Low In High School feels confused, misplaced, and tedious.

There's nothing that innovative or thought-provoking, but that's hardly the point. It’s freaky, it’s naughty, it’ll get your head nodding.

Krept and Konan end up sounding like features on their own songs.

This latest from Lindstrøm weighs to heavy on the pedestrian side. Sure, the whole package is professionally crafted and confidently gets you drifting away from your day-to-day woes, but what we really need is for Chewie to punch it into hyperspace.

An album that suffers from feeling just too assured.

At its best, The Saga Continues captures some of the old Wu magic but unfortunately these moments are few and far between.

It’s just sad to hear the spark of reinvention that ignited their last powder keg of an album confined to a handful of tracks on a largely mediocre album. They can do better. They have done better. They will do better again.

There are plenty of hooks and the pace rarely relents, but it’s hard to ever imagine Colors ever being in anyone’s top five favourite Beck albums.

There is a defining (and high-definition) period where the mix becomes less interactive, a little noodlier, and more prey to a mass observing sway.

Over-produced but under-written, the combined cast of co-writers and producers have failed to knit together a cohesive whole. Plenty of these songs are pleasant enough, but there’s very little to mark an artist in their prime.

Aside from a few big hitters, Wonderful Wonderful has too many middle-of-the-road moments. ‘Life Itself’, ‘The Rut’, and ‘Have All The Songs Been Written’ are barely distinguishable, and instantly forgettable.

While there’s nothing that will diminish their legacy or standing in rock music, there’s very little material that pushes the band forward either.

CCCLX is fantastic as a momentary escape from the lights and sounds of the mad world we’re living in, but once you’ve holstered the pastel pink desert eagle and left the booth, you’re left with only a handful of killer moments that might entice you to return.

While A Moment Apart has the foundations of a great album, ODESZA fall slightly short of the mark.

Even if the laid-back and relaxed atmospherics are endearing, there’s plenty of room to push the musical perimeters which the London duo fail to take advantage of.

With such weighty subject matter, and with some own personal trauma influencing the record, it’s sadly lacking in bite or overall attack.

By focussing in on softer deployments of electronics and more subtle processing, and staying resolutely in an ambient soundworld, Art In The Age Of Automation does feel comparatively safe; well turned-out and nicely polished, but generally risk-free in execution.

The real issue with the album though, more than any other, is its length (and the inconsistency that this brings with it). Few albums ever benefit from being 17 tracks long, particularly when there are obvious candidates for exclusion. And without wanting to sound too dismissive of the aforementioned chart ambitions, it’s here that sacrifices could have been made for the benefit of a more coherent and engaging record.

However dreamy the music may be, mind, it's not all quite so heavenly. The main distraction is how overwrought it all is. This is especially prevalent in Granduciel's lyrics which he sings in whispered reverence.

Rainbow is a muddled hotch-potch that offers little beyond the fact it heralds her return. It's great to have Kesha back--it really is--but let's hope the quality improves in future.

Album closer ‘Joy Ride’ does exactly what it says on the tin; it’s a joyous, perfectly assembled pop track. That’s not to say that the Kickstarter-funded LP is hit after hit--the bright and brash ‘It’s Sunny’ with its oddly theatrical tropes is a cheesy misstep.

Despite these few fleeting moments of greatness, Everything Now feels like the band's first missfire record of their career, with its lack of a focused concept, cohesiveness and heart.

French’s flow and character may be the same as his previous works, but his stature within the rap world has rocketed.

For such a young talent, his lyrics are strong, but give him a few more years of life experience and they could be in a different league.

Bloated at 16 tracks, it could have been a genuinely strong EP that formed a platform for Dizzee’s return to the sound he helped birth.

‘Run Me Dry’ plays a la mode with a loose dembow rhythm, but, as with the rest of the album, there are plenty of others out there who’ve not only done this already but done it more engagingly.

Unfortunately, with much of the record polished to a dull gleam, there’s little else that succeeds in rising above a pleasant but otherwise unremarkable album.

In aping the sounds that made early rave great--hardcore, breaks and hard house--Vibert has sucked the soul from the genre leaving just a smattering of style. If this is an ode to rave, then it is a hollow one.