After that early-onset dizziness subsides, Girl With Basket of Fruit loses its power and makes little impact, as if these songs were menacing storm clouds that simply drift into and out of town without leaving a trace. It is heavy but hollow, muscular but oddly meaningless, built with streams of images that, however vivid, are the lyrical equivalent of inert gas inside combustion chambers.

All of Black Cascade pounds away with a similar notion for four tracks and 50 minutes, offering four black metal tides that occasionally shift into some texturally bankrupt, wintry drone.

It’s always just one move too many.

Despite capable guest vocalists, including Robyn herself, it's generally devoted to glossy, bittersweet electronic drifts that are too slow, too long, or too bland to hold interest for 60 minutes, though often unobjectionable in smaller servings.

A mellow, slightly sub-decent album delivered at the wrong time.

By stripping them down to their bones, Lynne gets the skeleton of these songs right, but in the end you can't help but miss the meat that made Springfield who she was.

Occasionally, the dull roar manifests in some solid rock songs.

As impressive and encouraging as the production is, Pemberton's rapping isn't up to snuff. He's still overly dry and often noticeably amateurish, and he sometimes pushes himself to do things he can't.

Songs rarely pick up from a crawl. Sustained guitar chords fan out and crush whatever momentum the band gets going. The bursts of distortion that colored If Children are almost pornographically expanded.

So really, it doesn't turn out all that different from the most recent Earlimart, Beachwood Sparks, or Jason Lytle records: perfectly okay, not pushy enough to be even remotely unpleasant, and in a way you're hoping it's better.

This second-hand facelessness runs throughout Volta, which still reads oddly rote and cold with this addendum. Even with its hulking abundance, Voltaïc is flesh without bone.

Like all of Mazzy Star's releases, Bavarian Fruit Bread works well as a mood piece and makes good background music, but it doesn't reward close listening.

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 resulting sound feels new, to be sure, but mostly in the sense that it’s not fully ripe. Though challenging and, in its best moments, quite exciting, Music for the Long Emergency ultimately resembles a first draft. Its most compelling ideas are knotted up with its worst, and the whole thing could use a thorough edit.

Too mushy and indistinguishable to wallop you in the gut and too cheesy to be taken seriously, the album feels, at its worst, like a series of power ballads with the choruses ripped out.

It's not until Magnificent Fiend's closing trio of seven-minute behemoths that Howlin Rain find traction, though it's the band's willingness to tweak its grand appropriations, rather than the tracks' epic lengths, that helps the songs stick.

Though a mixed bag, Blues Funeral does have its moments.

Dreamland falls prey to the unfortunate mode of modern branding that conflates personal nostalgia with making a point. Glass Animals want to talk about The Way We Live, when it’s really just Let’s Remember Some Stuff.

The problem then is one of staying power--Lewis does such a good job of nailing choice sounds and styles from pop's past that you can't help getting reeled in right away; only upon later reflection do you realize that much of her success lies in evoking something else great rather than achieving a greatness more uniquely her own.

Everything about Cast, from its high-end synths and imperious production to Biliński’s alabaster vocals, is superficially flawless and taken at face value; most of one’s time with the album is spent looking for cracks, hooks, or anything resembling a personality. The thing about perfection in art isn’t just that it’s unattainable--it’s also uninteresting.

Even with fewer hands playing fewer instruments, the songs nevertheless sound leaden, ponderous, drowsy. Still, there are some inspired flourishes.

Their musical progressions are incremental and headed towards predictable outcomes. The slower songs are a little bit more country, the more uptempo ones a bit more rootsy, and all of it is bolstered by typically brawny Will Yip production that cuts through the chatter of any barroom or basement.

Welch sounds content and resigned, recollecting the stormy Saturdays of the past with a Sunday-morning penitent’s shrug and a born-again sigh. How small, how beige, how disappointing.

There are a few bright spots on this otherwise monochromatic album, most crammed toward the beginning.

It is a wearying listen, overcrowded and too loud and too harsh, and to engage actively with it is to feel your knuckles whiten with effort.

What’s missing, though, is the central promise of a supergroup: the thrill of hearing established musicians in a truly different context. Minor Victories’ lineup may stem from different circles, but their approaches are so complementary that there’s rarely any tension or surprise.

Even when their songs pass muster, the performances feel ineffectual, which makes long stretches of Venus on Earth drag semi-miserably.

The North Borders is not a bad album--for the most, it’s as inoffensive as those decade-old chill-out compilations--yet a frustration persists because Bonobo is better than this.