After a supreme early demonstration of pastiche, Alive As You Are's back half reveals a capable pop band writing capable pop songs.

You suspect The Painter may ultimately have been more rewarding to create than it is to listen to. It comes off as a therapeutic act from an artist who, assuming he’s managed his royalties, never really needs to work again, rather than an album that simply had to be made.

Breakbeats have become fashionable again, so a dusted-off track like “Undone” doesn’t sound quite as dated, with Paradinas playfully bouncing between tympani boom, percolator bip, and dramatic background strings. ... But “Bassbins” also shows that the more aggro and cartoonish take on it (which anticipated the rise of breakcore) remains out of fashion for good reason.

Too much of Going Grey seems oddly unwilling to risk offense--the concepts of “Far Drive,” “Everyone But You,” and “Grand Finale,” songs about various lovelorn states, could be the work of any pop-punker with a passing AP English grade, feeling as perfunctory and indistinct as the hyper-compressed, airless music surrounding them. Stella’s still got his tics, but by this point, they can feel like shtick.

If it's any consolation, the songs are interchangeable and accomplished enough that long-time fans will be relieved that they didn't embarrass themselves. Newcomers, if any, will almost certainly wonder what the big deal was.

While these songs can occasionally find that perfect balance of catchiness, sweetly familiar sentiments, and home-recorded charm, there a few too many lemons for this to be a record worthy of vibing out.

With today's cartoons darker and more violent than ever, I'm sure cartoon music could someday sound as though influenced by Suspended Animation, but I highly doubt any rock music will.

While Black Rainbows may represent more of a flickering flame than a raging inferno, it at least yields some evidence that Anderson's once-fiery persona has not been completely extinguished.

For all the mission-statement confidence that its title exudes, Sondre Lerche sounds strangely divided: It's too pristine and too scattershot.

If Liam seems hamstrung as a rocker on BE, at least he’s showing more promise as a balladeer.

Oceans Will Rise is not a bad album, but it is very much the sound of a band still trying to figure out who they are--and in fairness, they have lost and gained a member since their first record. But three albums into a career, they should have a better idea than this.

Even with the decibel meter dialed down to accommodate his wounded croon, Mendel struggles to assert himself, flattening out the album’s dynamic variation in the process.

In between bursts of inspiration, Ardipithecus is largely a record of growing pains.

The Neon nestles the duo back into their musical comfort zone when they’re exceedingly capable of more.

The downside of Belong’s greater tilt toward pop and feelings is an occasional lurch into treacle.

There’s plenty Sia could do with an album entirely of Christmas originals, but too many are underwritten; there’s more consistency in the art direction than the songwriting.

There are hints of this fledgling growth throughout Good Intentions. ... The most fun moments on the album are the ones where Nav gets out of the way.

Despite the emphasis on atmosphere that pervades the album and that seems like a necessary byproduct of its creative technology, The Fall may be the most earthbound Gorillaz album yet--and at times, therefore, the most banal.

While nearly every track on Nausea finds Vallesteros trying to grapple with these issues [feeling displaced and connected at the same time], he rarely wrenches out any insight or personal detail.

On a purely sonic level, TIM is an easy listen to a fault, but taking in this final artistic statement is more difficult when focusing on the lyrics. ... The effect of these [guest] contributors effectively recasting his personal sentiments over once-unfinished music is haunting in all the wrong ways.

Frustratingly, Trust Now doesn't advance on the better ideas from Shadow Temple, particularly the elements of dance music that occasionally surfaced.

Strays lacks what what made the band great in the first place: believable songs and lyrics.

As bizarre as LANY’s pivot to country pop is, they still manage to infuse it with enough charm where it doesn’t fall flat.

Young's music is so rooted in the past, specifically the spirit of the 60s, that his stabs at contemporary relevance sound awkward and even curmudgeonly.

Terrible Human Beings can still be cherry-picked for catchy singles bound for algorithmic playlists, but it’s impossible to overlook how much of the Orwells’ appeal is bundled into their persona as enfants terribles.

With Aesop Rock on production, Felt becomes a triangulation that canvasses almost the entirety of U.S. undie rap in terms of geography and affiliation. So why is this thing kind of a bummer?

Too often, the new record substitutes weighty, Biblical language for true heft.

Assume Form is aggressively pastel and suffocatingly serious. He has lost the playful sense of surprise that guided his falsetto’s agile twists and turns on his debut.

The album is too inoffensive to leave much lasting impression. Over 18 songs, its initially appealing tastefulness becomes cloying and monotonous. Instead of the dynamism of mixing colors, the album mostly yields just a uniform pastel wash.

Indeed, when the strings are given the spotlight, the strongest songs are created; ditherings with Theremin, xylophone, and scuttling drum machine are less impressive.

At over an hour long, the album suffers from sag and bloat. Each song loses momentum after the first minute, despite the endless parade of guest stars – Lil Wayne, Ludacris, Mario — popping by. Still, there are moments where the experiment almost works.

Aqueduct's most relaxed numbers are the strongest, where guitar, piano, and synth fuse in rare harmony.

A YG album should have a higher success rate, which just isn’t the case on I Got Issues. It’s frustrating because the worthwhile moments are obvious.

Now, uneven or not, the songs seem to breathe on their own, benefiting from a shot of rhythm and a healthy sweat.

Where even her most divisive albums have managed to push her artistic boundaries, Volta feels limp and strangely empty-- almost unfinished.

In his efforts to break out of one-hit-wonder-dom and demonstrate a wide range on his debut album The Chief, Jidenna sometimes comes off as shapeless.

Django is perhaps the first Tarantino soundtrack that feels, uncharacteristically, a little too nail-on-the-head.

The hard-driving Blame Confusion, in too big a hurry to stop and take in the scenery, simply lets too much whoosh by in the periphery.

To be fair, there is redemption embedded within, a few genuinely interesting bits wedged between stacks and stacks of gooey piano ballads.

The songs on Welcome 2 Collegrove too often resemble the tenth pass on ideas no one loved in the first place, tweaked and rearranged until they’re perfectly fine.

After an hour of getting your heartstrings tugged with such intense proficiency, You Are There starts to feel no less egregiously manipulative than hearing Celine belt out "My Heart Will Go On" for the thousandth time in a Vegas ballroom.

These songs tend towards fuzzy sentiments—the words “love,” “life,” “light,” and “feel” are staples. Many of the musical ideas—tinkling pianos, plasticky strings and emotion-squeezing chord progression—have been part of Moby’s toolkit since the word “Go.”

Most of Kila Kila Kila is heavy in all the wrong ways and strangely earthbound.

A collection that leaves so much on the table in terms of possibility. Many of these selections are too on-the-nose, kowtowing to Johnson’s legacy as though kneeling before his corpse at a wake.

Lu’s vocal delivery hovers between a coo and a stage whisper, though it rarely delivers the sort of blissful incoherence that shoegaze and dream pop are known for. The softness makes sense on a raw acoustic ballad like “All i need,” but it feels more like rote theatrics on “Black swan,” where the raging noise practically begs her to snap out of her feathery stupor.

Though We Are Only What We Feel plods through similar tempos and uniform textures, Wäppling sings with enough character to keep the record from fading into the background.

Instead of growing soft and slick while retaining their songwriting prowess, they’ve stayed fast and raw--but left much of their popcraft somewhere behind.

A lot of the music on Happy To You, their second full-length, sounds excellent. Beats sparkle, synths crest and unfurl with purpose, horns come in at just exact right moment.... [Yet] too much of the time, too much is missing.

The droning effect of the guitars-- all that static strumming-- might be more effective if they didn't sound so rounded-off and sanded down into a blur. It saps the life out of the songs, which come off more drab than they should.

While Okereke has described Intimacy as a break-up album, it feels like more of a document of a band disconnected from itself.

Kaleidoscope isn’t going to kickstart Coldplay’s critical reappraisal, nor does it deserve to. But it rewards those of us who’ve stuck around with a few songs that capture the band at its best.

Marela’s lyrics sometimes lack craft and thoughtfulness, like words plucked from a diary and dropped into a song without regard to word choice or rhythm. It’s a fine line between childlike and childish, and too many songs tend toward the latter.

The Last Slimeto suppresses the knottiest and most uncomfortable aspects of his music, the moments when it feels like you’re hearing him process his darkest thoughts in real time. As a result the album is easier to digest, the songs less likely to stick out on a playlist, but at the price of the individuality that has made YoungBoy impossible to replicate.

The good stuff aside, if hard whiskey, hard women and aboveground pools aren't your thing-- and I would imagine not-- it's tough to recommend Lucky 7.

Hairball is certainly an evolution for Nai Harvest, but it’s tough to really call it progress.

It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s easy to understand the need to release it. At best, Losst and Founnd is a way to feel closer to Nilsson, no matter how long it’s been since he left us.

The lack of palplable passion on Nobody Wants to Be Here is, once again, somewhat disappointing and even more surprising.

Discover a Lovelier you isn't really even a bad album, only unremarkably OK.

Gorgeous and overstuffed, ALL features Tiersen’s tearjerker melodies and his tendency to crowd them from all sides.

This valiant yet flawed endeavor feels more like a false start than a dead end, if the Blow keeps watering the ideas seeding the back half and stays away from karaoke.

Daughter of Cloud accurately depicts an artist who has pushed his artistic license to its very limit. It also makes a convincing argument for the virtue of accepting some of those pushed-aside limitations.

For an act so consistent in their sound, it’s hard to get a bead on their ambitions.

Dangerous Dreams is plagued by a pervasive feeling of been there/done that, and the album ultimately sounds like the same two or three tracks on repeat.

His proxies fare a bit better, though there's another problem: There's way too many of them, and none of them stick around long enough to establish themselves.

There’s a moment of startling emotional clarity on “Shoot at Will,” a revealing track where Zayn alludes to his and Hadid’s daughter: “When I look at her, all I see is you/When you look at her, do you see me too?” But for the most part, Zayn appears much more comfortable wearing the mask of vulnerability instead of actually exercising it.

The Thrill of It All even features a few songs that leave heartbreak in the rear-view mirror. They aren’t all successful, but they’re interesting experiments for someone whose bread and butter is romantic dissatisfaction.

Let's chalk it up to growing pains and watch how early learnings further develop into an adult style.

Their musical progressions are incremental and headed towards predictable outcomes. The slower songs are a little bit more country, the more uptempo ones a bit more rootsy, and all of it is bolstered by typically brawny Will Yip production that cuts through the chatter of any barroom or basement.

If you're willing to fully take Alpers on her own terms, however, there's value in Bachelorette. Specifically, there are a few songs here with lovely vocal melodies and harmonies.

The best parts of Banks are the ones that most resemble Interpol, rather than the stabs at spooky, old-guy mope-pop that comprise most of the record. In that respect, this album fails as a valid statement outside of the confines of Banks' band.

Perhaps praising Heumann's improved writing plays like faint praise, but it's as significant a step in the right direction as tightening the instrumental belt is in the wrong direction.

So Entertainment might be music for their performances, it might be for others' dance performances, but it's not for the dance floor.

It’s still a fundamentally flawed album, and those flaws were symptoms of a larger ailment within the Band. Perhaps that explains the overriding nostalgia on these songs, that sense of having something beautiful and essential. Cahoots is a eulogy for a Band that was already in the past tense.

Over a decade into his career, Greene is more than capable of producing technically interesting music that comes across as deceptively simple. Unfortunately, Purple Noon falters and feels too safe and lacking in substance.

Fellow Travelers can be seen as Shearwater showing their scratch work, and while great cover albums can be a revelation or an embarrassment, most end up right around here: which is to say, admirable and flawed.

Kiri Variations feels like an album that has lost its way: a soundtrack (though most of the music never appeared on the show) that shoots for terror but settles for unease; an “anti-muso” work that is far too conventionally musical

They’re modest songs for modest moments, occupying the space between the hookup and the breakup, of getting hired and getting fired, that manageable lovesickness, regret, and anxiety that underlie just about every URL and IRL interaction.

His beats are generally chunky sample flips and simple loops, but he also has an ear for a good sound. But if you’re listening to a Royce album it’s because you want to hear the guy rap. To his credit, Royce has the rare effect of a rapper’s extreme technical ability making him seem limber instead of rigid.

A good 80% of You and I, the latest album of the lot, consists of covers, many already released in some format.... The new material includes a version of "Grace" that is basically a fully formed demo, while "Dream of You and I" is barely even that; the title is literal, Buckley thinking aloud about a dream he had about a band’s "space jam," which inspired him to write what’d eventually become "You and I."

The collection has the potential to appeal a number of different audiences--Converge die-hards, Motörhead speedfreaks, Southern Lord hardcore kids--but partially on account of its stuffiness, falls short of those marks.

Drone Trailer arrives--after numerous CD-Rs and tapes of cross-cultural, relentlessly unconventional music to stargaze by--bearing principally unthreatening, old-fashioned rock'n'roll.

A stylish but stilted pastiche, 5:55 follows a decade's worth of mostly superior homages, often involving the same artists.

I Believe is one of those albums that hardly anyone could bring themselves to hate, but almost no one could truly latch on to.

Despite the strength of "Music Is My Boyfriend" and lush single "The Fear Is On", I continually find myself humming songs from the debut instead.

Sadly, the album is a few years too late in coming. As an example, the guys, while opening for Lou Reed sometime back in 1996, pulled off an amazing rendition of the Velvets' "Ride into the Sun" with Reed and Wareham handling the vocals together. Where were all the tape recorders back then?

A mess of an album.

Fans of handclaps, who don't mind that Berlin sings as many lines about doing lines as he does protest lines, marching lines and battle lines, will have fun pretending to be epic along with these Velvet Ramones.

The rest of the album’s expansive epics are built on a shaky foundations, with too many songs that contain too many concepts for their own good.

It also probably means that we'll be getting something new from Nau the next time around. Switching between musical characters is obviously Nau's default setting, and for all of its pleasantness, Paranoid Cocoon, in the context of his career thus far, feels like transition music over a costume change.

The Ruby Suns quickly lose their nerve and hooks about halfway through Christopher, and it simply becomes a brighter, albeit favorable, take on Fight Softly's mushier innards.

The resulting collection of cavernous electro-rock, elaborately adorned psych-pop, and winsome ambient-folk is polished and professional-sounding, but it’s also as tedious and unmemorable as the group’s name. There are glimmers of promise.

Wash the Sins is not a logical, concrete progression from Violet Cries and the Hexagons EP, but a competent if ultimately unmemorable reiteration of a message that wasn't particularly strong in the first place.

While the instrumentation of When Life Gives You Lemons signaled a wealth of potential new directions for Atmosphere's production, The Family Sign runs almost entirely on gloomy ballads heavy on maudlin piano chords and keening guitar riffs.

Digital Native is harmless analog tapestry, but it wilts under too much attention, unable to conjure the vivid scenes to which it was undoubtedly conceived.

The weirdly distant and safe Magna Carta Holy Grail abides by the tried and true business principle that the customer is always right: you just have to remember who the customer is here.

The album simply flickers out like a candle, with the faint promise of another visit to this setting.

The Indian Tower rocks in the most literal sense of the word; if that means anything to you, it's really all you need to know.

Most of the textural differences from song to song on Né So are slight, so they tend to bleed into one another.