Inoffensive, largely listenable, and accessible, the album is still stunted, and so never reaches the peaks of "The Civil War," still their best and most fully formed effort.

Ultimately, this is nothing more than workaday feel good bar music, technically well executed with the peaks and troughs in all the right places.

Rising Down is pretty much same old same old.

If only you didn’t spoil these tender moments that seem to make my heart want to burst out my chest by goofing around all the time.

The result is a series of boring romances and half-assed torch songs that drag their feet in a way that’s exhausting to listen to.

Worldwide‘s participatory highs are intense, if fleeting, and that cover would look amazing on a t-shirt.

Do It! is about as radical as Clinic seem capable of, which is to say that they finally seem smothered by the borders they’ve set for themselves.

The title Attack & Release implies the best aspects of the Black Keys’ music, all sweat and hurt and sweat and ecstasy, but the album neither gives nor takes, neither emotional nor sweaty but still clammy-handed.

What keeps Consolers of the Lonely from being an outright shit affair is, predictably, the assembled chops of its musicians, a group never so much fussy as amicable, wide-eyed about the righteous licks and insensitive tempo shifts they solder together so tightly.

They are a talented, enthusiastic and timely band; I feared that it’s ageist of me to suggest that their debut album isn’t great because they’re too young.

The Odd Couple from its superior predecessor (just: the writing is a bit weaker, the arrangements sleepier, the production effects a bit thicker) and so its most glaring flaw is that it simply lacks St. Elsewhere‘s invigorated tone, following the same blueprint with cheaper components, producing off-putting retreads whose only appeal lies in their similarity to more effective tracks on Gnarls’s former effort

They finally hit a hipster-heavy scene with what should have been a maverick heat-seeker of a debut and end up too tiring to interest most of the hipsters who long ago became bored of swapping their “Alice Practice” 7” on Soulseek.

I’ll be as straightforward in my assessment of his Trouble in Dreams as I can: this is his tenth solo album of the same old shit.

Goldfrapp have shed the sex-Moroder-robot-Bolan-fuck-disco like a used condom and re-tooled themselves as a whimsical psychedelia and pastoral folk outfit for the disappointing Seventh Tree.

Let The Blind never pitches badly or throws up a truly terrible track to mack on and leaves me with the potentially duff argument that this record is really good at what it does, but what it does so exactingly reaches for breadthlessness that its under-ambition ends up under-cutting what made the songs pleasant and amenable in the first place.

Golden Delicious confronts, rejects, and reinterprets his own past, which simply leaves me longing for a return to it.

There is nothing here but a band very awkwardly trying to have a good time, and that’s the kind of party you always leave early.

Fun and fresh enough on the first couple listens, it remains to be seen whether Vampire Weekend can find long-term favour with the listeners and critics so taken with them at present.

It is logically a bloated, uncomfortable, saturated throwback to no genre, time period, or movement in particular.

White people shouldn’t try to be funky.

Really, the sad emptiness of these raps needs little explication from me.

La Cucaracha is still a bit of a disappointment, short on memorable tunes and a bit muddier and more piecemeal than it should be.

While it’s very good at what the Band of Horses does best--providing a soundtrack to whistful moments or memories--unlike Everything all the Time there’s nothing here to grab onto, its songs merge together, and it’s so innocuous in the band’s trademark comfort that it can pass almost undetected.

Although there are a few individual moments where those qualities round-off and transcend any qualms anybody might have about Lekman's style, that style on its own, minus a map or even the faint corners of a box, can only elicit the slow smile of admiration, not genuine, passionate interest.

Magic manages to creep into a flat din, and tact is lost to nostalgia.

The latest Dashboard Confessional album is extremely front-loaded, it should have been an EP, etc.

Sure, Banhart executes the truncated verse spectacularly, but he doesn't give his listeners enough time to love him.

In Our Bedroom After the War is half of an above average album, which is unfortunate if only because the band's still clearly capable of gorgeous pop convulsions when they lay off the theatrics and let their rhythm section rev things up.