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.

Laugh Track makes several welcome adjustments to their present-day formula, but it’s hardly a wholesale reorientation – and make no mistake, the National are still very much in need of one.

Post Human: Survival Horror doesn’t break any moulds, it’s the sonic equivalent to fast food, by which you’ll consume it, enjoy it, and forget about it right after you’ve finished it, but it’s fun while it lasts.

To be blunt, Tesseract are entirely too reliant on ambiance as their "secret sauce." Where a proper use of ambiance can add a pensive tone or an opportunity for emotional reflection to a song, Tesseract rely on it both as cohesive glue on nearly every track on Sonder and as a melody replacement. It's simply not enough.

It's really unfortunate that Inc. hasn't been able to elevate beyond these very basic production mistakes; they give an impression that No World was either unmastered or mastered haphazardly.

It just lacks in a hallmark of all prior Ducktails releases: imagination.

This is an album of songs for a big idea before it was shrunken down and packed into the blockbuster money machine, and its well-intentioned attempt at bringing legitimacy to Marvel leaves Lamar and co. alone on a podium, broadcasting their passions through a megaphone to kids who just came to see superheroes do some backflips.

JAY-Z tries to invigorate his musical career by connecting with himself for other people's sake. In total, it sounds like what it is, a business leader for whom the personal proves troublingly difficult to connect with.

On balance, Lost Worker Bee simply does not do enough to distinguish itself from the rest of Elbow’s oeuvre, and therein lies its greatest failing.

The album's aesthetics are vaguely mostly there, but their function feels overly superficial. Giving The World Away does raise the bar over Keepsake in that it explores a wider range of palettes (jangle pop, gazey noise pop, synth-pop) and backs itself with a more momentous set of beats, but this is largely undermined by Pitfall the Second: Hatchie the vocalist.

Even with its glaring issues, Rise shows a lot of promise for Hollywood Vampires. If the band should ever choose to proceed further, an exclusive focus on original material seems like the best way to go, given that this is where Rise displays its, and the band’s, strongest attributes.

Aureate Gloom distinguishes itself in Barnes’ catalog as its own inexplicable set of contradictions: a record rendered inert and sabotaged by its own ambitions.

Felt, in turn, is not Suuns going through the motions; it's Suuns putting down their guitars and dusting off the synthesizers and scrounging up less than stellar material.

A Productive Cough should have refined and furthered those musical ambitions, but basically, it didn't--they're right back where they came from in a dying scene, idolising the genre's past and ignoring its future when they could have easily been the writers of it instead.

This may well be the group’s most sonically diverse outing yet, for good and for ill; even on the many occasions it isn’t convincing, it often manages enough novelty to entertain nonetheless, and Nigel Godrich's impeccable production job certainly makes the whole affair easy on the ears.

Ultimately, Harry's House doesn’t really go anywhere or do much of anything at all. It breezes by with songs that seemed designed for the festival circuit and that are interesting and experimental enough that they’ll fit with Harry’s aesthetic without being too alienating for radio, almost as if he and his team couldn’t decide which was more important to them, so they went with neither.

Stale songwriting and (mercifully) brief track durations birth forth mind-numbing verses and uninteresting choruses that repeat all too often, in all too predictable configurations. With such uninspired material to work with, it's difficult to conjure an emotion either side of ambivalent, neither to exalt nor to condemn.

The Jaws of Life sets itself apart by not really doing anything memorable or interesting. In fact, it doesn't do much at all besides existing. It neither follows trends nor tries its hand at anything original.

If I’d stuck to just a listen or two of Bad Apple or No Homo, I’d be tempted to think this was a good album. But underneath the fight-montage attack, the songwriting feels about as lazy as it can possibly get. I’m not looking for math-rock bridges or string sections in my garage band or anything, but there’s a difference between walking down a well-trod path and wallowing.

As a comeback album following one of the decade's most memorable flameouts, it reaches all expectations adequately. But considering the late musician you're obviously modeled after (and more disappointingly, the Hella-inspired track to which this album seems to forget ever existed), King of the Beach feels more like an expertly timed marketing ploy.

Atlas Sound meanders where it ponders, a purely ethereal trip without the oomph.