Instead of just latching on to the sonic palette of The Beta Band (a group they seem intent on emulating), they could embrace the Beta mindset: the creativity, playfulness, and refusal to ever bore the audience that made that band so frustratingly brilliant.

AlunaGeorge can still be both pop and provocative, they just haven't hit on a reason to be so quite yet.

It sounds like a Manic Street Preachers album, which alone renders it still better than all of the similar arena rock you can name.

Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams is as silly, day-glo, eccentric, and all over the place as its title.

Holland seems confident placing herself inside a mythology much older than her years. It’s this fact, along with her penchant for lyrics about crazy dreams and old-fashioned moonshine, that make many of her songs, though originals, sound borrowed from another era.

Too bad, then, that I Love You is underdeveloped.

Well, here’s a disappointment so mild I can barely taste it. I think I’m disappointed, maybe, but I’m not sure how much or wherefore.

Wayne's ebullience is too curdled to be all that interesting on its own –- not to mention that he can do so much better.

On Pl3dge, Killer Mike is often captivating, but his politics are just noise.

My problem with the rest of Memphis, then, is simple: it too often falls into retreading thoroughly explored pop without truly making it their own.

Sequenced as the record is, with each personality dominating certain stretches of runtime, Paper Trail feels almost vaudevillian.

I want to stress one last time, post-catch, that these aren’t terrible songs, nor do they add up to a terrible album. But the net effect is nevertheless one of tedium and disappointment, a partial reminder of "War Elephant's" potential instead of an attempt to realize it.

It still is either very sincere or very sarcastic, or both, though these are two qualities which have always been both a justification for liking them and just as easily a reason why not, meanwhile not offering any amnesty or middle ground.

A sturdy if frustrating effort that exceeds and disappoints expectations all at once.

Although a respectable, yet fickle bid at club fodder, schmaltzy ballads, and trend riding one offs, something about it just doesn’t fit.

Essentially, Blood Bank is one pretty song--the titular, opening track settling somewhere close to what Damien Jurado’s doing these days--and two similarly pretty experiments in stretching Bon Iver’s sound.

I’m happy to hear Prodigy sounding engaged and excited again, even if the quality of his lyricism doesn’t match his newfound enthusiasm.

Some of these songs are excellent, in an unfinished but inspired way. But many of the album's tracks evidence a band that's bursting at the seams with talent, only to stumble on unfocused, scattershot song-writing.

The songs get by on college rock atmospherics that linger for far too long and for the most part, lack the dynamism and character of even the weakest Decemberists song.

While their particular brand of retro goth garage is obviously built on an extremely derivative foundation of 60s garage, the Cramps, and the Damned, they're infinitely more interesting in practice than the majority of beige-rock being pushed by the UK music press.

Destroyer of the Void isn’t a bad album, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect well upon Blitzen Trapper’s changes as a band.

No single frontman in indie quite possesses Falkous’s unique blend of obnoxious charisma, and that fact alone makes Travels a sometimes engaging listen, but he’s still made an album that steers dangerously close to emulating the bros he’s spent his entire career railing against.

It's not the sort of thing one pins their organic, folksy dreams upon, though you get the sense it was born out of that interest and perhaps lost its way over time.

Powers definitely has the compositional wherewithal to make something special--he just has to put more of himself into it.

It feels like vital parts are gone, missed somewhere in Radiohead’s search through their own oeuvre for something more and more facilely universal, something that draws lines within lines of song types and not the larger methodology, something that can be "important" without being challenging.

The Citizens have a clear knack for arranging and a commendable ability to tackle a series of genres and combine them into an enjoyable full-length. The only real problem here being that the actual songs aren't nearly as good as their talent might hint at.

Price’s work behind the boards, while often commanding, is hardly ambitious; running the tracks together to try and give Madge the "album" sound is noteworthy, but he’s picked the wrong pop-star to prod.

While it feels a little sheepish to rag on a band for being a little too competent at what they do, the best you can really say about this, their fourth LP, is that it’s simply a good product that’s easily recognizable as a Doves album.