Good Riddance is, in a word, nice. But there are plenty of other diaristic artists, ones whose music displays a certain sense of individuality.

Sylvan Esso is feel-good music on all fronts, and when it comes time to throw on something at a summer gathering that’ll make people feel slightly hipper than they were when they arrived, Sylvan Esso will be a go-to. But it’ll still feel like I’m living in a beer commercial, someone else's idea of an inclusive, hip summer day.

As is the case with most overstuffed hardcore albums, The Tyranny of Will lends itself well to a cherry-picking approach; keep some riffs and ideas, and toss the ones that don’t stick.

Liquid Cool is just another likable if unexceptional lo-fi electro-pop record.

There's a limp, mostly-constructed skeleton of a great rock record here, and maybe that's exactly what it's meant to be.

What’s Wrong With New York? isn’t inventive or texturally weird enough to geek the analog synth heads, and its hooks aren’t massive or sticky enough to work as pure pop either. The embrace of pretentiousness and artifice comes at the expense of real emotional complexity and memorably witty writing.

Port Entropy is charming and pretty and brilliantly assembled, but utterly two-dimensional, and listening to it even one time completely through yields strikingly diminished returns.

These are not all indelible tunes--probably half of them will fade from your memory shortly after a listen--but they are pleasant enough while they last, and with half the tracks clocking in under the three-minute mark (and the others barely breaking it), nothing on um, uh oh overstays its welcome.

Ladyfinger (ne) are obviously a talented bunch, but they're trying to crack open the rock'n'roll firmament with ball-peen hammers, chiseling grooves without making any real breakthroughs.

The officially released version of Extraordinary Machine remains a decent-to-good album, one that showcases Apple's considerable vocal and key-pounding talents.... The shame of it all is that Apple, after six years of silence, could've made a more definitive, progressive statement rather than something familiar and similar-- and we've got the bootlegs to prove it.

As it stands, remaining at that upper register with every word and line, the album’s 39 minutes feel much longer, leaving one high and dry.

Despite Invitation’s cinematic and often successful composition, Broderick succumbs to the passivity she’s supposedly working to renounce. The songs are ambient rather than immediate, more decorative than they are distinct.

Despite the confidence of that opening track, Heaven Is Whenever sounds like a transitional album, hopefully paving the way for something stronger, more cohesive, more specific.

So much of Stone feels like stitched-together composites of what has worked well in the past. Momentum is often squandered, and the electrifying bits rarely rise into something more.

These songs may be less immediately catchy, but all of them have a moment in which they break away from their straightforward guitar-rock underpinning and allow strange, spacious moments to burble up from within.

We listen to Weezer in 2016 largely for nostalgic dog whistles. We listen because Blue retreads like "Endless Summer" and "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori" offer Proustian pleasures in spite of their obviously-recycled frameworks, and because the simpering, sweet "L.A. Girlz" is the group's best single since "Island in the Sun."

The dewy-eyed sound of Who Am I? appeals to a younger generation, confirming that modern Britpop doesn’t always equate to aggressive young men—it can be gentle goths with their friends, writing songs for kids hoping to figure out who they are. All Pale Waves have to do now is figure out the answer to that question themselves.

In the absence of a less effable genius, there's always elbow grease. Painting With feels, more than anything, like a kind of construction project: Each sound meticulously built and only faintly familiar, each second crammed with doodads, as though the band was worried either they or their audience might get bored.

It’s Laura Stevenson’s third album, and the third that leaves you feeling warmly disposed but unconvinced, gamely professing your interest to see what she does next time around.

The disc succeeds as a public testing ground, but as an album it's ultimately unfocused. One problem is that Parish simply isn't the songwriter that Harvey is.

Jhelli Beam manages to be a completely cerebral experience and at times overwhelming in a satisfactory way, but then again, you could say the same about ice cream headaches.

While the immaculately blended pop smoothie that is G I R L goes down easy, its complacency is disappointing.

Though enjoyable, it may land in a limbo, too simplistic for fans of great chamber music or its challenging modern variants; too classical--lacking bells, whistles, samples and beats--to make it more than pleasant dinner party music for people coming from the indie side.

Though The People's Record contains some of the best music of Club 8's career, it doesn't hold up well as a complete album. There are no outright duds, but the sequence is front-loaded to such a degree that there is an obvious drop-off in quality by the middle of the set.

After its auspicious start, The Dew Last an Hour tries to convey similar sentiments amid agreeable, midtempo synth-pop that skimps on the pop and piles on the twinkling, harmonized guitars and vaporous melodies. What begins as a cooling blast of fresh air dissipates into pleasant ambience.

Though BLACKPINK can sing and dance with precision, the production of Kill This Love is also weirdly dated, like it was crafted earlier in the decade and then forgotten in a time capsule for five years.

Someday is Today mostly succeeds in its paeans to frostbitten numbness, its flatness as wistful as the rolling plains and as familiar as the freezer aisle.

The problem is that while Ambivalence Avenue was a pleasant surprise in all forms, an astounding leap from an unexpected source that constantly offered new sounds, Silver Wilkinson provides the same thing without the surprises. And all that’s left is the pleasant part.