As a whole, the music is warm and pleasant, even occasionally gorgeous, but it feels a bit bloodless.

Jaar's samples might not seem obvious, but 2012-2017 can feel generic. Most tracks are just looped soul samples fastened to heavy kicks. They might be uplifting if they didn't feel so utilitarian.

Much like switching on a 24-hour news channel, No No is engrossing for the first ten minutes or so. Then the parade of lurid images continues, and sure enough, they give you a headache.

There's a dreamlike logic to much of Care: it's atmospheric, but it doesn't make sense.

No Sounds Are Out Of Bounds, with its stylistic and thematic missteps, too often shakes us out of this trademark groove.

Despite the name, Crooked Man's greatest fault is ultimately how straight Barratt plays it.

Where Bad Vibes had a dynamic range of feeling, Dark Red is melodramatic to the point of being alienating.

Runddans is an intriguing and sometimes fun experiment, but it's not quite a meeting of great musical minds.

As the white noise whooshes and the snares roll on Adrian Hour's "Make You Feel Good" (a track that was released on Toolroom four years ago), it's difficult not to sense an artist also drifting in the opposite direction, towards a sound that he'd struggle to call his own.

What we're left with is an uneven album that's rarely as profound or as meaningful as it tries to be.

Caracal has the effect of a magician performing a trick twice in a row, rendering once clandestine, miraculous movements suddenly obvious, over-rehearsed and unnatural.

Even though Brighter falls short, in this context it does illustrates that the indie WhoMadeWho infuse their dance with has more funk and attitude than most.

Listening to Imagin is like pulling on a old pair of trainers: comfortable, familiar and, ultimately, rather boring.

A somewhat stunted, companion piece to their debut, all the more frustrating for their lack of real development.

Ghettoville doesn't sound like the work of a producer who's no longer able to make wondrous music; there's enough craft and intention here to suggest that, for whatever reason, he just didn't this time.

There's an excellent 12-inch (or two) hidden in Addison Groove Presents James Grieve.

Ultimately, Reachy Prints is a bravura performance that lacks bite.

The tracks that feel like direct tributes to older, better tunes tend to fare better than the majority of the album, which is hugely sentimental but never sufficiently sharpens its edges to counteract all that mush.

Brute's most interesting flourishes are all surface-level. Take them away and you're left with Al Qadiri reusing the same musical ideas.

The reason that the DJ-Kicks series has remained relevant is that even at its so-called worst, it was still saying something about the overall state of electronic dance music. With Gold Panda's entry-despite its cleverness and state-of-the-art, diverse penchants-you're left with the impression the famous !K7 cycle has nothing more this time than a muted episode on its hands.

Those aching for Parker's winning synthesis of classic rock's melancholy and poppy euphoria still have plenty to chew on here. To ravers, Deadbeat might sound like not much more than beach bar music.

The album has bags of character and is big on ideas. Unfortunately, not all of them work. ... Jarring sounds and heavy-handed ideas dominate the album's second half and ultimately spoil the record.

The endorphin-rush techno of "Forgive Me," meanwhile, is sure to ignite one of his main stage festival sets. That's the setting in which Boratto shows his energy and confidence as an artist. Too much of Pentagram, by contrast, feels tired or confused.

The project consists of six previously released remixes, which have been butchered into new edits half their original size, one remastered demo track leaked online 15 years ago ("Gone Gone Gone") and one new remix. .... This may not be the Veronica we wanted, but the Veronica we have is a pleasant enough nostalgia exercise for the golden era of late '90s dance music.

He can't find a way back into the very culture that created him. This tragedy, and its lack of resolution, defines the saccharine and overdone sound of In Waves, whose missing of the mark is evident from its earliest moments.

At its best, the LP touches on the dizzying maximalism that made past records so thrilling. But at other times it treads the same ground as the healing frequency meditation videos that proliferate on YouTube.

Glow dumbs down Niemerski's music into mass market-ready chunks.

The album certainly isn't a waste of time, but most disappointing is that it lacks an intensity and message.

Rundell and Goddard are still crafting warm, well-balanced tracks, but the parts that reveal their personalities—namely the lyrics--are often awkward and strangely didactic.

Stones and Woods is a frustrating body of work, with good ideas poorly realised and arresting moments interrupted by annoying ones.

As you unspool slowly into Aimlessness, you can't help but wish for a more mediating human touch.

The LP's concerted efforts toward eclecticism feel more like a frantic effort towards containment, playing out like rote exercises in proving Snaith's stylistic mastery rather than genuine moments of strobe-lit inspiration.

Gately describes her method as a question: "How much can I add before it just sounds too crazy. What's the most obnoxious thing I can make the song do?" With Color, she's overshot.

Suddenly is a frustrating listen. Snaith's talent for writing earworms, hooks and choruses has never been so apparent. But overall he sounds like he's trying too hard, taking influence from too many places.

Gibson's earlier work mixed pop mastery with genuine feeling. Actual Life 3 is the Hollywood remake, with not-quite-convincing lookalikes and a script laden with clichés.

Without its academic trappings, Projections starts to grate, with its middle-of-the-road niceness and mood of tepid celebration. With them, it's borderline offensive.

The whole album sounds like it was mastered from a chewed-up old C90--it's post-chillwave music, busy and glitchy, but as relaxing as a soak in a warm bath.

Listening to the album feels like opening a time capsule to the early and mid-10s, a period marked by a cheesy, over-the-top hedonism that might only be truly understood if you survived the Great Recession and saw Obama become president twice. ... It's easier to get behind Quest For Fire when Moore's dubstep influences are subtler.

Caramel is a collection of half-finished songs that force you to fill in the blanks. It's just as frustrating and occasionally enlightening as that sounds.

Wonder Where We Land pads its vocal tracks with plush instrumentals, morsels of melody that would have been strong points if they weren't so half-baked.

A collection of big, bouncy and immaculately produced club tunes, it brings together some fine productions. But it's also a tough record to love.

Bridging that pop-underground divide has always been what makes Gou an interesting artist, but on I Hear You, she can't seem to veer from the middle of the road.

There's something so inherently off-kilter about Scruff's kaleidoscopic production that it just doesn't jell with the sound of a human voice being all serious.

It's nice indeed, but it may leave you craving something a little stronger.

You'll have to cherry-pick the best moments from Wonderful Frequency Band, but that's Justus Köhncke. He may bemuse you, but you can never write him off.

Secret Life is undeniably gorgeous. But it's a mainstream, you-know-how-this-ends kind of gorgeous, like a Hollywood remake of some European arthouse film. ... It's difficult to be mad at Secret Life. But the bigger problem is that it's hard to feel anything at all.

While it might be beautiful to gaze at momentarily, by the end of the record it's treading water.

Without any contrast, his vibraphone seems to grin vacantly, as if pumped full of sedatives.

As its title implies, Migration was meant to be about Green's experience moving to a new home and traveling around the world. But rather than taking his sound anywhere, Migration stays put.

It's all meticulously crafted with a keen ear for mood and emotion, and yet Creatures has trouble moving beyond a pastiche of Castex's record collection.

In losing sight of the dance floor, Battle Lines does away with Bob Moses' greatest strength, and the quality that made them stand out from countless other pop and rock acts.

The problem is the tone, which, from the album's first whimper to the comically bad poetry reading that closes it, is hackneyed and overwrought all the way through. These ten tracks are defined by somber pianos, bittersweet strings and quivering pads--like Sigur Rós, but drained of all mystery. Worst of all, though, is the singing, a half-coherent moan that falls somewhere between Thom Yorke and '90s radio balladeers like David Gray or Five For Fighting.

If The Mainframe is a film, then it's a Michael Bay blockbuster: slick and engaging but totally adolescent in worldview, its plot tortuous, its characters flimsily drawn, all of it an excuse for a string of eye-popping action set-pieces.

Some of Davis's early records still sound exciting because of the raw talent and vision behind them, and because of the way he stitched together the threads of old songs into captivating new ones. Now, his music sounds bland, as if it was designed for chillout compilations or cocktail lounges.

King Perry (released on Tricky's label—he also co-produces four tracks) simply falls flat, lost in technological tricks and devoid of Perry's classic, quizzical warmth.

If you come to Foals from an exclusively indie rock perspective, this may blow your tiny mind. But if this is Foals' attempt to infiltrate clubland proper, it falls short.

Eve sounds self-referential, dated and pretty low on ideas.

Even at its biggest, it sounds disappointingly thin.

In its studio form, though, II remains a lukewarm, ambivalent understatement.

With By Your Side, Ed Banger and Breakbot seem more and more lost in a Tumblr-tinged display of self-referencing: very now but just not very new.

There's no denying that Iradelphic is Clark's most accessible and friendly work in ages... Unfortunately, comfort is boring.

While some of its tracks were closer to completion than others when she died, the album overall still sounds unfinished.

Where their first album felt like a definitive statement, Natural Selection sounds, as so many second albums do, like a diffuse bunch of half-realised ideas.

It is the very overfamiliarity with those same [80's] tropes that makes TRST an ultimately unsurprising, par for the course listen.

The flatness of their construction, despite refreshingly warm undertones, means the songs easily collapse beneath the weight of Smith's carefully constructed persona, losing the plot on his apparent quest to let loose. Where they might blossom, the album's new cuts mostly bore holes into themselves.

It's appealing stuff, but dig deeper and you'll find there's not much beneath the pristine surface.