There are still traces of their recent, more mature outings, but those moments are predictably outshined by the ones that harken back to the band's glory days.

There are a couple groovy licks scattered here and there which are half decent, but otherwise it's a tepid exercise in mediocrity difficult to even feign interest in.

My World 2.0 is effective and innocent Top 40 material, if not terribly inventive.

Even where the record shines--and it does at points--it really only does so against a background of blinding light from Muse’s back catalog, which is an unfortunate, but inescapable point.

Unfortunately, it is hard to embrace these strengths on such a predictably unfocused album.

There’s something for everyone, and OCS do well to cater to a crowd who are afraid of falling with the rest of us into the future.

Tapes is hampered by unimaginative mixing and a serious lull in proceedings at the halfway point.

Carry On is not a bad album, nor is it a good one.

Working at breakneck speed, Vivian Girls is sloggy, hampered by the cloying feeling that the lo-fi shtick is simply too on-the-nose.

Most of the tracks emulate what could be B-Sides of a post-Lemons Ant, doing nothing so groundbreaking as regurgitating mid-90's soul.

Every once in a while, Myself In The Way’s commitment to boringness leads to some Nice Music.

S/T is a valiant try by a band that has a strong history of trying, but it’s neither an impressive return to form, a nostalgic trip back to 90s emo, nor is it a breakthrough in Rainer Maria’s sound, it mostly just exists.

The disc is hook laden but the hooks are bland. The rapping is heartfelt but forgettable and, 'So Far To Go,' easily the highlight of the album, is actually a track of J Dilla's posthumous "The Shining."

As a soundtrack, it works. Moody music fills the background, and in that respect it is largely a success. Yet as a standalone listen, the record is a weak and almost slap-dash display, with Arnalds feeling regrettably uninspired.

Riceboy Sleeps isn't quite awful; on the contrary, there is enough warmth and prettiness to give the record some value. But by the same token, it's certainly not fantastic either, and therein lies the great problem with the whole project.

The album is still very much a tale of two cities: for every half-baked wobbly anthem that the rooster-haired cockney thug has in his pocket he still manages to surprise with an occasional outburst of borderline genius.

It aims to give fans something different, but it does the bare minimum.

Grande is far too talented to be crafting forgettable pop albums, so here’s to hoping that she regains her footing soon.

As it stands, it’s just another Vampire Weekend album, except the songs are less catchy and more sterile this time around.

It's hard to mess up a good thing too badly and there are certainly enjoyable moments on The Green Album.

MGMT have (purposely?) lost that instant magic that they effortlessly whipped up with those debut singles, and in trying to re-establish themselves as artists that don't need the commercial mainstream to survive, they've created a record that lacks any defining characteristics to call its own.

Artpop is the third album by pop recording artist Lady Gaga. Therefore it has similarities to her previous work but is inherently different because it is a different album.

Never Enough's tepid reheats demand some form of urgent rethink.

Despite the similarities, there’s actually a few brief moments in The Floodlight Collective where Pundt one-ups the band he derivates from, but there’s unfortunately as many that are boring enough to negate any previous triumph.

Shinedown has the raw talent to keep Amaryllis afloat, but the album is full of holes and it always appears to be on the verge of sinking.

This latest Lana del Rey record does contain some measure of robust and moving songwriting about topics other than sex, death and California. ... Secondary highlights “Paris, Texas” and “Kintsugi” disappear into the background; otherwise cogent hip-hop flirtations turn into innocuous daliances (“Fishtail”); the middle of the road becomes the most desolate of wasted spaces (“Fingertips”).

Frankly, Mercer’s unfiltered production makes Heartworms an exhausting listen.

In the end, what you’re left with is a generic rock album with a couple of noteworthy moments and an aftertaste that will probably alienate a few long-time fans of the band.

You Will Eventually Be Forgotten offers nothing new nor does it pay respectable homage to its influences.

While an interesting concept, neither CD contains enough strong material to match up to either of her previous releases, and at times, the constant barrage of R&B cliches and adult-contemporary production make it sound like Beyonce is rapidly transforming from hot, hip pop goddess to your standard bored diva.

Picture Perfect's silver lining comes in that it is, at the end of the day, a perfectly serviceable pop record replete with euphoric headrushes and the occasional tenacious earworm ("Impossible").

Mission Bell isn't anywhere near a disaster, but it's also nowhere close to being a great album. Whatever it is Amos Lee went off in search of at the beginning of this album, he should have kept looking for it.

The music itself isn't really the issue. It's the conceit, the fact that even though Kanye and Jay-Z truthfully are nailing what pop can sound like, they use their royal stature not to communicate fresh ideas but pander to their subjects because they f*cking can.

That consistent album we're waiting for still hasn't come just yet.

The album is just standard rock/alternative affair.

In the glutton of pretty records, With Our Heads in the Clouds and Our Hearts in the Fields presents itself as a merely a needle in the haystack; the likelihood is that it will be lost in the mix, not good enough to be remember, but also not bad enough to be singled-out.

It’s a series of surprisingly coherent and original steps forward, followed by a series of steps both backwards and sideways. I’d venture to say that’s better than continuing to rummage around the status quo at least, even if the cumulative results are still decidedly average.

Overcome is but a grain in the sand on an oversaturated desert; a metal album you'll enjoy while you play it but won't ever be something you‘ll yearn to hear.

Devoid of any country heart, country soul, or country swing, if Bon Jovi had started out a country band and decided to play mainstream rock, this is what it would sound like.

777 - The Desanctication leaves the band treading water, unable to escape onto dry, firm land... This leaves Blut Aus Nord in a funny situation: they are 2/3 of the way through a trilogy that has no character other than its egg-shell atmosphere – thin and prone to cracking with no solid musical base underneath to resist and hold the shell in place.

Perhaps Sky Full of Holes will be that album to some impressionable youth whose idea of power pop revolves around Justin Bieber ballads, but for longtime fans it just sounds tired and dusty. Fountains of Wayne are still doing what they've always done, but I think I've finally grown up.

An unwieldy, 80-minute record that was barely promoted and likely rushed to release. It's not 22 tracks of straight garbage, but the idea that Chance had three very viable debut album candidates but chose this as his big day would be funny if it wasn't so deeply frustrating.

Copycat Killer is an unexpectedly clumsy release and often fails to spotlight the subtitles that brought its tracklist close to excellence. Its clear attraction is that Bridgers’ gorgeous vocals are more prominent here than on the original version, but this is cancelled out by how awkwardly the string pairing tends to clash with her performance.

AmeriKKKant falls on its face pretty fast.

Good Nature recaptures the brightness and pop sheen, sure, but it's a trip back to a treasured childhood location only to find that the palace in your mind was always just a fallen tree, and the river your dreams used to float along forever is just a kinda gross, muddy little stream.

There’s glimmers of the old brilliance here and there of course. Exotic BOP may be a pale, miserable ghost of the glory days, but there’s life to be found in Angela, its funk line feeling like it's going to be the root of something that’s about to flourish, but whoops, there it goes into its weird low-effort basement style as Stas THEE Boss delivers a verse that’s passable enough, but which doesn’t do anything to dig the rest of the track from out of its own mire.

For lack of a better word, it’s dull. The subtext of this record is rich for those firmly invested in Swift’s personal narratives but, perhaps for the first time, outright irrelevant for anyone else.

This disconnect between intent and delivery is explicit the entire album through. From the harried, unfinished-sounding "No Mistakes" which is built on a skeletal Slick Rick sample and almost nothing else, to the choppy breaks for chorus in "All Mine", to "Wouldn't Leave" which is basically a Francis and the Lights demo with a Kanye scratch vocal quickly added in.

As a Lily Allen record, it’s a sneering, vapid imitation: a Lily Allen stereotype.

The Tortured Poets Department is too pulseless to inspire anything at all – and so when Swift does lay down the occasional track with colour in her cheeks, the results tend to tower over the rest of the album regardless of any visible issues they bear. Practically every one of the its greatest highlights is a glaring case-in-point for one or another of its recurrent flaws, yet transcends them through sheer pep and conviction.

Volume Three can’t flourish under the force of her considerable personality or Ward’s craftsmanship, because the latter has been deadened and the former is unwilling to break the illusion.

M is painfully bland and too on the nose.

Ultimately, A Fine Mess is a subpar offering that sounds like you’d imagine it to: a handful of B-sides with varying degrees of enjoyment, made worse by a myriad of problems. Devoted fans should find a meagre portion of redemption here, but to the casual listener this will bring little enjoyment to the table.

There is roughly an EP worth of songs here that bring something remotely interesting to the table, rather than simply rehashing past ideas and reproducing beats you’ve heard in 100 other tracks before.

Heaven to a Tortured Mind eliminates the diversity and nuance of its predecessor in favour of underdeveloped avant-pop.

The Dead of the World, well, doesn't do much of anything. It's cold without being chilling; it's colorless without being dark.

Too bad it doesn’t come together better as it merely buckles down into a messy heap of proggy tomfoolery.

Every single song is still about smoking with girls, and every song is the same stale, tired, derivative indie/emo I’ve heard a million times.

Fennesz' ear for striking textures takes the spotlight precisely once here: through the latter minutes of the opener "Heliconia", he plucks and rakes his guitar as though putting it on life support, the stark tone of the instrument a fragile contrast to the densely processed sound that otherwise dominates the album. It produces a genuinely compelling tension and sets the bar modestly high, this but proves to be an early peak: the remaining five tracks lay down one languorous chord pattern after another, their digital modulations and cavernous reverb settings spread too thin to patch the threadbare cast-offs.

The frustrating desire for something daring or interesting is never satiated. To be blunt, Evolution is essentially a blander version of Immortalized, which was the flavourless porridge version of Asylum, which was the graham cracker version of Indestructible. Even the song titles are uninspired.

Music to Be Murdered By doesn’t improve on Kamikaze, that’s largely down to its run time and hodgepodge of styles, but I can say there was at least some effort put into this one. The production is decent, the vocals occasionally hearken back to his playful era, and the guests do a pretty great job throughout, but there’s still too much baggage being carried over from the ‘10’s Eminem albums, and it kills a lot of the potential here.

Given Jónsi’s past solo releases and Sigur Rós’s discography, Shiver should have been much better than it turned out. While not a complete trainwreck, it disappointingly features a minimum of the signature greatness listeners have come to expect.

The faults of Bouquet lie not in the genre lane-switch, but in the artist’s seeming disdain for her own talent, which by-and-large goes unutilised here in favour of an exceptionally flavourless, dirt-road bland, pop country excursion.

‘1999’ has a nice, early 90s computer game vibe, but the BMTH-esque screaming vocals completely kill any momentum that the two-minute track had. It really is a shame because there are plenty of moments here that make you think that Danny might turn the corner and bring back some of the whacky, darker vibes from the past, but those moments are always killed by embarrassing vocals, cringe worthy pop choruses and not enough of Danny himself actually rapping.

While much of the record’s content could be charitably filed under inoffensively middle-of-the-road, ‘Outsider’, ‘Addicted To Pain’ and ‘Shards’ are some of the feeblest compositions the band has ever released.

Aside from its occasional highlights, Crisis of Faith feels haggard, tired and lost: branching in a handful of uninteresting, jarring directions with little apparent rhyme or reason.

Near to the Wild Heart of Life succeeds only in proving that the Japandroids of 2017 will have a hard time matching their former glories.

“She Shines” displays fleeting snippets of raw emotion over chunky guitars, while “In Time”’s surging, punchy, melodious hooks bring some recognition of greatness to the forefront, but overall, the majority of the album seems pretty content with functioning on passive, prosaic ideas with little staying power.

The End, So Far is lack-lustre at almost every turn.

The bulk of EVERGREEN does little more than yeeting a distorted riff at you, copy-pasting vocal melodies on top and subsequently repeating a few lines by way of a chorus (and, if you’re lucky, this is the part where Gunn’s vocals get a little grittier, yay!). While this affords the record an inherent sense of cohesion, none of the songs here are particularly memorable or uh, good.

FM! might have personality, but it's of the more obnoxious and self-obsessed "Get the Fuck Off My Dick" variety, and there's simply not enough quality on display to justify its own brief and largely annoying existence. Next.

The result is an unfortunately hollow album, recycled in its sound and empty in its emotion.

The number of songs and the length would be a bit more understandable if there weren’t also the feeling that some of these songs are woefully undercooked and underdeveloped, but it feels like a true russian roulette to engage with the totality of Music when you get a song that feels kinetic and lively and progresses, only to then be met with a bonafide voice memo that repeats one idea over and over.

All in all, not the death knell that it could have been but not the triumphant return it so could have been at the same time, Descension is another addition to the Coheed saga.

You’re Not As ___ As You Think feels like the conclusion to something that was never started in the first place, it hasn’t earned any of the things it takes without asking, it’s a shallow pretender desperately fumbling in the deep end, and it’s an unfortunate development for a band that used to write dumb, fun songs about girls.

In fairness, Witness isn't a failure, and its good intentions, both politically and sexually, aren't insufferable as much as they are listless and unsatisfying.

Sadly, the relative adventurousness of Girl of My Dreams has been traded in for trite stadium-pop fodder that doesn’t play into Fletcher’s core strengths as an artist.

Almost all these songs are dynamically stolid and melodically immemorable to the point of interchangeability; the drum parts are phenomenally disappointing coming from a musician as talented as Jimmy Chamberlain; Corgan’s voice still sounds like old tarmac with inconsistent numbers of cars passing over it; and every song follows an identical progression from midtempo verse to homogenous chorus.

It doesn't help that the music in general is so stubbornly tepid. Sure, overall it's a step up from The Black Market, but there's nothing here that gives the hope of Rise Against vaguely recalling what they used to be good at.

These slightly above average hooks/melodies deserve better. I deserve better. So tell me it’s over.

Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon doesn’t expand on its original ideas, it gives you less – a familiar, now tenebrous and barren wasteland. The bottom line being; when your reimagined version makes an already lethargic album look like an action-packed thrill ride, you know you've got problems.

The album is a frustrating, calculated mishmash of pop powerhouses, balladry and dance music, but are either underdeveloped, overdeveloped, or just plain bad.

These tracks of moderate length are dull and lack any sort of imagination or emotional intensity.

NAV is front-to-back one of the blandest takes on the genre so far.

There's a minor detail to enjoy in almost every song on here, but the whole is average to the point of being physically sickening for anybody who fell in love with their magical debut.

The Stepford wives of shoegaze.

Post Human: Nex Gen is genuinely impressive. How does one band manage to rip off Deaf Havana, Deftones, Boston Manor, Enter Shikari, Porter Robinsonbithfimtaylorswift, Green Day, Radiohead, MGK, Iggy Pop and DreamWeaver, feature Underoath, Aurora, Lil Uzi Vert, Daryl Palumbo and Glassjaw… and be this goddamn boring?

The end result is a tepid, lifeless album devoid of everything that we've come to expect from them in this part of their career, leaving only the most traditional aspects of their sound intact.

Bleeding Through's self-titled album is yet another Bleeding Through release that tries to skirt by on the bare minimum. For every good idea presented, there are three more trite and tired ideas weighted to it, dragging it down into the abyss.

A gimmicky novelty album that has a handful of redeeming songs but will ultimately fade into the ether within a few months.

Taking into account that half of Leave This Town was never intended for headphone listening, and is better heard blasting on a car stereo or a jukebox, it can seem somewhat picky to criticise the album for being poorly-written or for sounding like compressed dog poo.

More often than not (and this is the kicker, ladies and gentlemen), Pretty. Odd. is just pretty dull.

With a good production, some of these tracks could have been saved, but by all accounts, Let the Bad Times Roll is the worst album The Offspring have ever made.

Outer South is too long, too uninteresting, and too uninspired to be anything better than not good at all.

The band is out of gas and has been for a while now. Wonderful Wonderful fills the same role as Battle Born, taking mid-tempo pop-rock with aimless verses and marrying them to one stab-at-the-radio chorus after another.

‘Espresso’/‘Please Please Please’ are each strong enough in their own respective ways to carry Sabrina to stardom and keep her there for years to come. It’s just a shame that the rest of this record couldn’t live up to those efforts, because anything worthwhile to be gleaned from this particular era of Sabrina Carpenter’s career has already been out and heard a hundred times over.

As a whole, Cardiology is an attempt to leave behind the band's failed newer sound and return to their pop-punk roots.

A huge chunk of the record comes across as a potent reminder that even at the height of her powers, Lopez tended to provide second-rate, filler radio pop which was distinctly inferior to what Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and even Shakira were pumping out at the time.