Desire, is a mess: intriguing, puzzling, intriguing and ultimately frustrating as all hell.

A totally hit and miss affair, with only two of the five songs clicking.

The album is also horribly sequenced, pushing its best tracks down after a morass of prettier, more insipid melodies had fluffed you.

Thom Yorke used to make better music than the nine anemic Atoms for Peace cuts here.

There is literally nothing on Gauntlet Hair that hasn't been done better by more respectable second-order bands like Tonstartssbandht or Ganglians.

Now, we’re certainly all pro-happiness and exuberance, but the same doggedly optimistic message reiterated during several songs begins to sound more than a little shallow, even if such statements have a way of lending themselves more grandeur than they deserve.

It's as if More and Black set out to purposely compose a more "mature" album. By slowing things down they're able to accommodate R&B outings, spoken word stories and artsy offerings, but to be honest, it's not all that much fun.

Together, and backed by the rhythm section of Cornelius' band, one would hope for left-field pop fireworks, but their debut album Salt on Sea Glass is more of a mediocre light show.

Gesturing, though, is just about all it does.

His voice is a delightful constant through good writing and bad. The propeller-arms guitar rock supplied by Pollard's various flesh-and-blood bandmates tend to provide just-off-enough accompaniment, but Tobias mucks it all up.

Vocalist Ryan McPhun deftly walks the line between embarassing naivete and calculation.

While a well-concocted snotty attitude may be a decisive factor in any number of great rock albums, Born Again in the USA feels lazy without any particular agenda. It’s good for a laugh and a couple of listens, but ultimately does not resonate.

When guests appear on a few songs (Maxo Cream and Ohgeesy among the standouts) it appears that Greedo is actually not bad, but only on hooks. His hooks are catchy, melodic and even smart in a dumb way. Most songs are just that, hooks stretched for two minutes. If verses and hooks stand for meat and bones, Netflix and Deal is bones only. Thanks but no thanks.

The problem is the lack of hooks, atmospherics and soul.

Picture is an album’s worth of universal feelings spoiled by his compulsion to present them as sordid or literary, to make them clever or allusive or needlessly alliterative

Particularly in the lugubrious opening half of the disc, Clogs tends to repeat things simply for the sake of repeating them without really building towards anything.

The Ark Work is certainly not black metal. The problem is that it’s really not much else, either. Indeed, even after repeated listens, it comes across not so much as an album but as a sort of formless mass, which could be a good thing, in the right hands, but here does little more than baffle and exasperate.

If another band were to serve up the fiddling strings and lollygagging vocal harmonies of “Animal Shapes,” the wanky guitar breakdowns of “The Poor, The Fair, and the Good,” perhaps Tanglewood Numbers wouldn’t feel like such a disappointment. But Berman’s a brilliant lyricist with 30 or 40 minutes to spare every couple of years, and his voice seems oddly absent from this record.

One major problem is the Lone Pigeon’s tone of voice: earnest, slightly keening, with no core or crag, no edge or clamor. Combined with melodic and lyrical art that often borders on the perfunctory, Anderson is left flailing.

The record never hits a stride that allows it to pull together as a cohesive album, save its fantastical, paper-thin theme.

Granted, Buzzcocks sounds very '77/'78, albeit with better production, but it's largely devoid of the hooks, the melodies, and the anxious, deconstructed bubblegum pop feel that made the band's early material so memorable.

The most interesting tracks on this album sound like music for the great Pier 1 Imports in the sky, suggesting an infinity of pure, terrifying stasis.

The songs here are mostly ponderous, nine-minute long epics with very little in the way of song form, melody, or musical interest.

Pretty Ugly is neither very pretty nor particularly ugly, rather a lumpen, unengaging mess.

It is unremarkable to the point of being enraging.

Uncanney Valley looks like a Dismemberment Plan record and largely sounds like a Dismemberment Plan record. But yet, it’s not a Dismemberment Plan record. Not a very good one, anyway.

Pop chanteuse lets the sunshine back in.

It's unlikely that you'll want to hear any of these remixes, even the better ones, more than once or twice.