works and what doesn’t about the album.
Dross Glop is scattershot, meandering, awkward, and often boring.
Liars’s “No. 1 Against the Rush” is a tight arrangement of gloomy dance music.
Unlike in the past, when Jason Pierce stirred the pot and made something new, it doesn’t cohere in the way the best Spiritualized albums have.
Monica’s on-point vocal turns are squandered on some cliché-addled songs and embarrassingly cheap-sounding production.
Boys & Girls is curiously and deliberately subdued.
I Love You, It’s Cool fails to deliver on the promise of Beast Rest Forth Mouth.
“Kill for Love” is, on the surface, enraptured, but more than just a little creepy.
Folila speaks both to the increasing currency of African pop and the shrinking size of the world.
Though you could call Roman Reloaded schizophrenic, the better word would be noncommittal.
Beneath all the shattering percussion, well-timed sound crashes, and plethora of borrowed ideas, the album is rather skeletal.
There’s a reason the comments section of Howse’s “VBS” is littered with words like “boner” and “orgasm.”