It’s a recipe for Joyce Manor at their slickest power pop yet, even as it lacks the narrative depth we’re used to.

AlunaGeorge have always been smooth, but here they sound soft, the glitches debugged, their quirks edited out.

This time, there are a couple of solid songs surrounded on all sides by wandering experiments which never quite form into a whole.

While Anxiety is not a trainwreck, it's a missed opportunity given the strength of her foundation.

Uneasy Laughter is fine. It’d be much better if it was either divorced from ruminations on honesty, or if the band actually managed to define themselves without leaning on ’80s nostalgia.

The end result is an incredibly inoffensive album, one that’s perfectly lovely without offering any striking new ideas or features that make it memorable.

Sometimes Romano manages to pull off an unexpected success: a repeating thinly strummed acoustic guitar chord and quavering vocals at the start of “Empty Husk” eventually build to a catharsis of overdriven electric guitars and a vibrant melody. More often, though, these tunes just idle.

The record is good as background noise, with a few tracks strong enough to stand alone. As a complete story, though, it doesn't exactly deliver.

Violet Cries is broadly, nebulously goth, with very little to distinguish the band from their peers and forebears.

For being one of the first big punk albums in post-Trump America, Wolves doesn’t howl nearly enough and rarely shows its fangs.

On songs like these, she resists the temptation to play the spurned frontierswoman out for revenge. She’s a little wounded, a little scared, a little less of a caricature and a little more human.

Even the bright spots in the album’s composition—the off-beat piano cascades in “Death By A Thousand Cuts” and the pulsating synth of “Cruel Summer” (thank you, St. Vincent) are particular standouts—are overshadowed by the musical anticlimax on most tracks, especially on “The Archer.”

All told, Dylan and company don't leave you glad all over--but maybe half-way.

Even with Gab’s phonetic prowess and all that time to prepare for launch, Escape 2 Mars doesn’t reach the transcendent heights of its sublime, lushly orchestrated predecessor, ultimately feeling less like an epic interplanetary voyage and more like space camp.

It wants to be The Antlers as a singer/songwriter, but even The Antlers walk dangerously close to the edge of good taste. Remiddi’s voice is no help, either, often times too delicate and dainty to extract much emotion from, and only convincing when it flaunts imperfections.

Unfortunately, Everybody Knows is the sound of two classic artists playing the 18th hole of their intertwined and decorated careers.

In spite of its melodic clarity, Drones ultimately succumbs under the weight of its narrative, which strains for political and social commentary but winds up closer to parody.

There are hints of the band's previous life here--"Oasis" seems to strikes the roots-pop balance they're going for, and "Goodbye Kiss" is perfectly fine barroom reggae--and Potter rarely misses a chance to show off her killer voice, but The Nocturnals' crucial swagger has sadly been scrubbed clean away.

By track four, a whimsical-by-numbers reverie called “Dinosaurs on the Mountain,” American Head starts to fall off an American cliff. The tempos are slow enough to deflate even Coyne’s considerable charm, and the record’s rootsy, pastoral spin on the Lips’ sound is undermined by the band’s maximalist production ethos. Nearly every song is overstuffed with queasy synth textures and sleek, digitized strings, and Coyne can’t resist warping his vocals in a grab-bag of ugly processors.

On "Lazy Bones," that confessional spirit adds urgency to the band's power-chord crunch. Elsewhere, though, there's a troubling lack of focus.

The Recession's singles are exceptional, but the filler suffers from a detached and dispirited sound.

he vocals are gorgeous and Carlos plays with restraint and taste throughout. Unfortunately, such moments of inspiration are rare, as most of the songs reflect a project that struggles to find a place to stand.

It seems Gogol Bordello is still stubbornly clutching for the inventiveness of earlier records like Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike and Super Taranta! without truly progressing, leaving us with a Rick Rubin-adorned imitation of their visionary past work.

It’s an ideal time to simultaneously start over and glance back, which Walker does on Sycamore Meadows, trading the glammy style of his prior solo work for competent, traditional radio rock....Then again, you’ll need a high threshold for boorishness to enjoy his frequent autobiographical nostalgia for substance abuse, pubescent defloration and venereal disease.

Hiatt puts these thoughts to paper in his signature cerebral style, but it isn’t enough to make these played-out themes feel fresh.

On Play On her approach results in a scattershot collection that too often mistakes bombast for sincerity ('Unapologize') and sap for sentiment ('Temporary Home').

He set out to depict the pains of contemporary Chicago, but he ended up just making another Common album.

Not everything has to be pure pop, but nothing else on Brutalism even comes close to sounding like a complete song the way [“Body Chemistry”] does.