Obsidian is a shallow and unsatisfying exploration of this dark side.

What Midlake has crafted here is monastery music – glorified Gregorian chants that achieve nothing if not snuff out the candle light in your head that represents your slowly melting interest.

While the concept of exploring new horizons seems like a perpetually Megafaun thing to do, it's a case of too much too soon and of a band reaching for places they have no business going toward.

As an album, it's probably the dullest anticipation of the year.

There's a patchwork of pleasantness woven throughout.... By the time the closing tracks roll around, the album has fallen apart entirely. These instrumentals are complete afterthoughts and belong nowhere.

If you want to hear this sort of thing done properly, you'll find happiness in the more sedate moments of the peerless Saint Etienne, but there's little to recommend The Trip. It's not much more than a Christmas bauble: shiny and polished on the surface, but with little of substance on the inside.

The nostalgia lacks anything close to the authenticity that Thunder, Lightning, Strike achieved, and the sound of the 2018 version of The Go! Team struggles to get anywhere far from persistent annoyance.

Up until Lulu, I didn't think it was possible to be both enamored and disgusted at the same time. Mind? Blown.

Just like the band itself, it presents something of an ongoing identity crisis for the band, one that hasn’t figured out how to advance their sound except to put more meat on the bones.

All We Are has potential, but it's squandered on their debut in an attempt to make a spacey, moody soundtrack.

Far beyond simply avant garde, this is one for the abstract devotee.

The band needs to play to its strengths, rather than a production style. This is not a band that sounds good with buried instruments. This is a group that sound best when they are in your face.

It’s largely inoffensive and bland, with a few above average moments, and has a tendency to fade into the background.

There is little in the way of actual technique or subtlety, and as an album, Prism falls short of its predecessors in the innovation and charisma department.

At once droll and melancholic, Cigarettes After Sex struggles to earn the aural beauty it desperately seeks.

Less a jazz album than an eclectic selection, Preliminaires is inconsistent and demonstrates Pop’s reluctance to deviate completely from his safety zone.

Although these compositions show a ton of improvisation, Radian pigeonhole themselves to a one-note range that imprisons Chimeric with a threatening, claustrophobic mood.

Despite the promising influences and the strong pedigree, essentially all that Blanck Mass offers is a distorted, unusual take on new age music, and while interesting in small doses, it makes for a long, repetitive slog over the course of an hour.

Krug is a songwriter whose craft is best when met with the editing of other musicians--left to himself, however, we are left with a very forgettable retreat into his very OMD-obsessed psyche.

The song writing is passable, the sound is passable, but passable is usually as boring as it sounds.

For most of My Bloody Underground, Newcombe vocalizes like a decaffeinated Kevin Shields, barely audible under the weight of reverb that blankets just about every track.

Very rarely, this album finds a moment of excitement. And when they do, you have to savor them, because you aren’t going to get another one for a while.

Pond constantly struggle to find a balance between prog, classic yuppie rock and psychedelia in Hobo Rocket, cramming a cheat sheet of tired rock trappings and psychedelic clichés that were already fatigued even before corporate rock detoxified its very essence.

Celestial Lineage may be well crafted and even (relatively) accessible but by eschewing the ideas that coloured their previous work, Wolves in the Throne Room have ended up creating something that's not really black, but rather quite grey.

There’s a lot of bluster and enthusiasm here but I’m struggling to identify much in the way of true substance.

Somehow, because Uptown Funk is so, so good, Uptown Special is even more disappointing.

In what was already an inane, washed-up concept to begin with, P&A fail to enlighten by opting to deliver trite lyrics and characterless humor for their own amusement. Evidently, consciousness suits them better.

There's a significant lack of depth to Within and Without.