The bad news is that the overwhelming vibe is still that of easy listening digital mush.

Without outside direction, however, Dr. Dog quickly go back to their old ways. Afrobeat specialists Antibalas provide the horns on B-Room, but their talents are wasted on songs like "Long Way Down", the beginning of which sounds like the Wayne's World dissolve tuned to a baritone sax.

Despite its razzle-dazzle, this is the rare King Gizzard release that actually sounds like it was composed as quickly as it was.

Too often, he strays from the hushed mode he's mastered and ends up supplanting the band’s strengths with its weaknesses.

With every album, the Foos get slicker than before; the passion behind their songs waxed off by an ever-thickening veneer of overproduction. Right now, the Foos are so polished you can see right through them.

Its majority carelessly regurgitates the painful cliches of "enlightened" hip-hop's critical and commercial darlings, while the band falls back on their organic hip-hop sound as a gimmick and piles on guest appearances to disguise their lack of creativity.

Too much of Long Live the Angels just feels turgid.

That Marina--the lyricist who wasn’t afraid to detail the taste of toothpaste on a lover’s tongue, the vocalist who wasn’t afraid to punctuate a sentence with a feral shriek--has gone missing. The temptation of safe is undeniable, but mononyms are earned by embracing risk.

With songs that play like a grab-bag of genres and lyrics that have little of the humor or self-awareness the band displayed in the past, it's hard to muster the patience to uncover anything deeper.

Light Chasers improves on 2008's Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) by focusing on what Cloud Cult do best, though it lacks the colorful songwriting and hooky inventiveness of the band's most endearing songs.

Even when Turnover try spicing things up with congas, a violin, and a couple of ill-fitting saxophone features, Altogether tastes incredibly vanilla, like a playlist of department store slow jams.

Time & Space is actually a punishingly familiar collision of yesteryear's crossover rock with textbook hardcore bluster.

The problem with Radlands is that, armed with the potential to go wild with a new bag of tricks, Mystery Jets often become as conservatively minded as parts of the state whose outline graces the album's cover.

Voyager’s attempts to pay homage to disco ancestors while paring his maximalism way back make it all feel like a dance night in an unfurnished room, all speakers and no lighting.

Late in the record, the perky "You Know" also stands up to the quality of jj n 2, but between these tracks is mostly B-side fare. It's a shame, but I don't get the sense listening to jj n 3 that jj's best work is behind them.

From the quality of the production, it seems that Metro knows he wasn’t going to get a progressive performance from Sean. Most of the beats on the album are standard fare with a few gems like “Reason,” which recalls Metro’s What a Time to Be Alive production “Jumpman,” and “Who’s Stopping Me” which samples from Brazilian artist Nazaré Pereira’s “Clarão De Lua,” something a little bit different from Metro’s typically modern approach.

Lissie's voice is haunting as always, but the band doesn't match this tone, and as a result it no longer sounds like Lissie's song. Hopefully these missteps aren't enough to put people off, because Lissie is still a significant new voice.

Black Cocaine comes across as not particularly different than, say, recent records from Saigon or Uncle Murda or M.O.P.

Nearly the entirety of Apparitions feels covered by some haze that's equal parts car exhaust and glitter.

After the Disco is a more cohesive record, and that turns out to be the problem: Mercer and Burton's eccentricities have been sanded down to a single, flattened plane.

As evolutions go, Ode to Ochrasy makes for a particularly awkward adolescent phase, the sound of band that is outgrowing their loud-fast-rules roots but still too timid to sever them completely.

It’s all exceedingly pleasant, which is a bit of a curse. They’re songs with ingratiating hooks—tracks that would benefit from the ambient exposure of a grocery store or a doctor’s office, where they’d worm their way into the subconscious leaving no trace of entry. It’s so comfortable, in fact, that it hardly feels creative.

While Right Words achieves a baseline level of quality or at least competency with the exception of “Goodbye Friends and Lovers” and "Love Illumination", they lack the conviction to take most of their lesser ideas to the realm of being unpleasant rather than kinda boring.

Music this theatrical demands a stage. On disc it plays a bit like a conversation-starting party favor: colorful and bright, but no substitute for actually being there.

The formula’s limitations are evident on Father of Asahd: There are plenty of voices but no clear message or intention.

You've got your acoustic guitar base, your occasional slide guitar fill, your Dylan-esque organ, your chug-a-lug drums, and your mildly catchy melodies. It would be offensive if it wasn't so obvious that Cracker doesn't aspire to much more than this sort of rustic middle-America mediocrity act.

Too much of it drifts into generic 1960s-nodding garage-rock territory.

On Golden, she sounds like someone playing at country music, rather than someone who understands it. Her star will doubtlessly endure this awkward release, but let’s hope country Kylie is short-lived.