Bouzilich however, does have some good ideas and there are some very good moments to be found on Hello, Voyager, it's just the convoluted mess of ideas that is the rest of the album overwhelms its strongest points.

Thus when taking in Attack on Memory as a whole, it sounds as if Cloud Nothings are, despite their best efforts, a pop band at heart.

It’s a pleasantly relaxed portrait of a band kicking back and stretching its legs.

While she has not found Torn Mk.II and continues to prove her weaknesses as a vocalist, Imbruglia has at least shown some much welcome diversity here. That, along with her hallmark sweet melodies, means that Come To Life is at least worth a listen.

For all its inadequacies, Dignity is a solid, cleverly-constructed pop album.

Get Awkward, as an album, is a step up, and it certainly has highs and lows, but what I’m really missing here are things like "Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle" or even “October, First Account,” songs that really stick out.

If Turner can return to his best--and there's reason to suspect he can't--then the possibilities open to them are potentially limitless. Then, Humbug will be seen a stepping stone. That's certainly how it feels now.

For better or for worse--you'll like it because of the music it reminds you of, but you won't love it for exactly the same reason.

Although Freedom isn’t the return fans were hoping for, there’s enough experimentation here to at least remind old fans of what made them adore the band in the first place.

As a whole Negotiations does little to distinguish the individual songs from the album's greater artistic statement.

Caught between the indie-pop that they so cleverly deviated and their new found ambitious sound, Death Cab For Cutie have lost themselves.

The problem with MU.ZZ.LE is that, as a self-produced effort, it blatantly lacks the restraint that might otherwise have seen this become something truly extraordinary.

It’s smart at points, silly at others, often musically unremarkable, occasionally pure pop gold and easily listenable without providing significant satisfaction for more than ten to fifteen minutes after the act of consumption.

It's clearly her best album, but it's also her most frustrating, because it really drives home her potential and hints at so much greatness without ever truly delivering it.

Reputation is a hodgepodge of styles that have been percolating around the mainstream for years, repackaged into a shiny, expensive-sounding vehicle for Swift’s lyrics and sizable cult of personality.

Bouncy bass and catchy vocals keep it going, but sometimes it seems Albert Jr. has nothing substantial to fall back on.

In the end this is a nice EP to play and a timely release considering the season and what they're releasing it right before.

When the natural flow of Nas' rap elevates 'Success' to one of American Gangster's best songs, you kind of wish Nas could have just had the same idea and done the album himself. It shadows the finale of the album, even the tight, appropriately grand title-track that finds Jay-Z at his breeziest.

There are plenty of loveable moments, sure, but they tend to congeal like sand passing through your fingers.

Essentially, this is an album aimed at everyone – which could explain why it’s so long and inconsistent – and while For Those That Wish to Exist is far from perfect, I do feel everyone can take some good things away from it.

Tha Carter III is scattershot, which oddly strengthens its faults, as if any lull in quality means that the next batch of producers can just reset the formula.

It’s not as consistently good as Now What?! and it doesn’t contain inFinite’s peaks. Nonetheless, it’s classy, enjoyable, and it’s certainly commendable to see legendary musicians who have nothing to prove, feel the desire to express themselves artistically.

Until Gibbard can harness this newfound happiness with the kind of lyrical flair his fans are used to, Death Cab remain in danger of being, well, just another indie band.

It has moments of genius (‘Grand Canyon’, ‘The Remedy’) as well as questionable missteps (‘Simultaneous’).

Days of Being Wild won’t ensnare your senses or make a concerted effort to win you over, which is okay. All you can do is just embrace it, listen to it, and hope that it grows on you.

It’s reductive and doesn’t help really anyone by saying the hooks just aren’t there on the level they used to be, but it’s telling that I searched the rest of Currents in vain for anything as immediate as the crashing waterfall of multitracked vocals on the chorus to “The Moment.”

Shogun is by no means an outstanding metal album, but it should be enough to satisfy both fans of their older material and those attracted to the meatier hooks of ‘Anthem (We Are The Fire)’ and ‘Entrance Of The Conflagration.’

So while Velociraptor! takes us to a few different destinations than we may have expected, it is ultimately going to elicit the same divisive response which its three predecessors did.

Basically, fans of In Flames' last four albums are sure to find plenty to enjoy on Sounds of Playground Fading as it is easily better than a lot of what they've done recently, but it could have been so much more if the vocals could be anything more than adequate.

The bloat of Transcendence seems to be a problem inherent to post-2011 DTP, and appears to be symptomatic of a group trying to deviate around a winning formula of the past rather than one keen on developing the innovation they were built to achieve.

It's not Kanye's return to form, but it does enough to stave off the kind musical irrelevance that seemed to be creeping up on him as his detestable personal misconduct began to dwarf his poor-to-middling studio output.

Their experimental ambition and artistic integrity is extremely promising, and with a little more focus, direction, and experience, they could be something special very soon.

This album just seems too comfortable.

A lot of tracks start off OK, but his flow and style are so unfocused and muddled the songs become a chore to sit through.

It's a take it or leave it sort of deal and though I presume that is exactly how it's going to be received among most listeners, there's a fan base here for any romantic fuzz-nerd with a sweet tooth, which considering the success of the inferior Dum Dum and Vivian Girls (of which one plays in Best Coast's live band (with all due respect)) is quite an audience indeed.

Steingarten is a unique take on ambient/glitch inspired music however it’s lack of musical progression brings it down.

We’ve come to expect more than inoffensive, lukewarm indie-pop from these guys. MGMT should save that for the thousands of other indie bands out there that all sound exactly like this, and go back to the stupidly fun and unpredictably bizarre music that most of us fell in love with.

As a record, Barragan concludes as a frustrating summation of Blonde Redhead’s overwhelming promise and a glaring reminder of the band’s flaws.

Yet even Campbell can’t save Desire Lines from coming off as creatively stagnant, just as pretty as ever but overwhelmingly pedestrian.

Sure, the lyrics are better, the songs aren’t quite as boring, but it’s becoming harder and harder to defend this band on the charge of being dad rock.

Ultimately, Promise Everything is a solid collection of songs written by a band that, over the course of 3 albums, have shown that they rarely write a bad song. However, the majority of the songs feel a little too secure within their own skin; a little too tentative to deviate from the safety of their rough midtempo origins.

Well-meaning and inoffensive.

What’s frustrating is the way in which Typhoons signals the less ambitious intentions of a band surely destined for more, such that its inconsistencies compound and shortcomings shine.

A Kiss For the Whole World remains eminently-listenable low-calorie fun despite its intermittent slip ups.

The core songs are decent, still, there’s nothing mind blowing. While the instrumentals occasionally dive into intricate progressions, they never truly reach a powerful climax. Thus, we are left with several fragmented bits and a couple of fleshed out numbers in between.

The very things that inspired Maybeshewill to make music in the first place--social unrest and robust melodies--are both absent on Fair Youth, and there isn’t a whole lot left to take their place.

Unfortunately, it’s an LP which simply lacks reward... Both for listeners and, ultimately, the band.

Mirror Reaper is a challenging album to listen to on multiple fronts. On the one hand, it is oppressive and deep music, wrought with heavy themes and even heavier aesthetics. On the other hand, it challenges the listener's patience with overcooked ideas that threaten to spoil what is otherwise an immaculately produced record.

Omens shows some return to form, but couldn’t hold a stiff one against the likes of Ashes Of The Wake, Sacrement or VII: Sturm und Drang and that’s not at all Cruz’s fault.

While the ceiling is low and the majority of So Close To What is annoyingly undercooked, there is still a lot of promise to be found. Tate and her team clearly have an ear for sticky melodies and the lack of necessary lore is appreciated, but there still is a very pervasive sense of figuring things out here.

Lyrically, it’s inconsistent, and doesn’t serve its title or occasional flirtations with current events very well besides a few references smattered in every other song. Musically, though, it feels more disposable than before, and less beholden to locking into deeper, more resonant grooves.

In the Lonely Hour is less meaningless and vapid than a song as unapologetically hammy as “Classic,” but the result is unfortunately the same.

Smile! :D is a weird album. It’s equal parts disappointing and enjoyable: it’s a good time if you don’t pay too much attention and zone out every once in a while. Most of all, it’s a failed experiment.

New Material is an album that achieves a lot, but accepts failure as an option and takes it with a begrudging grace. So much can be made out of the stories told in the album's songs, but with the general lack of ideas, the role of the doomsayer is running its course for Preoccupations.

A good-to-great set of songs, that would make a fire mixtape if you cut the energy-draining bores "RUNITUP" and "I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE"? A half-finished classic album, powered by reckless abandon and thrilling energy, but too scattershot to make it over the finish line? It's both, and neither, and I don't know, man. ... Call Me If You Get Lost is too busy shooting itself in the foot and calling it coming down to earth to be complete, but following along with its fragmented course down is still an exercise worth engaging in.

Good at Falling makes little headway into its own unique musical space, that’s something fans can hopefully expect in the future as Bain continues to distance herself from this vigilantly-traced launching pad. For now, here’s to another round of synth-laden pop balladry.

While the album’s too inconsistent in style to be considered a successful change of pace for the group, it’s at least a promising sign of things to come.

This is the kind of music Shearwater plays best--the it gives the band the space they need. It is a damned shame most of Fellow Travelers opposes this idea, with songs that are defined too rigidly for the Texan reimaginists.

The majority of this new record feels stuck in a chordal rut. The dynamic tension between the musical surface and the tonal depth is alive and well, but Disappeared serves as an excellent reminder that good rock music needs more than just ideas to thrive.

Whilst by no means an unmitigated disaster, Michael fails to do much of anything beyond that which we already knew was well within its namesake’s capabilities.

Despite its frustratingly monadic nature Howl does hold attention.

Mercurial Bay is bland and overpolished and probably insecure and definitely destined to make mincemeat of fickle hearts all over the web. It is good and shiny like an overviewed but freshly refiltered Instagram photo of a Hollywood sunset.

For all the razzle-dazzle of its surprise release, I’m struck by hard it is to draw a lasting overall impression from the record. It adds little to the reinvention established by Folklore and doesn’t deepen her work within this sound in particularly convincing terms. I want to credit her at least for keeping up an industrious streak, but this alone would seem patronising.

Unlike past efforts, however, Ti Amo is jarring for how glossy and smooth everything sounds.

It may be palatable and generally inoffensive on a whole, but Ghost on Ghost really goes down best when viewed as a supplement to other better, more transcendent material already out there.

It’s too harsh to suggest that the band are coasting, since there are once more fragments of ideas, concepts and melodies which arouse.

The Last Will and Testament is slickly produced, conceptually sound and stronger in its first half. Unfortunately, it lacks an overall aesthetic that would see this record reach the accolades of Blackwater Park, Watershed or even Heritage while dabbling in those clear elements.

All in all, Forever Howlong feels like a missed opportunity. There are enough good bits to show that the band are as capable as ever of crafting a spellbinding moment, but there’s a frustrating lack of direction or commitment that prevents these moments from ever coalescing.

Apart from a precious few exceptions, none of the gathered musicians seem able nor willing to push each other into new musical territory that could yield fresh revelations about their union.

The inherent problems which bog Welcome Home down largely stem from superficial writing. This is nothing new for the band, but for a record centring itself around Vinnie, the lyrics feel like they’re skirting around the topic in a humdrum manner in favour of really getting into the nitty-gritty of it all.

Even at 45 minutes, Education, Education, Education & War feels too long, because the Chiefs are 100% committed to impose their sarcastic views till the last second.

Baptize is as much a trip through modern day Atreyu cliché as it highlights the best of the group’s more...aged cuts.

It is without a plan and without much of an aim, save for vague touchstones in ‘80s pop and new wave, a path tread much more smoothly by Casablancas’ prior solo work.

This moment of fuzzed-out, fucked-up pop music with questionably scant odes to rap music is not designed for posterity. To his credit, Post gets that, and is content to make overlong albums where every song can be a single. Not every song on beerbongs and bentleys can be a single, but there’s enough of them hiding in there to make it one of 2018’s more rewarding releases.

It is the last two tracks of EP2 that bring a little disappointment.

Gravebloom is a fun album. Honest. But it’s also a rehash, plain and simple. Nothing done across its eleven tracks hasn’t been done on previous Acacia Strain records.

At its worst, Younger Now is inoffensively bland, wasted Dolly Parton talent aside. Songs like "Love Someone" are dead on arrival with their lifeless energy and forgettable hooks.

Unfortunately, Wolf fails in the very same manner as Goblin, albeit with slightly more class.

Ringo remains Ringo, for better and worse. And in keeping with the hangdog Ringo persona this isn’t even the best country-adjacent album by a Beatle. It’s an album for Ringo Starr, and if we can’t give it any sort of adulation, we can at least respect its intentions, and those of the artists who made it.

From Zero is a tale of two halves. The first half feels like pandering to what people miss from Linkin Park. .... However, by the time “Overflow” rolls around, a switch flips. Though it’s more of a Shinoda track, it sets the stage for a strong second half, with its dark and captivating atmosphere and simplistic instrumentation that makes it a powerful standout. From this point on, From Zero maintains momentum.

Is 4 Lovers isn’t a bad album, it just lacks that much-needed energy and purpose. A lot of the songs here feel like they’re going through the motions.

At its best, the album embodies the curiosity of revisiting audio or video recordings, scanning for oddities which could possibly be the etchings of spirits crossing the veil between worlds. At its worst, Gallarais fools you into thinking its divination has lasting credibility.

Supercharged is a surprisingly decent, albeit flawed record. There are elements of greatness at the heart of it, but the problems soon arise when The Offspring attempt to veer away from their wheelhouse of driving riffs and infectious hooks.

The Future Bites traverses a strange course ripe with rewarding avenues and detours of failed attempts alike. It’s nothing if not fascinating, and will perhaps be more rewarding to those with a high tolerance for unorthodox marriage of various elements influenced by Prince, 1980s pop, modern electronic music, and alternative rock.

In trying for everything, they’ve highlighted the disjointedness of the end product, turning a fully-fledged transformation into an erratic collection of middling-to-great Belle & Sebastian songs.

Kantos isn’t all bad, but it is his worst album yet. It’s somehow both too cluttered and more conventional at the same time, and the lyrics, while pretty most of the time, don’t hit as hard as they did on this record’s predecessor.

Off With Her Head is a solid album, well-produced and with occasional moments of brilliance, but ultimately it’s the singer’s blandest effort to date, its best moments offering little more than a bittersweet reminder of what it could have been.

As far as simplistic and generic post-rock goes it’s fantastically inoffensive. Yet with the face of the genre ever changing, God is an Astronaut and their sixth are slowly becoming a relic of the past.

Its moments of potential aren’t to be to be trifled with, but neither are they enough to elevate it from a stale sequence of overthought ideas, and this is a real tragedy given its stark contrast to the preview performance the band gave on KEXP back in April.

As a result of their indulgence, The Night Creeper feels somewhat forced to be something it isn't. The mindset is far from what we heard on Vol. I and Blood Lust, although the ideas are the same. Recycling is good, however, 4 albums later it turned against them.

There's No Leaving Now was almost as good as The Wild Hunt--and now I Love You. It’s a Fever Dream. is almost as good as There's No Leaving Now. It’s diminishing returns on the same approach, and with this album we’ll definitely find ourselves satisfied yet again--only with another layer of appreciation eroded.

This time around, deprived of their usual energy or lyrical quotient, they are nothing more than a momentarily likable diversion.

We have Gone Now, which alternates in black-and-white fashion between intriguing and utterly flavorless.

For about nine songs, Experience is good.

Truly, the blame lies at the feet of Sean, whose limp bars and flow make middling fare of ten reasonably well-rounded bangers.

The good thing is this second record, Born Pink is a slight improvement overall, feeling a tad more cohesive, despite its modest runtime of 24 minutes. Their debut was simply a mixed bag of tracks thrown there to please the horde of fans who insisted on a full length release.

While her vocals absolutely rule 99% of the time, the instruments just do not measure up. It's hard to even point out specific parts because it all blends together and not in a good way.

Ultimately settling into a safe, at times boring sonic bubble.