Blueprint 3 is the kind of stuck-on-stupid, event-driven money pit that proves while Jay-Z's at a point where he's got no one to answer to but himself, he's still capable of an entire hour of failing to take his own advice.

Those who are coming into Transfixiation blind might just hear a notable band boasting a currently rare commitment to an '80s kind of noise-rock rather than the '90s iterations of shoegaze, goth, or industrial that’s more prominent in 2015. Then again, APTBS’ progress as a band only serves to expose the underlying one-dimensionality of their actual songwriting.

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.

Gauntlet Hair lasts only nine songs. But they're all potential singles in their own right, all different.

Excusing the album's inherent garishness, 666 expands Hella's core sound to new heights that, although at times hard to stomach, finds the band both at their most playful and regimented.

And though their passable guitar parts-- all choppy downstrokes and wiry, insistent clangs-- lose their exuberance as the record stretches on, for at least the album’s first six tracks, they are played with such adolescent gusto that it's hard not to be won over.

I'm sure it's all firecrackers live, and in their defense, Dinowalrus' populist-noise contemporaries (Liars, Oneida) needed periods of woodshedding to find their way. But I suppose it does the title justice when % finds a band that's not quite all there yet.

While Presidence may keep its distance, it's never hard to enter, and individual pieces are as intriguing by themselves as they are in the album's wide-open context.

Through the Green can scan as simple or nostalgic, but either misses the point (and neither is the album a "modern take" on disco). It's an album of execution, of Tiger & Woods sharing sounds that aren't elusive and chasing feelings that are.

The band's personal choices--to abandon rock iconography for smaller, more fulfilling family units--will be Grace's fate as well: a record without broader narratives, meant for those who grew up with the Rapture, or want to.

The discrepancy on Bootlegs between studious songcraft and rambunctious execution occasionally sounds distractingly self-conscious, but Lerche still sounds better here for sounding so unguarded and loose.

More often than not, however, Mice Parade pushes these songs down paths that don't fit.

Kiss Land sounds every bit as isolated and singular as Tesfaye feels.

Given what he’s proven capable of as part of his main gig, though, it’s hard not to wish that, when left to his own devices, he made more of an effort to get outside of his own head.

Unveiled and ineffectual, Matthewson’s gripes get boring quickly. The sense that you’ve heard these songs before--or at least their frameworks and tricks--doesn’t help.

Underworld’s compositions are lush and polished, while Iggy’s ad-libs tend to spin their wheels, at times pausing and sputtering while he searches for the next word or phrase.

There’s a great lightness to each of Olsen’s covers, an attempt to abandon the feet she has planted on the ground. But the songs are rendered so fluffily that it’s hard to hear any of their structural elements; instead, the collection sounds more like a series of beautiful ooh-ing.

Timbaland's productions are the weaker links on this frustratingly ordinary album.

A dense and star-studded collection that sounds like the millennium’s most expensive karaoke party.

Konk feels like a mere cowardly act, a TPS report from a band that strives to be nothing more than British pop's ultimate company men.

That inferiority complex and desperate need for approval keeps L.A.X. surprisingly entertaining even though there are far more weak tracks on it than good ones.

Between the carefully plotted reference points and the not-exactly-gripping lyrics, Forever tends to run together over the course of its 39-minute runtime. Still, taken song-for-song, there's no shortage of takeaways.

You'll find something to latch onto in every song, but you won't always walk away from Negotiations with its choruses in your head; it's a more consistent record than its predecessor, but more orderly, too, and the highs just aren't quite as high.

Though much of Spills Out seems to zip by in a blur, it's assembled with enough care to never quite spin out from its center.

As “Dancing Is the Best Revenge” illustrates, !!! are at their best when making dance music that’s both unabashedly celebratory and stridently unsentimental. When the band veer into more typically romantic house terrain (“Our Love (U Can Get)”) and starry-eyed electro-rock (“Throw Yourself in the River”), their peculiar, provocateur personality is muted.

Anika is shortsighted in the best way: it's a tribute, an exercise, the charming kind.

Meds isn't a terrible album, but there's very little to get excited about on it either, and Placebo's calculated naughtiness is no more convincing than it's ever been.

Thing is, it still sounds entirely like an Air album--just a remarkably bland one.