As with Lover, folklore wears out its welcome by containing too many tracks. A tighter song list would have done a world of good.

Permalight was an unacceptable rocking of the boat. Nightingale Floors is an all too predictable response, then, safely ensconced as it is in the warm, reverb-heavy sound of beloved predecessors like 2005’s Descended Like Vultures and an atmosphere far more organic in tone and mood than Permalight.

CRASH might not be up there with her best, but it's still a good pop album, and worth trying for any fans of the genre.

It’s been five albums now with this formula, and I’m not saying I’m looking for a New Coke version of Tiny Moving Parts, the formula is very good, but it’s holding the band back from being anything more than pretty good.

Sparks is an album containing its share of diamonds, but only if you’re willing to sift through the rough in order to find them.

Metal Forth isn’t a bad album—it’s just deeply disappointing. It doesn’t feel like a new release, and more importantly, it doesn’t sound like a Babymetal album. Ironically, the three excellent original tracks only highlight what the rest of the album is missing.

The serene aesthetic is undisputedly the selling strength here, but if you’re looking for some of the band’s best creative ideas, you won’t find many of them here. Nevertheless, if you’re wanting a wholesome pop-rock album with plenty of experimentation, you may find a thing or two to like here.

It’s encouraging to see Thrice so keen to play with different palettes at this point in their career, and they clearly have enough of their old touch left to make those critical moments count. However, if Horizons / East really represents a new dawn for the band, one can only hope that its rays penetrate a little further across its recently confirmed sequel.

The Pretty Reckless don’t do a great deal to prove the cynics wrong here. More frustratingly, they are undoubtedly capable of much better.

Happiness Is is warming shot of feel good guitar pop and bright choruses that is easily on par with the best of the latter half of Taking Back Sunday's career.

For fans of Pretty Lights, A Color Map of the Sun is an acceptable recreation of his wild live show, if nothing else. For those looking to get into the real contradiction of Smith, the album makes for a wonderful primer.

Silversun Pickups’ fifth full-length sees the band craft another very enjoyable alt-rock album, but it’s one that is full of holes. For every catchy melody, they seem to abandon their creative spirit. When they aspire for the stars artistically, they can’t seem to locate their tune sense.

Pulls its weight at the points that count, fumbles mainly at those that don't, feels less successful holistically than it does as the sum of its parts, leaves me with anything but satisfaction by the time it's done, and does very little to address the question of when Shepherd will finally show the chutzpah and scope of vision to make a truly great work on solely his own terms.

This is verse-chorus-verse as pleasantly intuitive as it comes, thematically light yet with enough room for the musicians to show their considerable skill.

Big Red Machine is an exercise in expectation and follow-through, and in how throwing a bunch of good ideas at a song doesn’t make a good song, nor a bunch of great tracks onto vinyl wax a great album.

Liturgy of Death is still a decent slab of black metal, but for a band that has released so many classic albums full of banger riffs, hellish drum performances and demonic vocals, this album just doesn't measure up.

Hyperdrama will ultimately please fans who enjoyed their last two albums, but for anyone else hoping for a more adventurous LP that captures the succinct, edgy and grimy attitude of Cross, you’re going to be left disappointed. Justice’s fourth album caters to the radio-friendly masses, and frankly, they do a good job of it.

The main problem it faces is trying to successfully combine her new, slower palate with the tense, rapid-fire elements she's known for. To anyone who has been listening to her discography for long, this is clearly something that will be difficult for anyone to pull off. And to her credit, she tries.

Reachy Prints is yet another tedious exercise in modern IDM attempting to stay relevant, and failing to do a very good job of convincing us listeners that it is.

Winter’s Gate is entirely enjoyable throughout--nothing is even close to being poorly written or executed--it is just that there are almost no moments in the entire 40 minutes that I would call exceptional, where the band went above and beyond to craft something truly memorable.

There are a handful of potential hits on Distortland, still they needed some structuring or at least a more powerful instrumental to be compelling.

Not everything's entirely stale, though. On the whole, the djent factor of the album is lower than most others (spare, perhaps, Juggernaut: Alpha) and the inclusion of orchestral elements throughout makes things feel a little more open, inviting, and intriguing.

Despite being frustratingly inconsistent though, Andrew McMahon In The Wilderness is still a step in the right direction.

Add Violence returns us to the bite-sized pop with-a-dark-side which has been Reznor's bread and butter since 2005, but without the energy of Dave Grohl pounding the drum kit like it said a bad word about Kurt Cobain.

While Die Without Hope is a mixed bag, I enjoyed it enough to at least recommend it to Carnifex fans, fans of deathcore, or even fans of blackened death metal who are looking at a band with some potential in the genre.

It's really cool on paper, a showcase of obvious and enormous talent with an extensive feature list that manages to satiate fans’ long-awaited fantasies while still giving them opportunities to explore new discographies. yet somehow it still ends up much smaller than the sum of its parts, particularly the main star.

Some of it wants to carry on the torch of its predecessor, other parts of it want to redefine Karnivool, and other parts don’t even seem to have any discernible purpose, like those god-awful interludes.

“Reluctant Hero”’s post-rock introduction and its booming mid-section pay-off delivers one of the crowning highlights for the entire album, while the rest of the record is peppered with great reverb-y, ambient soundscapes and really well-executed vocal performances from all parties involved, unearthing the squandered potential here. Unfortunately, these aspects are definitely overlooked in favour of the aforementioned thrash-y, hardcore sound.