The busy arrangements and serious frontloading make Born Under Saturn’s 54 minutes a demanding investment, and the effort it takes to simply get any sort of visceral pleasure out of it makes it feel twice as long.

The original is a seduction; this [album] is food-court flirtation.

Kanye West, who once again produces the majority of the album, has tried making a tribute to Common's Jay Dee-fueled Soulquarian-era sound, and he doesn't fit it well at all, managing half of its vibe and none of its energy.

It's rarely boring, and often full of promise, but it's a direction that calls for further tweaks, experiments, and exploration to get the balance just right.

These 12 songs feel like whimsical larks, and Jackson's considerable charm should be able to put them over just fine in a live setting. But the record can also be too whimsical for its own good, and for most listeners, Jackson's Belle and Sebastian songs will be enough.

The tracks on Yanqui are content to continue building to bored, satiated endings we can see coming 20 minutes in advance.

A goofy, sloppy mini-album, cramming familiar Weezer fuzz, stoned piano ballads, playful analogue synths, and misguided Bad Company references into a little more than half an hour.

Greenwood and co.'s impulses have grown disappointingly easy to dissect. The result is music that, by any definition, remains experimental and difficult, but the invigorating internal tension between the ordained simplicity of American musics and the free-will noise jams has evaporated.

While 'Bruises' proves that a well-done song that sounds like other songs can make people take brief notice, Inspire mostly proves that recycling isn't the only answer.

It’s the pro-forma songwriting that transpires between those brontosaurus blasts that ultimately proves problematic. By using their muscular might to prop up otherwise featherweight tunes, Royal Blood have effectively built themselves a castle and furnished it with IKEA.

On Deceiver of the Gods, they are satisfied with plugging 10 new anecdotes into 10 songs they’ve made before and, unfortunately, will most likely make again.

Overall, CLPPNG is chock full of ideas, and if its failure is due to overambitiousness, well, there are worse ways to fail.

Melodies coast, but they don’t always stick; everything’s too mannered, too clean, and the album is marred by a clinicality further punctuated by its bonus tracks.

Butler’s commitment to the detached frontman where singing occurs barely or not at all robs songs of their emotional largesse, that basic thing we licensed to Arcade Fire and upon which their entire identity relies. What saving grace there is on Everything Now is scattered throughout its mercifully short 47 minutes.

Toggling between merely pleasant and overly precious, Melt Away is such a low-stakes endeavor that it never even registers as a comeback.

Four albums in, it's becoming pretty clear that the genre in which Manchester Orchestra resides has more untapped potential than the band itself.

It's hard to shake the feeling that the album sounds too comfortable, too familiar: It's so deeply entrenched in their comfort zone that it sounds too easy-- not effortless, but automatic and rote.

It’s almost as if the first half of the album is comprised of songs that Crocodiles had finished writing by the time they got to the studio, and the second half is all of the stuff that they came up with while they were there. And this exploratory spirit is where Boys finds its strength.

Ultimately, the picture that emerges on Twentyears is a simplified version of Air that swaps out most of their quirks for only their most palatable qualities. It’s a lite version of the band, and a frustrating missed opportunity.

Marketing aside, Phase doesn't sound unpleasant, just generic.

There is rarely nuance to Baio’s lyrics, and everything is offered up with little in the way of poetry or insight.

They’re a "the + plural noun" band. For those who felt the "New Rock Revolution" was exactly what its name promised rather than a revival of old aesthetics, the Districts' A Flourish and a Spoil signifies a restoration of order. For everyone else who simply likes rock bands, it's actually kinda quaint.

Ironically, in trying to tap into the mystique of America’s most storied cities, Foo Fighters completely demystify their own creative process, effectively turning the Sonic Highways project into a glorified homework assignment--educational, perhaps, but laboriously procedural.

The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness may attempt to forge a common ground between two trans-Atlantic artists, but even when working from the same instrumental base, the sensibilities at play here are still oddly segregated.

Remember My Name as an album isn’t going to change lives.

The disappointment is in how it sounds like their years apart have needlessly chastened them into fast-forwarding through the idiosyncratic streak they showed on Some Loud Thunder instead of embracing it, coming out of the wilderness only to end up smack dab in the middle of the road.

Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic smolders with emotion, and yet Kasan’s aloofness—even when he’s shouting—sounds like a protective mechanism against truly letting himself go. Framed by the derivative music, Kasan sounds as removed from his feelings as the rest of us do expressing them via memes from inside the stultifying safety of our digital cubicles.

Highlights aside, Total's belligerence is as predictable as it is teeth-grinding.