It’s hugely to Owens’ credit that he’s turned his hand at a slew of different styles in assured fashion to date, but neither this album nor Lysandre really hold the universal pop appeal of Girls’ output, either.

While Purple Noon is likely Greene’s most lackluster output, it’s not a total bust. He does manage to squeeze in a few noteworthy moments that briefly highlight his songwriting.

This is a conventional theme LP rather than a document providing a great deal of insight into Bright Eyes’ musical development.

The stories she unveils here can get dull and repetitive – as they are designed to be relatable to as wide an audience as possible – but the way she tells them is, more often than not, captivating enough to sit through the 3-minute runtime.

At only 32 minutes and housing five interludes, The Age of Pleasure is slim on ideas and music. It would be more successful if she followed the same pattern of zinging between genre and form effortlessly like on Dirty Computer, but this record largely sticks to reggae and funk, leading to a slower, more lax mood.

Smile feels like it’s just kind of there. It just sits at the table surrounded by Perry’s past, which has some of the aforementioned biggest tracks of the ‘00s, and a couple of toe-dips into new territory which were at least commendable, but Smile just walks the line of enjoyable.

Nobody’s Home struggles to grasp the organic feel of Badkid throughout its run time, but tracks like “Youthenasia”, “Riot”, and “Alone Again” make whatever heights are out there for him an eventuality.

There are no question marks next to ambition here but rather a general air of confusion in the artistic make-up of the songs that makes Mosaic a slightly frustrating listen.

There aren’t any outright failures on Full Circle--Bernardout and her bandmates Dom Goldsmith and Arthur Delaney are too talented to turn out a subpar project--but there are moments that simply lack staying power.

Views, like Take Care and Nothing Was the Same before it, is brilliant in places and thoroughly bloated in others.

The record isn’t a patch on his very best stuff, but compare Original Pirate Material to the work of the vast majority of artists and they’ll come up short. For every eye rolling moment, there are more than enough to make you glad The Streets are back.

The frustrating thing about Past Lives is that it simply sounds like good music. It is not bigger or smaller than the sum of its parts – it’s exactly that. The members got the recipe just right, but it doesn’t leave much of an aftertaste.

House in the Tall Grass is a sonically pure endeavor, but its beauty does not withstand scrutiny. Though it aspires to soundtrack, music by which to have interesting experiences, it amounts to mere mood music; ambience and suggestions of potential, but little else.

This isn’t a terrible album, but it’s not much more than a re-run of what Pelican have been doing for a decade before.

It’s an album that washes over, vying for attention, but never quite succeeds in grabbing it, and never quite living up to what Cold War Kids could be.

Herein lies the central problem with Devendra Banhart’s latest record; there are moments to savour, but for each of these there’s at least one frustrating or disappointing moment to counteract it.

Strange Burden, while infuriatingly short, is paced and produced acutely.

Though impressive and vaguely explorative, the record falls slightly short of the mark for an outfit aiming to reinvent themselves.

There are a lot of underwhelming moments that come in tracks that don’t quite find the perfect marriage between conflicting styles. But Red Earth and Pouring Fire is an admirably ambitious album and presents Bear’s Den as a far more diverse, capable band that many would have previously thought.

Weezer’s greatest misses may come from their frontman’s visceral desperation to stay relevant, but it’s a relief to hear them take chances and risk failure in such a new way. The album might just be OK, but it’s been a long time since Weezer have dared to be this human.

There is a somewhat disconcerting beauty to some of Pre-Human Ideas’ songs.

In the end, another eternity leaves us somewhere in the middle, to contemplate the excellent and the bland.

Talk Memory excels as an advertisement for prodigious jazz technique, but it just doesn't excel as a BADBADNOTGOOD record.

In the end it is a work crippled by its own indecision, and perhaps bowed by the weight of expectation: a shame, for sure, but hardly a reason to lose faith.

This natural movement away from jazz has led them to a sort of awkward middle ground. It feels like To Believe is a beautiful soundtrack to a film we don’t have the visuals for. And it’s just not quite enough on its own.

While Pedestrian is not the most remarkable album, it feels honest and comforting.

God’s Favorite Customer isn’t afforded the opportunity to shine with Tillman’s usual charming spirit--that’s not because the turmoil of heartache is too mundane a subject for the philosophically-minded Tillman to master, but because in order to master it, he needs to do more to whip up his usual reckless innovation.

While these tracks aren’t necessarily bad by any set definition, it’s worth looking at them through a critical scope and for grand moments like these that once carried so much weight early in their career, we have to begin asking ourselves just how many times can a group reduplicate their sound before their efforts simply become white noise.