Despite the occasional flashes of brilliance, Codes and Keys often feels like a half assed attempt at innovation.

Cottrill's clear songwriting focus gets bogged down with mellow, listless ballads that sound pleasant—and not much else.

Despite the album's likable, glistening production, though, the duo mostly chooses to dismiss the darkness rather than embrace it—emphasizing a pop veneer that is bold, bright, and, well, a little bit boring.

[The album] is disappointing, but not because it's unmusical or masturbatory or boring, although it is sure to be dismissed as all these things. On paper I love the idea of the musical direction of the record – there are just some insurmountable problems with the execution of it.

It’s difficult to qualify Somewhere Else as middling because it proposes a whole new set of exciting challenges for Shapiro, but it also brings about a befuddling, poorly sequenced effort that crosses out songwriting ingenuity with across-the-board dancehall padding.

The Menzingers established themselves as a group interested in moving forward—even if they wrote about those high school days. Hello Exile fails to follow through on that promise.

While Perry finds the occasional moment of quality here (Smile and Tucked both feel like the best possible music we could get from Katy Perry in 2020), Smile is an album searching for an identity—and when it fails, it falls back on lazy writing.

Backed up by masters of electronica David Guetta, Diplo and Swedish House Mafia’s Sebastian Ingrosso, they all make sure to drop a storm of ugly, trite and utterly soulless EDM breakdowns and dubstep drops whenever they can.

They are only a few steps away from making a truly great record, because they certainly aren't lacking in talent, they just need an identity to give it a purpose.

jj no 3, in essence, fails to carry the same number of dimensions and, unfortunately, and perhaps unfairly, reduces jj to a hype machine.

It’s an album focused on a very limited range of moods, and inhabits that tone very well, but ultimately does little to justify sticking around.

It may be a bit dull and overlong (a three to five song EP of this would have sufficed), but he doesn’t care. It’s his music and he’ll do what he damn well pleases with it.

Too much of Weathervanes is unnecessary fluff. Of the album's 13 tracks, three are wordless moments of focus-less, meaningless noise and at least three other songs could have been trimmed down by a few minutes.

Different Gear, Still Speeding could be a good album if they just scaled things down a bit.

The good news, at least, is that Phantogram have made a solid album. The bad news is that it spans across their two LPs with plenty of forgettable filler in between.

The anthemic choruses largely remain but are endlessly unsatisfying and constrained. Given the unmistakeably grittier and less atmospheric qualities of this album it was the right to attempt to temper them; I'm just not so sure they pulled it off.

Largely, the band’s turn from paradoxically sweet Goth-pop to the more treaded territory jangle-pop works against them.

Not only does the music feel like filler and lacking in substance but the album itself feels like it’s only purpose is to merely keep music ticking over until something worthwhile comes along.

There’s a whole lot of beauty in As Seen Through Windows, but it isn’t attainable beauty. When the music stops, so does it disappear, leaving you feeling as though you’ve lost something in the process.

The first two tracks (two of the three singles from the album) are irritatingly underwhelming, and only Carrion (the third of the aforementioned singles) conveys any of the urgency and compactness required to really grab a listeners' attention.

They rekindle some of that fiery passion with The Doomed, a stunning example of grand, orchestral rock with some majestic touches. But for every explosive, curtain-closing exit there's the lifeless anthem.

The only saving grace, pun possibly intended, is God Is, where West's voice genuinely cracks as he calls the Lord over a soulful sample. As you might imagine, the production overall is expectedly top-notch. But that's the slight upside to an otherwise tepid attempt at finding commonality with his devout followers—except that we never wanted West to come across as ordinary as the rest of us.

FRIGS half-convincingly communicate their agitation over piercing shards of noise. The band are at their best when the rhythm section takes charge.

It needs a more tangible emotional charge. What it most sorely lacks is spontaneity.

Kehlani replaces any hint of controlled pop presence with a lowkey, gloomy vibe that doesn’t suit her strengths at all. Her raspy voice is now placed upon liquid synth bass and irritating trap production, leaving her songwriting to be the record’s only strength.

Taken as a whole, The Soft Pack isn’t exceptionally challenging or memorable, though it does leave space to appreciate a few of its singles.

Sure there's some nice stuff here and no one ever said Stevens lacked ideas. But I'm telling you that despite this, The Age of Adz is a major misfire from an artist of uncommon depth and talent.

Almost without exception it seems this album delivers good but never great: and, when you put it like that, its clear that good is not good enough.