It doesn't help that Cole brings the least-flavorful bars of his career to his debut, aiming, most likely, for something more universal than his diaristic mixtapes. The few glints we get of his personal life are intriguing.

On Hotspot, the best-selling duo in UK pop dampen the euphoria; the result is a tuneful, wan album: a mid-tier effort.

The whole of Playground in a Lake suffers from the flatness of its instrumentation and emotional range.

The math-rock drums and hard-edged guitars that balance the band’s pop instincts have been mostly smoothed out; the blaring brass of some of their most anthemic songs is no more. At their best, Field Music take risks. Flat White Moon is a record that too often plays it safe.

Though Younge and Shaheed Muhammad may enjoy casting themselves as career revivalists, Roy Ayers JID 002, as pleasant and groovy as it is, never quite feels like a true Roy Ayers work.

Ultimately, The Fountain is an echo of an echo, inessential to all but the band's most devoted followers.

The writing is so meandering and mechanical that little here feels intentional, even the gaps. And strangely, that’s the bittersweet takeaway: Nas the meticulous observer has been supplanted by Nas the nervous rambler. It doesn’t feel like an accident.

The record feels like standing water, Herring is so entrenched in the past it’s hard to tell who he really is on so much of this record. There are, however, moments when the light shines in with the vibrancy of stained glass.

Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped, Krug's first post-Wolf Parade LP, feels like ritual music infused with 1980s nostalgia.

But if this introduction presents a retreat from the heavy metal parking lot, the rest of Western Xterminator returns to the usual spot and sets up a permanent trailer-home in it, with the 70s-Stones sleaze of Herrema's former band all but vanquished for a full-on 80s headbanger's ball pitched halfway between Sunset Strip flash and New Wave of British Heavy Metal thrash.

Tracks such as “There Was a Button” and “Traanc” are acceptable as minimal-house DJ tools, but as greater parts of a long-playing whole, they seem lost for a broader context--a context Dear previously had no trouble offering. Only at Alpha’s tail end does Audion’s (and Dear’s) personality assert itself.

It's a shame the Rakes stopped just as they were starting to sound fun again, but if they had to end it while they still had that last spark of fun left, it's a better decision than most successful bands can bring themselves to make.

Crybaby displays neither the maturity of a band in a retrospective era, nor the sense of fun of a band trying not to grow up; instead, there’s something loose-ended about it—like it’s a companion piece to all the mythmaking and nostalgizing, rather than the other way around.

Though it is easy to grasp the broad appeal of Aiko’s music, it’s harder to decipher whether the songs are more appealing than the mere atmosphere they create.

Growing's approach is uncharacteristically undeveloped here, as the trio never seems to know for what exactly what it's aiming.

Williams has figured out his sounds, but he’s still working towards his voice.

Guitars, synths, and beats all sound crisp and glisten with a layer of cold condensation, but they come together in ways that don't necessarily make for memorable pop tunes.

The EP's lackluster tracklist leaves iTunes Session seeming clunky and unrepresentative--like it's not a full set, but an excerpt from a larger show.

The more anthemic crowd-pleasing numbers littered throughout The Beginning Stages of the Polyphonic Spree boast such endlessly repeated refrains as "Hey/ It's the Sun/ And it makes me Shine," which lose a lot of their appeal when taken out of their natural habitat (the live setting) and placed between your headphones.

Sleepy Sun have learned the methods and studied the maps, but-- at least on record-- they've yet to take that knowledge into territory that feels new or, really, like it's their own.

Part of what makes listening to Light Asylum so frustrating is a nagging want to see her talent mobilized to the fullest, to roll up your sleeves and try to make a Light Asylum in your own image.

Dipping into her lower register, she stuns as a contralto. I found myself rewinding her runs on hymnal parts of “Heart on My Sleeve” and could’ve sworn I was levitating during the awe-inspiring bridge of “Pray It Away” and “Make It Look Easy.” ... The emotionally charged conversational interludes and narrative intros (“Do you ever wonder, like, who else is fucking your man?”) are out of place amid the redundant themes and mind-numbingly online songwriting.

The problem isn't that Valtari aspires to beauty, even if it's a commonplace, celestial understanding of it. Sigur Ros have proven they can make indelible music that's pretty and unpredictable, pretty and melodic, pretty and unnerving, pretty and inspiring. Valtari wants to be pretty and that's it.

Americana doesn't so much amount to a caustic commentary on the modern-day American condition as capture a bunch of old pals trying to rediscover their chemistry by sloppily jamming on some standards.

Icy and stiff has been the band's M.O., but its new material demands performances that command that sparseness rather than toy with it. Had the band drawn on some of that confidence from R&B as well as the instrumentation, it could have made this record even more compelling.

Though Cydonia is far from being a dull, sequencer-heavy Namlook ambient release, it regrettably sounds irrelevant in today's climate.

As Die Antwoord's energy level putters out, so too does Mount Ninji, an album too faded and immature to make a lasting dent on the face of hip-hop.

The Golden State band Golden Animals mine that particular epoch of mild psych and blues rock--especially the middle part, when 60s idealism gave way to the dope-daze haze of the 70s--for all it's worth on Free Your Mind and Win a Pony, the duo's solid enough debut.