The music on The Gifted sounds fantastic, with intricately arranged keys and strings, stacks of soul and gospel-inspired backup vocals, and deep, rubbery bass lines. The problem is that Wale and his team made a really decent soul rap album without a rapper soulful enough to carry it.

Ultimately, Laika make pleasant music that's difficult to be passionate about.

Diet Cig’s debut is almost entirely made of other people’s gestures hastily collected and cheaply executed.

I’ve Tortured You never lets up on its fist-in-the-air rock eruptions. No small acoustic numbers punctuate the record; there is no time to regroup. Even within songs, Heroux and Zambri follow safe, predictable progressions.

His one-man band's busy textures can't fully distract from insipid songwriting.

There may be six different versions of Lauv pulling the strings, but in the end, they all sound alike.

Strength in Numbers is far from unlistenable--I don't know if your free time is spent sorting through stacks and stacks of charmless indie rock CDs that have the nerve to call themselves "pop," but when the chorus of the title track hits with the subtlety of a latter-day Nas album title, it's damn refreshing to hear a group bound for glory as shamelessly as the Music.

The rest of The Colourful Life is, ahem, less colorful. Most of the blame shouldn't go to Butler, but to these not-so-ragin' non-Cajuns.

There are no insights to be found here about prestige, depression, or dependency. The whole thing is unbelievably dour and boring.

There are a couple of moments when these banalities briefly turn transcendent. ... There are too few of those bright spots, though.

Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, their new drive can be awkward. Even more unfortunately, it's most notable on what should be their catchiest songs.

At their best, Sweet Apple sound like they're trying to emulate the lovable-loserdom perfected by one of Petkovic's unsung Cleveland rock peers, Prisonshake. At their worst, such as "Goodnight", Petkovic goes on and on about him and his hard-luck honey while the group tediously grinds away in the background.

But ultimately, Loyalty to Loyalty leaves a weird aftertaste, and it's not just because the penultimate 'Relief' tries to prop itself up on Willett's falsetto harangues and stuttering slap-bass, before 'Cryptomnesia' ends the record collapsing into a rumpled heap.

Rarely does a band bid you farewell and admit it overstayed its welcome in the same breath.

Let Me Come Home is still too overworked, but, as that final song proves, it represents a welcome shift toward (relative) musical simplicity and lyrical honestly that shows that the band is heading in the right direction.

The Altar has a lot in common with Goddess, including its fatal flaw: its attempts to position Banks as edgy or dangerous, despite all musical evidence to the contrary.

It delves as far as it can without hitting government-name territory, and for that the true fans will embrace it. But how many times can you retell the same story?

Ashcroft always fares best when he sounds like he’s addressing another person in an intimate exchange rather than megaphoning the entire human race, and there are moments on These People where he reconnects with the steely-eyed conviction and restlessness that fueled his best songs.

They're not teenagers anymore, but you'd never know it from listening to them. That's not exactly a compliment.

Though Mull Historical Society is an act one could easily file under "pleasant-enough pop," at 13 tracks (plus a bonus disc!), MacIntyre's strictly 80bpm velvet-lined melancholia will test the patience of any Anglophile.

In the context of Matt & Kim's discography, Lightning is inconsequential. Like an echo of an echo, there's nothing here that Matt & Kim haven't already done over and over again.

He set out to make a mediocre album, and succeeded admirably.

Ghost rarely does get the hint, often left too slight and too self-important for it's own good.

The Cave Singers' mild, moseying tunes aren't without their minor charms, and they're unfailingly good at conjuring images of wide-open fields and dust-caked lanes, but nobody wants to walk down the same road all the time if they can help it.

There are flutes and poetry readings, floods of noise and wisps of bass clarinet. Still, such an astounding lineup only serves to reinforce the disappointment of the flat and oftentimes gangly Field.

LAMB has one mega-hit, one okay song, three stillborns, and seven full-fledged embarrassments.

Sky's Edge has some of the old Hawley magic in the form of "The Wood Collier's Grave"... But for the most part, it's an unwelcome return to a less distinguished period in Hawley's career, back before he knew how to make more beguiling music than this.

Love Frequency isn’t a complete disaster, if only because the new, chastised, and chaste Klaxons aren’t really capable of doing anything that could inspire that sort of animus. At their best, Klaxons dredge up the kind of sounds that keep the Coachella Sahara Tent bumping all weekend, composed to be aggressive and participatory, yet strangely ambient and easy to ignore.