I’d argue that 4L and Up 2 Më are bolder than anything here: Yeat’s older projects threw you into the deep end of his magma flows and fuzzy world-building and asked that you either get it or don’t. An album this safe and familiar will be great for packing out bigger concert venues but only makes his musical identity more nebulous.

The spirit was willing, but the editorial hand, which could have redeemed the project by jettisoning the filler, was weak.

More color-by-numbers post punk that uses too many grays and not enough pure blacks.

Much like its predecessor, Optica's pervasive mildness doesn't give you much to latch onto.

From the title on down, the new CD tries hard to conjure an ambiance of languid sin-- opium, absinthe, vintage porn-- but that aesthetic is just a few steps from your average bachelor pad with a zebra throw and ceiling mirrors. In fact, that's where copies of this album will inevitably spin, a soundtrack to excruciatingly banal seduction.

It’s hard to grasp who Childish Gambino is supposed to be. So even when he’s genuine, I have a little bit of skepticism on my mind.

The inability to define Porcelain Raft contributed to the initial intrigue, but with his second LP in two years, Remiddi has cemented his sound; Permanent Signal is more or less more of the same, a mutual fatigue passed on from Porcelain Raft to the listener.

While in•ter a•li•a has plenty of motion and heat, it needs friction and resistance to light a spark.

Vertigo is very well-studied and primed to reach the rafters of the mega venues she was thrust into early on. It just lacks much sense of her in it.

The moments where Mastermind gives us William Roberts the man instead of Rick Ross the gangster flick composite character with the borrowed name are scarce, and he remains committed to dialing in good life platitudes that increasingly ring hollow.

Scintilli is a disappointingly static record from a duo of born tinkerers.

The fundamental Gatekeeper template has been stretched and tweaked, putting one tentative foot forward into the future while the other remains firmly rooted in the past.

It all sounds so serious without any real reason for it.

Throughout Turn Blue, it's difficult to tell how invested these guys actually are in the music they're making, an indifferent attitude that encourages the listener to act in tandem.

What the title describes is just as ineffable as their sound: you can see it coming down, but somehow it fails to leave any tangible impression.

Stewart's increased output and dearth of exploration gives Archives an unflattering offhandedness, and it also dilutes the potency of Vapor City, like putting together an album is just another item to mark off his to-do list.

Despite his reputation as one of rock’s great thinkers, Byrne has never sounded more like a stoned teenager staring at the clouds and spit-balling deep thoughts about the universe. And yet despite its many misfires—including a truly unfortunate pun on the word “duty” in that dog song—American Utopia manages two unblemished triumphs in its final stretch.

Which brings us full circle, in a strange way, to DFA79. While the band surely wasn't the headiest of its era, there was a svelte, muscular quality to their music-- a feeling that any excess had been cut away-- that is absent from this record (and, it's worth noting, Keeler's work in MSTRKRFT).

Maximo Park so often sound on The National Health like they're trying too hard, struggling to find a sound that once came naturally.

Forget Rockin' the Suburbs; the new Folds can barely rock an infant to sleep, though at one point he tries.

What makes Live so disappointing isn't that it offers too few shots of the band they were, but so many glimpses of the band they could be, if they were more adventurous in hi-fi.

BNQT (pronounced “banquet”) is not a push outside the comfort zone for those involved, but further indication of restlessness from a collection of indie rock lifers, each of whose primary acts made their dent in the blog-rock boom and find their relevance dimming. At that, the optimistically titled Volume 1 serves more to elaborate on its characters than it does to recapture past glory.

From the first track through its final seconds, Invaders joylessly stomps through overly familiar territory. It's another lunkheaded, loud mash-up of rock and dance, a sound now so beefed-up and campy that it's perhaps only suitable for shotgunning cheap beer and practicing UFC chokeholds with your pals.

It doesn’t help that their guest singers’ lyrics rarely scale heights comparable to the duo’s vertiginous waveforms.

In an attempt to be taken seriously, they've sacrificed too much of their effervescent appeal--after all, enthusiasm and artfulness need not be mutually exclusive.

The problem is, he’s not a compelling enough presence to hold his own. Seven years into a career spent flipping familiar references into crowd-pleasing shapes, it’s still not clear who Alexander really is, beyond the sum of his influences.

An album in which he and his reformed jug-band compatriots paradoxically reach for a musical approach both more complex and more approachable, instead landing squarely in the realm of mediocrity.

Though Thompson's plaintive wails and the brawny playing of the rhythm section give the impression of relentless and differentiable activity, they're holding patterns all the same.