Unfortunately, this humanity doesn't translate to the music. The performances are flawless, but overly so.

The results still sound as slickly produced and hedge-betting as any actual Foo Fighters album.

At times, the maturation feels forced; the more adventurous moments here are experimental only for such a high-profile group, and they don't play to Gibbard's sentimental, word-weighing strengths.

To navigate successfully around a Kid Cudi album, then, is to get really good at squinting at the periphery.

It's a shame that Falkous is playing to the cheap seats on The Plot Against Common Sense.

Challengers tracks end with uncharacteristic whimpers instead of bangs.

Folding Time serves as a stopgap for an aging sound without a firm grasp on its bearings. Should Sepalcure continue writing from their fixed point, they'll have to project further and further from its origin.

The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is baggy and unfocused. If he wants to sell a promise of salvation, he needs a better story to tell.

While many of those artists have since released their finest work to date by stripping away a lot of the dissonance, the same can't be said of Dancer Equired. Though revealing, this probably wasn't the right set of songs to unveil in the process.

As strictly a listening experience, though, it's a decent document of a bunch of relatively unexceptional guys who willed themselves to greatness for a couple of years there but couldn't stop being relatively unexceptional.

The best Jeezy music often exploited how far he could go with memorable ad libs and punchlines, a triumphant kind of simplicity. Here that gets muted to muddied results.

Bottom line is that if you've got the old albums and you want to experience Gang of Four again, better to shell out for the actual show than for the disc that approximates it.

Su might not have the highest aspirations, but minor dreams can still compel a listener; Sincerely Yours just needed to find better modes of expression.

Pastiche is the entire point of Lobes. Maybe its period recreations provide some surface pleasures, but it’s not enough to erase the suspicion that We Are Scientists have turned into indie-rock journeymen, content to dabble in sounds and styles that have just fallen out of fashion.

I'm hard-pressed to find a song that's more interesting at its three-minute mark than it is after 10 seconds: 2:54 exposes a band that knows how to make a good first impression but not a lasting one.

Set aside the negligible opening and closing tracks, and Sol Invictus has just eight tracks spanning 34 minutes, an underwhelming running time considering how long Faith No More have been away. Such brevity could be overlooked if Sol Invictus was accompanied by a significant shift in the band’s sound, but many of these songs feel like retreads.

Shifty Adventures feels more like a collection of gadgets than songs.

The dividedness of the record is especially plain here. Acher generally gets calm and luscious music, and then all hell breaks loose whenever Dose shows up.

Much of Curiosity finds Wampire a bit too comfortable and self-satisfied within their washed-out aesthetic, and the premeditated haziness of the recordings--and obvious attempts to weird them up, through squeaky synth settings and effete vocal tics--ultimately undermines the duo’s songwriting ambitions.

While its standout tracks are strong enough to ensure Phantogram maintains its current altitude, there are a lot of places to turn to for this sort of thing these days, and this album ultimately underwhelms next to the pure-pop punch of Haim, the cutting lyricism of Lorde, or the radiant grandeur of Chvrches.

Editors sound like an earnest rock band who grew up loving the same bands as the current batch of revivalists, but beyond the workmanlike interpretations of their heroes, it's hard to swallow.

There are easily as many misses as hits on the album, and 14 tracks is probably about seven tracks too long.

Summer Sun is pleasant, if nothing else, but that's such a loaded word for an album that clearly aspires to (and ought to be) so much more than it accomplishes.

It’s an enjoyable and subtly diverse listen only if you give it your undivided attention.

What's Between provides some compelling glimpses at Kelly's cimmerian headspace, but knowing that he possesses the ability and the vision to flesh out his own ideas, it's hard not to be left wanting more.

Lupine Howl essentially take the bluesiest moments of past Spiritualized records and use them as the starting point for their sound, placing the emphasis on gritty rock rave-ups, and adding another Marshall to the stack for every orchestra member Pierce hired for Let It Come Down.

Master and Everyone is a solid collection of rather thin songs that never quite sound intimate; songs that meant something profound to someone-- but always, it seems, someone else.

These slower songs aren't just mellow, they're mundane, and their inclusion leaves Innocence feeling lopsided, a oft-killer rock record with nasty balladry habit.