There's nothing wrong with seeking to accomplish the same things your heroes did, but when a band tries only to imitate a few aspects–in this case, detached singing, jangly guitar interplay, and lyrics about teen angst–without offering many of the other aspects that made that band great–like clever storytelling and interesting perspectives--it's always going to fall short. Which Come Of Age does.

With repeated listens, even the least of the songs still reach for that relaxing, carefree Best Coast vibe, but the feeling takes more work to achieve compared to the immediately lovable, attention-demanding nature of their entirely natural, easy-as-pie debut.

Pedestrian may have similar mechanics to Yuck’s highlights underneath, but it’s stripped that fuzzy distortion and slathered in a thick layer of schmaltz as a replacement. The end result is a struggle, one that’s scattershot due to it’s need to include now-ancient methods to survive.

They haven't quite found it yet, but Esben and the Witch have the potential for an arresting and momentous album in them.

Sure, there is not a bad tune in the bunch, but the problem is that there isn't a particularly good one here, either.

While it's not as subtle or as elegantly constructed as Beast Rest Forth Mouth, this record has a kineticism and momentum that Beast lacked.

Despite the thimble of predictability or aural similarity, Wahlfeldt has accomplished in Crusher an interesting take on familiar sounds. It’s too fuzzed out to just be post-punk, too sparse to just be a home-recorded take on his alt-rock idol.

To put it simply, Is This Hyperreal? suffers not because the band made a bad album, but because this is the fourth time they've repeated the formula.

Soft Metals shows a ton of potential, and each track is polished with care, but it is hard to overcome the album's mostly simple pattern.

Yeah Right’s dual interests in songwriting and guitar explorations end up being its greatest strength.

Ultimately, Mylo Xyloto feels like a mixed bag of ideas that never really comes together.

The end results are still pleasant enough, but can wear thin, even just after five songs.

All in all, Two-Way Mirror is a good but flawed album, with plenty of things to excite, but a few things that can disappoint.

It's shiny but fluffy, and sure to be a disappointment to those hoping that O'Regan could build on the promise of Special Affectations.

Banks is showing some desire to move beyond the design that his career has sustained itself on, but this album shows he's not quite ready to cut the cord.

If Wilson and crew are trying to invoke a riot, then Easy Eighth isn’t the best manifesto – but it does at least fill the time fine enough until they figure out their cause.

All things considered, this EP seems to be breeding ground for experimentation and possibly be what's to come from a second LP.

If you can forgive Barnes' very unfortunate excursions into hip-hop and overlook what is hopefully the last few Georgie Fruit guest spots, you'll be amazed at the range of sounds that the band manages to successfully explore here.

New Epoch, Goth-Trad has adopted a patience, openness and attention to detail that feels indebted to the more intricacy-focused realms of bass music and techno, but retains the sweaty, oxidized exhalations of muscled jungle rhythms.

Different Gear, Still Speeding shows that the band is comfortable with themselves and their follow-up has every chance to be a stronger album – especially if they are brave enough to include more styles, even if they won't move beyond their British Invasion inspirations.

They need to find their identity, and they're going to have to move forward and progress even further as a group if they want to move beyond being a flavor of the month.

The Rapture show that they are as worthy of pupils as they have been for the last decade as teachers. But, unfortunately, they still have a lot to learn.

As much as Mice Parade’s previous releases seemed to be insular statements, Candela is simply stretched too thin, with too little of Pierce himself in the music.

Side B is not a total miss though, nor even a miss at all. Once Mathers stumbles through this opening salvo and the awkward bits of “Tone Deaf”, the album settles into a comfortable space, and even becomes enjoyable.

An ambitious concept, but not fully executed, Top Ten Hits Of The End Of The World is stuck somewhere in-between.

It does sound a lot like oOoOO and under scrutiny with A-B comparisons, Our Loving Is Hurting Us is pretty starkly more of the same.

The album as a whole isn't flawless, yet by sounding utterly enchanting during its climax it leaves a listener feeling genuinely touched. From a such legendary band, you could ask for nothing more.

It's when I keep in mind the idea of Pull It Together being an album for her daughter that I enjoy the album most, as it's in this light that it sounds at its most charming and likeable.

The music on This Is Another Life isn’t the kind that boasts colour, or even deep and dark hues, but rather is full of big strokes of dull greys.

Off the Record, despite a few promising tracks, never provides a strong enough reason for listeners to do anything but go back and admire what he accomplished with Kraftwerk.

Neither cold enough to make a disquieting impression nor warm enough to connect with the listener the way the artist’s own A Strangely Isolated Place or, hell, Amber did.

Let us hope this isn't a flash-in-the-pan success and that subsequent releases are just as good.

I'd say that MDNA is at the very least "not bad," but frankly, it's worse than bad: it's mediocre.

This is one of those albums to throw on and leave on while you accomplish something: it won't demand too much of your attention, but none of it will bore you.

As it stands, Beak & Claw gets an A for effort but considerably lower marks for execution.

So while it displays a more mature and focused sound for The Drums, the album eventually crumbles beneath the weight of its influential stilts.

The textures are jagged and distorted, the lyrics are mostly nonsensical and feel spontaneously captured, and the whole thing sounds like an awkward genre-fusing experiment that doesn’t feel like it warrants its own noted release. That’s not to say there aren’t moments with elements to enjoy, if not just moments with potential.

Despite a couple speed bumps, Dross Glop is as solid of a collaborative remix album as you're going to find.

In The Cool Of The Day sounds like an intimate affair, like Moore has called up his friends and invited them over to the studio upon finding the Steinway piano.

Although this may be a relative disappointment it should not be looked at as the start of a decline, but merely a curiosity in the collection.

These six instrumentals are pleasant if not pretty in the usual way an Andrew Bird instrumental track might be.

Where at their best, Gardens & Villa may recall the harmonies of Local Natives and the hazy qualities of The Walkmen, they are clearly not (yet) at the level of either of those bands.

With Feed The Beast she has neither progressed past that nor become a lost cause.

He has this impeccable talent when it comes to picking the right sounds to liquidize his voice, even if that tends to muddy what he’s actually singing. It’s a shame that this time around Greene wants to distance himself from his two best records and early EPs, but Purple Noon is nonetheless an improvement over Mister Mellow because it brings most of what we enjoyed about his early work back – even if it’s not as heavily emphasized.

It’s surprisingly how unaffecting and mediocre most of it is.

All in all, the album is an above average collection for a band well past their expected use-by date; and with new blood injected into them, a world tour booked, and promises that they'll continue writing on tour, they don't seem to be stopping any time soon. This could be the beginning for a highly successful era of the band.

The moments of brightness--some poetry here, a brief pop moment there--will get most listeners through the album, but won't inspire them to keep coming back.

If anything, A Very She & Him Christmas can feel like a wet blanket at times, like a party that just can't get off the ground.

The Mother Stone is a stroke of real promise. With its harrowing peaks of dramatized catharsis and musical excursions that recall rock greats – yet look deep into a dark and obscure abyss – Jones’ record keeps audiences at the edges of their seats. If he can be reeled in to gather his thoughts more concisely, the sky is the limit.

There is a disappointing flatness to the songwriting, the performances and the general drive of the record. It is the sound of a band going through the motions, scared to make much of a show of themselves for fear of making a mistake.

There's potential here but it's sadly unrealized.

This kid may not have the voice of a generation, but there's certainly a demographic he could mean the world to. Once he figures out that it's what he has to say that should guide his singles, rather than what he imagines we want to hear, there may well be a great artist in Yelawolf.

Thematic speculation aside Green has managed, more simply to write a compelling collection of guitar pop songs.

If they stick to the melodic folk at the core of their best songs, that fateful open-mic night could be the beginning of something really great.

What this results in is an album that is just as frequently successful as it is frustrating.

Sure, they may borderline on gimmick at times, but Born To Die has its own sound, and that is more than we can say about a lot of music that is presently being released.

Mumps takes a little while to sink in in a different way to previous albums.

Though Mr. Impossible is their most accessible work to date, it's still unmistakably Black Dice.

Rave Age is an awkward half-step in a couple directions for Vitalic. It's texturally half-baked and predictable.

Though freer than the critically acclaimed Ungodly Hour, it is also less focused. Her performance rises to greater heights, but her music doesn’t always rise with her. Still, it is a work laden with potential.

Blessed with an old-fashioned FM radio charm, Here is a worthy follow-up.

Barnes has definitely taken a step in right direction.

Go With Me is like a big box of popcorn; it's tasty and it can be improved by the circumstances under which you're enjoying it, but by the end you're barely even tasting it anymore, and it certainly won't quell your appetite for a proper meal.

The record sounds tired, dreamy, and wasted in the daylight at five in the afternoon– it tries to be breezy, but instead still feels like 99 degrees of heat.

The electronic approach doesn’t work for every song, and a little more humanity and ambience would have been charming, but the appeal of the whole grows as nuances reveal themselves with repeated listens.

With this mixed bag he's likely cemented his reputation as a MC that was blessed with a sack of classic beats for his debut, now just a rapper like the rest of 'em.

Apart from the aptly titled "Film Credits," which, worthily, plays much like a ode to Max Richter, the music on the remainder of the album is left to unsatisfying and grey piano suites that don't sound destined for a more open setting nor benefit from the intimate setting of Arnalds' own living room.

Considering this is her first album since 2014, it’s unfortunate that it can feel a little one-note. A Romeo and Juliet-esque yearning wasn’t necessarily expected or desired, and it doesn’t always serve her best across this effort.

It just runs over half an hour, but time slips away when you’re inside it, wandering about.

Consistently being an upbeat adult isn't exactly an easy thing to do and at least here the band show that they can mature without having to completely forget who they once were.

Ripe for radio play it may never see, Spine Hits is a neutral but enjoyable record for the impending days of sun and so-what.

The vast majority of Dark Lane could play in a suburban Baskin Robbins without offending a single soccer mom. Honestly, they’d be unlikely to even notice it was playing. The few songs that would have moms asking to speak to the manager – which are by and large the project’s better offerings – feel more cribbed from younger artists’ playbooks than ever for the Toronto king’s rapidly aging brand.

All Of Us, Together isn't an attempt to disown his early work and roots. Jamison just made the record he felt like making, and that's why it so easily matches his best material.

There are good ideas scattered about on the record, but when you have to pass through several minutes of cacophonous effects and layers of sound, it can get a little exhausting.

The version the band have made is still a solid, if not rather good, Kaiser Chiefs album. [Review of UK release The Future Is Medieval]

Future This is stuck in some kind of awful, awful limbo between Robert Smith-less Cure and hyperbolic electro dance music.

As said, the songs benefit from being taken out of context and as much as that leads to just picking and choosing the moments worth going back for, the process of listening to the EP as a whole can almost be disheartening as much as it is unrewarding.

Unless you really enjoy music in commercials, you should avoid this disc.

Descriptors are hardly necessary for any of these songs because they're all a stone's toss from one another in pretty much every respect.

They start off well, though, with a trio of solid tracks.... The remaining tracks on the album are equally inoffensive, but they don't have the same half-minded unassuming appeal to help them glide along, and too often there's one too many head-in-your-hands cheesy lines thrown in.

Detractors have long said that Harris’ music is tailor made for background summer playlists you can ignore – listening to this project, it’s hard to disagree.

Ritual is an enthralling album, highlighting a band flexing their musical muscles, trying to grow and add new sounds to their existing palette.

From an MC that would call himself King, shouldn't we all have hoped – nay, expected – well, better?

She enlists help from guest artists and DJs to encapsulate the past six years – but there’s no innovation or originality.

With a collection of songs largely indistinguishable from one another, this album exemplifies the struggle up-and-coming rappers currently face.

The album's top heavy, and its finest moments come when T.I.'s able to look past himself, whether it be to attack the legal or education system. The rest is frustratingly mixed.

Much like their genre, Clock Opera's music is nothing new, but has charming roots.

Absolutely perfect, sun-soaked pop.

I Love You Dude is offensive in its banality, and other than that it's so mundane that it's tough to even want to care.

Raekwon returns with material to please both generations of his fans.

There's a great EP's worth of material hiding within Replicants, and I wish it had stayed that way.

Guaranteed both to amuse and to confuse, Ten$ion is a masterpiece of kitsch: an intently provocative, tongue-in-cheek rave-rap record, by a cryptic performance art group.

Lasers is more an indictment of the state of mainstream rap than anything. This is the absolute worst-case scenario of what can happen when commerce is placed above art, and in this instance it's especially offensive because Lupe is someone who doesn't need to bend over backward to be accessible.

The levels of electronics that come in and out subtly, but skilfully, on the album's best songs are an indication of how much time Jason Drake has put into them. It's just a shame that this shines light more intensely on the songs where he didn't.

The most disappointing aspect about Syd Tha Kid's delivery is her inability to create a remotely compelling protagonist - something Odd Future members have proved themselves more than capable of doing.

Who knows whether the notoriously megalomaniacal Jackson would approve of this album-people on both sides of that argument have valid points-but as a start-to-finish collection of songs it's more enjoyable and less filler-stuffed than anything he's released since Bad, a minor miracle given the circumstances.

[The songs'] punchiness and repetitiveness can quickly get on one's nerves, depending on your disposition.

Unfortunately it's largely downhill from here [after opener "Silence"].