This is the band's most autopiloted effort yet, a hacked-up last-gen rehash of said space jams, only now with greater emphasis on glitz and glam. Somehow Muse, always loveably lame, have managed to take a turn for the lamer.

By co-opting and debasing punk-disco's vitality and sincerity and thereby rendering the style accessible to the botox-and-bulimia set, Jackson betrays the visions of those whose ecstatically powerful music he lavishly degrades.

Their bar band approach sounds as if they've taken a book of rock history and, dutifully following along, bookmarked some of the most unremarkable passages.

VHS or BETA have moved on, like so many bands this year, to pillaging the dance-friendly template of late-80s Cure.

True Colors does traverse familiar, populous formats that may be difficult to innovate on top of, but other posi-tinted, mass audience-focused projects have found success by mixing their own cocktails of EDM, soul, and of-the-minute rap production. Zedd’s True Colors, though, feels underformed and unoriginal.

Form & Control immediately shows the band's strengths and their weakness: It's a smooth, utterly precise study of the formal elements that make disco and electro-pop tick, but with far too little of the body heat that actually gets that stuff going.

Dead Media works on occasion, but primarily when Hefner revert to the traditional pop trio format of bass, guitar, drums.

The underlying problem here seems to be that Hebden still isn't comfortable in his own skin while improvising, with Reid or otherwise.

Live It Out is stymied by lame riffing and unqualified wonkage.

Lemonjelly.ky's nine tracks consist largely of samples from atrocious Nana Mouskouri songs and soundclips nipped from 100 Strings mood music albums. What binds these samples together is a series of predicable hip-hop beats and root-note basslines.

They feel like the pieces that stuck to the wall when he threw everything at it.

Picture, the more ambitious of the pair, simply sounds unfocused, overly concerned with effects and production--with moments and sounds--than with songs or overall shape.

On Ten$ions, they replace what made them sometimes intriguing and slightly subversive with tired tropes and lazy lyrics.

Only the spirited, psychedelic chug of “Spitfire” and the handclap-catalyzed go-go of “Hey Now” come close to clicking with—let alone recapturing—any portion of the band’s former glory. The remainder of the record is filled out with either bland mediocrities or downright embarrassments such as “Flying Like a Bird”, a sappy ballad that sharply delineates every weakness Inspiral Carpets has, from a dearth of energy to a lack of melody.

Look at the Powerful People begins with 54 of the most exciting seconds of music I’ve heard in 2017. And then they start talking.

Billy Corgan needs someone on his shoulder to whisper "no."

[Come of Age] is even more of a dystopian nightmare than Kid A or an El-P record: The Vaccines draw us into a universe that revolves entirely around Young, and if he's got nothing to say, his only possible conclusion is that nobody does.

The album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms.

The lack of any sort of critical thesis or undergirding may seem merely academic, but it translates into performances that are wanly reverent and unanimated, celebrating the music mainly for its age but not its actual history.

Weird to say about a hippie, but it's humanity that's missing in Sharpe's mild but mannered and certainly unmemorable music, which feels focus-grouped, stone-washed, and artificial.

If Samson's voice had the full-blooded verve of her old bandmate Hanna, she might be able to sell this stuff. Instead, she delivers all the album's lyrics in the same flat monotone, and she just sounds bored the whole time.

Overproduced, under-written, swaggering nonsense.

Too much of the album either throws the group into truly unflattering contexts or returns them to the hamster-wheel formalism they’ve been running into the ground for years now.

Like much of X&Y, Magnet is exceptionally unobtrusive, music to ignore.

Despite good intentions, the wincing lyrics border on pandering and even exploitative, revealing little in the way of insight or palpable compassion

Not all of Diamond's new songs go awry. Most just go away, their melodies dissipating, their lyrics flimsy even through those tremendous pipes.

Run-DMC wind up overwhelmed by the guest stars and the schizophrenic nature of the production.