Much of the album’s electro-lite flavoring does provide some hummable moments, but as the cringingly tricked out Mexican Fender and stomping chants of La Mancha Screwjob suggest, they’re most likely to suffer a slow and gradual death at your local Forever 21.

To her credit, she has absolutely carved out her own unique sound, far from the epic, prog-punk productions of Titus Andronicus. However, in the process she failed to deliver a consistent batch of songs.

Something to Tell You doesn’t attempt anything new and keeps it safe, though, and when your best track is yet another sanitized extract of Tango in the Night, well, that’s not saying much.

It’s a loud, raucous affair for sure, but as much power and aggression Pop. 1280 can inject into each and every track they create, it can’t distract from the fact that Imps of Perversion is a muddled, frustrating affair, and it’s clear that Pop. 1280 still have ways to go when it comes to developing their sound.

For a band where constructing songs into rocket-fueled crescendos is their biggest strength, too often does A Black Mile to the Surface fail to take advantage of any momentum it builds, often taking the wrong fork on an ascent to a splendid finale.

When this EP gets it right, it is a triumphant nod to Dear's versatile ear, but when it settles for being weird for the sake of it, it's simply messy.

Wait For Me hugs the middle of the road with such caution, it’s strenuous to either love or hate.

The potential is there for this to be very good, but the fact that it’s so comprehensively safeguarded limits it hugely.

With ambition and expectation clearly larger than its execution, (K)no(W)here relies too heavily on its “concept” to drive itself, music being its afterthought and, ultimately, its title only communicates its direction.

Ultimate Care II doesn’t inspire one to peer closer into the musicality of everyday life; instead, you’ll constantly look at the time, wishing it’d sped up so you can move on with anything else.

For the most part though, it adds little to a genre that’s already saturated and is disappointing from a band whose past evidence has shown can do better.

Mind Hive is middling. Some tracks are engaging and perk up your ears, while others are flat-out dull and uninspired.

While it is more realized than previous effort The Stand Ins, Okkervil River is showing potential for new direction more than they are showing versatility.

Frankly, Love Kraft sounds like a different band, which would be fine, if it wasn’t so less loveable and not nearly as bizarre.

If ambition of design were to take precedence over tangible results, Laced would be a great album. It is an elaborate attempt at uniting heavy-handed artistic endeavours through exotic instrumentation and experimental sounds, with a lo-fi crass, lifelike production, giving it the feel of a bold art exhibit found lying on the sidewalk of a dirty street infested with lowly people, as opposed to a quaint art gallery.

Candela has some shining moments but, overall, is an album that teases the palette instead of really satisfying.

There is just too little here to distinguish Wild Nothing from the vast sea of mediocre 80s revivalists, all getting a kick on overhyped nostalgia.

The potential Young shows is infectious and encouraging, but her debut was going to be a buzz kill from the start, if only because of the hype.

Victorious is premium Wolfmother in places, and pretty much abominable in others.

Frontman Max Bloom’s voice isn’t even that dissimilar from that of the man he replaced in 2013, but he’s lacking something that Blumberg clearly had in his arsenal to sharpen his band’s sound.

The production is inconsistent and largely a bit too bombastic for Das Racist's usually free-associative, untechnical rapping.

All in all, Curve of the Earth comes across a little on the self-indulgent side, and although most bands evolve and move on from past successes, over-complicating things can lead to that band losing their sense of character and identity.

Sadly, the interesting ideas fall at the place on the spectrum where it jives for just a short time, at least for this particular listener.

There are some nice elements here: the vocals and vocal harmonies are reasonably solid, but they're trapped underneath layers of, well, noise.

Even if the album's sonic template doesn't stray too far from his 2011 breakthrough debut LP Within You Without You, Greene chooses to keep the mood so light that it's practically inert.

Stephan Babcock is a determined performer, and his bandmates are suitable harmonizers, but even at a tight 30-minutes the album’s lack of strong melodic direction quickly turns tiresome with its stilted, colorless sonic onslaught.

Conrad’s strategic intentions get the best of him, swerving between unmemorable mid-tempo cuts and stodgy piano playing with the occasional flashes of unfulfilled brilliance.

He implicitly tells you to “die, die” on the Slightly Stoopid-resembling Zombie Bastards, after all, a joyful retort to the haters who won’t shut up about how Weezer has become a meme in musical form. But Cuomo, ever the mercurial songwriter, later goes off over the pleasures of parasailing on the escapist, Paul McCartney-recalling High as a Kite. And that’s when Weezer (Black Album) peaks.

Pyramid of the Sun certainly isn't an utterly bad album--it's cohesive enough, and it can be really engaging. At the very least, it serves as a heartfelt tribute to the band's late drummer.

At its strongest moments, you can make out its appealing qualities. But at its weakest, you start to understand why they announced the album with a blog post that said: “Wait, they’re still a band?” Aside from the haunting Fallin’ Thru, with its sparse piano notes and whispery vocals, Mercy is a broken-down, mostly acoustic album that only feels empty.

The English Riviera is a perfectly listenable album, and it's one that will, quite rightly, be the soundtrack to the summers of more than a few, but the often indistinct music and insipid lyrical content mean that it's doubtful if its charms will last through to the autumn.

While there are plenty of technical elements to recommend it, The Classic just lacks that indefinable quality that would make you return to it repeatedly.

Hang appears as an album of ambition that outdoes itself so spectacularly that it appears as a jazzed up, Disney-esque caricature of its own end product.

Without him [Machinedrum], it's a well assembled but dull record. With him, it's sublime.

There's not a single stand out track, good or bad; and the likes of this album have been released, oh, a million times over, in the past 8 years--it’s not bad, not good, just a drop in a calm, tepid, flat ocean.

The lone connective thread found in Gardens & Villa is that of its dedication to build a vigorous gamut of synths. As it turns out, once that defining element is out of the mold, you're left with skeletal compositional biases that amount to very little.

An album can't wear the pants of Carpenter, Carlos, and Oldfield, all of whom crafted electronic epics built around unforgettable melodies and precise attention to detail when Stevens and Bram hop from one track to the next before any of their soundscapes journey beyond the front porch.

She's still one to watch, but the hype which preceded the release of Who You Are promised much more than what has been delivered.

It has all their trademarks--simultaneously elaborate and raw, idiosyncratically punk-rock, dedicated to chronicling the unrelenting ugliness of western society--but this time little of it sticks.

Woods should take the cue from Bill Callahan and what he accomplished with Smog: if you are going to delve into the restricting realm of lo-fi, there has to be emotional and appealing substance and quality in the songs themselves. Lowering the production quality does not, as in a double helix, imply that the songwriting quality will improve.

Unfortunately, her constant insistence on being so ham-fistedly quirky and zany soon becomes wearing, and simultaneously rescues and spoils the whole album.

Lyrically Wake Up The Nation is largely inscrutable, while sonically it remains a shambling and ungainly listen.

Considering how the lyrical content and flat as a rug singing in Weekends was written for an elementary school child to understand, they probably should've kept it that way; it occasionally downgrades the songs to a point where they are unable to rise above their cheesiness.

When it comes to developing and honing the craft of songwriting to present a signature sound with a variety of ideas, The Temper Trap fall short.

Weezer disappoints again. The rest of the tracks are, for the most part, more throwaway power-pop in the vein of the "Red Album."

Most bands are simply prolonging the genre’s decline by playing insensibly catchy pop under the sonic crust we’ve come to know it for. Failing either, we’re left with the dull ad nauseums of the musical record. And that, in a sentence, is Born Again Revisited.

There are some nice moments in the mess, and sometimes I'm almost tempted to look past the annoyances before they build up--but sometimes, that's frankly just not possible.

Ultimately, the record just sounds comically one-paced and disappointingly stale. As I said, Thorn’s voice is lovely, some of the little stories are smartly narrated, but it’s just nowhere near enough.

Obsidian is a shallow and unsatisfying exploration of this dark side.

What Midlake has crafted here is monastery music – glorified Gregorian chants that achieve nothing if not snuff out the candle light in your head that represents your slowly melting interest.

While the concept of exploring new horizons seems like a perpetually Megafaun thing to do, it's a case of too much too soon and of a band reaching for places they have no business going toward.

As an album, it's probably the dullest anticipation of the year.

There's a patchwork of pleasantness woven throughout.... By the time the closing tracks roll around, the album has fallen apart entirely. These instrumentals are complete afterthoughts and belong nowhere.

If you want to hear this sort of thing done properly, you'll find happiness in the more sedate moments of the peerless Saint Etienne, but there's little to recommend The Trip. It's not much more than a Christmas bauble: shiny and polished on the surface, but with little of substance on the inside.

The nostalgia lacks anything close to the authenticity that Thunder, Lightning, Strike achieved, and the sound of the 2018 version of The Go! Team struggles to get anywhere far from persistent annoyance.

Up until Lulu, I didn't think it was possible to be both enamored and disgusted at the same time. Mind? Blown.

Just like the band itself, it presents something of an ongoing identity crisis for the band, one that hasn’t figured out how to advance their sound except to put more meat on the bones.

All We Are has potential, but it's squandered on their debut in an attempt to make a spacey, moody soundtrack.

Far beyond simply avant garde, this is one for the abstract devotee.

The band needs to play to its strengths, rather than a production style. This is not a band that sounds good with buried instruments. This is a group that sound best when they are in your face.

It’s largely inoffensive and bland, with a few above average moments, and has a tendency to fade into the background.

There is little in the way of actual technique or subtlety, and as an album, Prism falls short of its predecessors in the innovation and charisma department.

At once droll and melancholic, Cigarettes After Sex struggles to earn the aural beauty it desperately seeks.

Less a jazz album than an eclectic selection, Preliminaires is inconsistent and demonstrates Pop’s reluctance to deviate completely from his safety zone.

Although these compositions show a ton of improvisation, Radian pigeonhole themselves to a one-note range that imprisons Chimeric with a threatening, claustrophobic mood.

Despite the promising influences and the strong pedigree, essentially all that Blanck Mass offers is a distorted, unusual take on new age music, and while interesting in small doses, it makes for a long, repetitive slog over the course of an hour.

Krug is a songwriter whose craft is best when met with the editing of other musicians--left to himself, however, we are left with a very forgettable retreat into his very OMD-obsessed psyche.

The song writing is passable, the sound is passable, but passable is usually as boring as it sounds.

For most of My Bloody Underground, Newcombe vocalizes like a decaffeinated Kevin Shields, barely audible under the weight of reverb that blankets just about every track.

Very rarely, this album finds a moment of excitement. And when they do, you have to savor them, because you aren’t going to get another one for a while.

Pond constantly struggle to find a balance between prog, classic yuppie rock and psychedelia in Hobo Rocket, cramming a cheat sheet of tired rock trappings and psychedelic clichés that were already fatigued even before corporate rock detoxified its very essence.

Celestial Lineage may be well crafted and even (relatively) accessible but by eschewing the ideas that coloured their previous work, Wolves in the Throne Room have ended up creating something that's not really black, but rather quite grey.

There’s a lot of bluster and enthusiasm here but I’m struggling to identify much in the way of true substance.

Somehow, because Uptown Funk is so, so good, Uptown Special is even more disappointing.

In what was already an inane, washed-up concept to begin with, P&A fail to enlighten by opting to deliver trite lyrics and characterless humor for their own amusement. Evidently, consciousness suits them better.

There's a significant lack of depth to Within and Without.

The Hood Internet couldn't decide whether to make a party record or a moody record. They tried to do both and succeeded at neither.

With Arcade Dynamics, a bit of that moral fiber is lost, resulting in a pleasant number of hooks that hone the psychedelic tag a bit too conventionally.

As convincing as she attempts to sound, Bionic does nothing to persuade authenticity.

A recipe for disaster which tries to please everybody and ends up being enjoyed by nobody.

This album displays the band at an absolute low-point in their career.

There's nothing particularly grating about their gentle, country-pop stylings—most of which deal with themes such as nature, gratitude, and fleeting time. And these are all worthy topics to explore—except that every song sounds so gosh darn wholesome that it's as if they discourage against any deeper introspection.

The vocals are obscured, but nothing else really meshes.

On Make-Believe, a sloppy more-of-the-same same approach has crippled what this album could have been, ultimately leaving us with some vaguely interesting notions rather than well-explored concepts.

The album is not an abject failure however, as there are bits, just tiny bits, of it that give off the faintest wisps of something more.

Love Remains has no established coherence, disrespects the meaning of creating a full length from scratch by (reworking?) rehashing material, and frankly, relies too much on Krell's scorching falsettos.

Anyone expecting some sort of lost treasure in this collection will be let down.

While Ainsworth is getting closer to making an impact with her sultry romanticism, she also hasn’t refused to give up that producers’ mentality that stifles her more spontaneous urges.

In the love affair of listeners to this EP, an overly ambitious singer-songwriter who seems to be far more into growing artistically then creating genuine songs will force fans and detractors alike into the arms of another.

One of the most frustrating releases of recent times. Tracks meander insipidly, crushed by the weight of a solipsistic “message” and the real moments of quality only serve as a reminder of what might have been.

There are some appealing songs here that deserves to be on a Spotify playlist or in a chill lounge environment. However, they struggle to stand out next to subpar material over the course of a full-length record. There are lots of alluring instrumental pieces that show potential, but Kllo treats them as decorative rather than core aspects.

Craft is an artist who values songcraft intensely, structuring his stanzas carefully but with an exuberant self-assuredness. The result of his work in the case of Full Circle Nightmare is a precession of songs that wear out their welcome in a brisk fashion.

There may be some great ideas on here amongst the mis-steps, but without any suspense, it is difficult to tell.

This album may have been a growing pain in their attempt to evolve past their initial signature baroque pop, but it sounds like they missed a few steps that needed to be taken.

The album quickly loses itself into a tasteless, gimmicky wormhole of hideous sounds that grate the ears. Superorganism are onto something here, but as it stands, their erratically-paced scheme is a passable novelty.

So much of Iz just blends together into a balmy, gelatinous goop of trap-flavored maquettes that could’ve come from anyone, let alone Big K.R.I.T., someone who I have always looked towards for quality bangers.

It's a mediocre album, and I'm only being hard on you because I sincerely wanted more. Like a pissy parent, I'm not mad at you... I'm disappointed.