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.