The result is that you're having fun--on tracks like the stellar title-track and the popping candy overload of 'Let Me Show You Love' you can't help it--but increasingly it feels hollow... almost kitsch, and deep down you know that you, and the band, can really do better.

Voivod have a hardcore following and for most, this much anticipated album will be received with adoration. For the rest of us, it's to be hoped that with relatively new bandmate in Mongrain, this is a transient moment before they head off to fight new battles.

A few instrumental passages could have been reined in, while the misguided inclusion of the irritating 'Dark Side' is an unfortunate blight on what is, overall, a cascading and rewarding listen.

While With Love is an ambitious and entertainingly composed undertaking, offering glimpses into Zomby’s varied inspirations, it can still be frustratingly piecemeal and somewhat self-indulgent.

Instead of a coherent collection of songs, Animal Joy feels like a series of very clever blueprints that, while admirable in form, are often (despite that title), rather bloodless.

Grinderman 2 RMX provides an enjoyable enough distraction but ultimately this is a collection of material that would have worked better as an EP rather than an album.

With little meat on the bones, it's difficult wrap your jaws around and as those occasional deep-filled prog wig-outs keep slipping away, they provide a glimmer of hope, but the doses are far too small and far too measured to have any real effect.

Mind Of Mine is an impressive enough debut, with excellent, laidback production and assured vocals. It's lyrically stunted, it's too long, and the overall sound is not starkly original, but the subtle elements of South Asian sounds set a promising tone of fusion.

You could spend days mapping the landscape of My First Album, which is woven with enough references to flummox and delight any pop nerd. The trouble with this approach – artist as nostalgic fangirl – is that it leaves you wondering who Jessica Winter is, and what her sound might have to say other than “I really love the music of my youth”.

Each featured artist at the top of their games, masterfully dominating their segments, leagues above Tha Carter IV's comparatively tired host.

Their arrangements are accomplished, and even the constant falsetto vocals are tempered enough to be pleasant throughout the album, but it's difficult to discern what exactly--if anything--Jungle actually stand for.

Despite the high quality of the arrangements, the orchestration and the recording as a whole, it is a bit too much at once. A case of less would have been more.

There's something exhausting about this manic exuberance, too. All rush and almost no plateau, it's so fidgety and full of swarming textures that it wears you down.

Trimming back their signature embellishments leaves an album that strangely is more focused sonically, but somehow aimless in intention.

Ultimately, The Endless River is another Floyd album about the inability to communicate--it doesn't "say anything" or "go anywhere", but maybe that's the point. While it's unlikely to win the band many new admirers, the casual Floyd fan will find much to enjoy here.

What could and should have been a coolly assured olympic plunge is instead a remarkably ungainly near-belly-flop of an album, weirdly devoid of the dense musicality, crooked charm and sheer kinetic potency which characterise Ghersi's works to date. ... The problem with KiCk i's particular brand of spontaneity is that it feels procedural and expository, rather than organic. It can seem, when the smoke clears here and there, a bit hollow.

After such an imposing start, the rest of My Love Is A Bulldozer was bound to struggle to keep the standards up, but even with this in mind, it's a confusing and muddled album.

Ultimately, nothing hangs together long enough to enable a consistent or enjoyable listening experience.

Watch It Die will likely comfort those already on side, but it leaves you wondering whether well-intentioned decency is enough when the world they’re responding to demands more than sanitised anger and familiar sounds.

The narrative and sonic stylings of these songs have the aesthetic qualities of intimate music, but Snaith’s anonymous intonations, sometimes bathed in layers of muddy distortion, hold the listener at a frustrating distance. Like the album’s artwork it advertises transparency, but delivers only more obscurity.

Overall i,i sounds expensive and yet – simultaneously – all too safe.

More or less everything here sounds anaemic, lacking in body, squashed, diminutive, like it could be pushed over by a strong breeze--or, worse, drowned out by light conversation on the dancefloor.

The results just feel like a watering down of his vision, leaving the listener in a strange hinterland which doesn’t leave much of an impression either way.

As Compton progresses, it rarely seems to shift out of second gear, evidently favouring laid back grooves and sparse production over aggressive break beats and G-Funk swagger. All the while an almost listless lyrical style on occasion provides a narrative, or lack thereof.... Cynicism aside, there are moments of brilliance here.

Despite its best intentions, Straight Songs Of Sorrow is an album that would’ve worked considerably better as a well-pruned EP. As it stands, there’s too much intent and not enough delivery to maintain attention throughout its sprawling running time.

This panoply of styles is both the most impressive and the most frustrating thing about Noise, the result being that only at select moments do they approach the majesty, the fists-pounding-the-ground righteousness that many have come to associate them with.

No amount of street cred can make up for this mostly middling, only intermittently marvellous record.

Padding the album with ambient interstitials would be a forgivable peccadillo were the other songs seriously weighty--after all, even Kid A had 'Treefingers'--but the remaining seven tracks can themselves come off as a little half-baked.