There's something bold in the smaller scope of The Endless River, but it proves to be one of the few Pink Floyd releases that sounds like a step backwards, with nothing new to say and no new frontiers to explore.

2:54 have built a palatial structure on The Other I, but they still have yet to lay out a welcome mat.

The Lips’ Fwends are so intent on tripping up the songs’ rhythmic momentum and weirding up the basic melodies with hammy vocals that they ultimately reinforce their sturdiness. They’re trashing all the furniture in the house, but not bulldozing any walls to open up new vantages.

Ironically, in trying to tap into the mystique of America’s most storied cities, Foo Fighters completely demystify their own creative process, effectively turning the Sonic Highways project into a glorified homework assignment--educational, perhaps, but laboriously procedural.

Throw Haerts on shuffle and it’s uniformly accessible and uniform, period.

Alone for the First Time is the furthest he's pushed himself, and the growing pains on the album can be chalked up to the strain of trying new things, a kind of adolescent awkwardness that shows signs of maturing into something sophisticated and unique.

Despite the dual versions, Storytone never finds a comfortable middle ground: the orchestral versions too maudlin, the solo versions over-sharing.

Home Everywhere has every element needed to make a great Medicine album, only they’re deployed in gangling spasms and obsessive over-processing. If only they’d edited themselves a little more--or a little less.

Marigolden fares best when it loses the florid similes and addresses character and story.

The lack of palplable passion on Nobody Wants to Be Here is, once again, somewhat disappointing and even more surprising.

Sound of a Woman fails to spark, as its homogenous textures blend together to rob this music of the personality and emotion it has when done right.

Trick is nice with atmosphere, but largely a non-entity when it comes to hooks.

Otherness isn't just less immediate than other pop music; it's less self-aware, and way less fun.

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.

When No One Is Lost tries to blend in with the youth, Stars sound like professors rather than participants.

There is nothing on Lily-O to break the spell these musicians have too carefully cast. In other words, there is nothing to get Amidon out of his own head or out of our collective past.

With all the work to try and incorporate these far-afield guest vocalists aside, it's worth noting that the production itself is more reliant on them than ever. Underneath them, the music is often flat and unadventurous, tasteful where it could stand to be raucous and rigid where it needs to be limber.

Too many songs on Taiga come across as filler—too small and formulaic to impress at "taiga" scale, but too leaden to reach anthemic heights.

It’s been fussed over so much that any spark that may have spurred it has been smothered.

The Drums are at least halfway to amassing a pretty great singles comp--they just can’t really call it a Greatest Hits.

This generation-crossing collaboration feels like a record lodged in a sort of chronological rut, one where a young artist fronts an old-sounding record that sounds like it could've been released at any point in his lifetime--and helmed by any number of MCs that could've sounded like him.

Feel Something is a so-so listen that never rises above the band’s influences.

On Tyranny, that guy has simply worked too hard, and that sense of needless toil bleeds through in every bum lick, brick-walled sound, and garbled burst of noise shoved onto the record.

Mallet percussion, multilingual lyrics, chesty vocal huffs, fumbled acoustics, roundabout vocal harmonies, tentative EDM dipping, Asian monasticism, "Rule Britannia", American gothic: they all get sucked into the vacuum of This Is All Yours without leaving an impression.

It’s the pro-forma songwriting that transpires between those brontosaurus blasts that ultimately proves problematic. By using their muscular might to prop up otherwise featherweight tunes, Royal Blood have effectively built themselves a castle and furnished it with IKEA.

Ryan Adams is a persuasively dark album, one defined by themes of struggle, instability, isolation, and regret.

Bono may have self-deprecatingly described Songs of Innocence as “the blood, sweat and tears of some Irish guys...in your junk mail,” but it’s not even that interesting--it’s just a blank message.

Imagin shines whenever it isn't contorting to fit preconceived notions of format.

It’s all the more disappointing that, despite the rawness of these recordings and the private nature of their creation, O sounds weirdly noncommittal on Crush Songs, as though the sparse demo arrangements were a form of holding back.

His process of filtering out the bad has failed him on Adrian Thaws, leaving an album that bears both his names but offers less of himself than ever before.

Banks could certainly go places--but Goddess doesn't, and instead seems content to wallow in the same depressive rut for an exhausting 59 minutes.

With El Pintor, Interpol don’t sound as much like Interpol as they do a band that really wants to be Interpol; it’s a sad notion for anyone who once held this band’s music dear to their hearts, but taking into account what came before, it’s a miracle that Interpol still exist in this capacity at all.

Even though Anchor is a truly disappointing work from such an inventive mind, it’s not enough to suggest that he’s reached the point of creative bankruptcy.

Seen It All: The Autobiography doesn’t deliver on either one of its titular promises.

Four years later, though, all Blonde Redhead has to show for its lengthy studio hiatus is another too-obvious bauble.

Melodies coast, but they don’t always stick; everything’s too mannered, too clean, and the album is marred by a clinicality further punctuated by its bonus tracks.

Pale Communion only toys with the building blocks, revealing influences that were already apparent but refusing to invigorate them alongside each other.

Outclassed by their own ambition, the band has aimed Annabel Dream Reader toward the lofty heights of Poe’s glum, fog-shrouded majesty--and winds up hitting, at best, late-period Tim Burton.

Wire never wanted to be a satisfying band, yet they somehow became one--which leaves the otherwise bold impulse behind Document and Eyewitness curiously inconclusive.

A fragmented 12-song album that trends toward the same path that he already spent five albums exploring.

For now, though, Kimbra's status as "That singer from the Gotye song" woefully underserves her full potential, but so does The Golden Echo.

While there is much to admire about Beal taking such an abrupt left turn at this crucial juncture in his trajectory, in this case, it’s one that, more often than not, leads to an aesthetic dead end.

The main problem is that the music is so self-conscious, as most of these songs sound like a band still trying to feel its way forward. The quest is noble and even necessary; the results, much less so.

On Time Is Over One Day Old, any emotional extreme or attempted musical shift just ends up sounding like stasis.

The idea is clever, and very Beck: a mix of the modern and the antiquated so fluid that you start to see how they're not that different to begin with. The execution feels out of his hands, and really, out of everyone's--just another project whose purpose seems lost in the labyrinth of production.

The result is a strictly passerby album: one that is heard and then quickly forgotten.

Even at its best, though, In My World resembles a less-engaging version of someone else, the sound of an artist regressing instead of stepping forward into new territory.

At times the intricate arrangements come across as a means of covering up unmemorable songwriting.

Wantonly skipping between sounds with a dilettante zeal, Wolves in the Throne Room seem woefully under equipped for this music.

Though We Are Only What We Feel plods through similar tempos and uniform textures, Wäppling sings with enough character to keep the record from fading into the background.

This album can't be written off purely as a repetitive mess--this is the sound they were going for, after all, and when they rely less heavily on repetition, drones, and electronics, they find some decent material.

The bulk of Neon Icon resists coherence or purpose.

Given what he’s proven capable of as part of his main gig, though, it’s hard not to wish that, when left to his own devices, he made more of an effort to get outside of his own head.

In the Lonely Hour comes from a personal place, it doesn't end up feeling like a very personal record.

Love Frequency isn’t a complete disaster, if only because the new, chastised, and chaste Klaxons aren’t really capable of doing anything that could inspire that sort of animus. At their best, Klaxons dredge up the kind of sounds that keep the Coachella Sahara Tent bumping all weekend, composed to be aggressive and participatory, yet strangely ambient and easy to ignore.

Too often Favorite Waitress sounds too too clever to accommodate something as visceral as a groove.

Overall, CLPPNG is chock full of ideas, and if its failure is due to overambitiousness, well, there are worse ways to fail.

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.

While nearly every track on Nausea finds Vallesteros trying to grapple with these issues [feeling displaced and connected at the same time], he rarely wrenches out any insight or personal detail.

As a distilled 5-song EP, Stockholm might have served as a refreshing slap in the face--a potent reminder of what a vibrant jolt of lightning Chrissie Hynde can be--but instead, it's a rather wan listen.

It’s pointedly brief--11 songs, 39 minutes and with a scope every bit as limited.

Dereconstructed can be fiercely intelligent, but more often it is frustratingly blinkered; his lyrics can be defiantly blunt, but they’re often elbowed out by music that is dumbly bombastic.

Like a child playing dress-up with their parents’ wardrobe, Only Run’s impulsive change-ups can result in some ill-fitting looks.... Fortunately, Only Run finally hits its stride in its more focussed second half, with Ounsworth and Greenhalgh strategically building upon simple ideas rather than trying to cram them together and see what happens.

They’ve been slowing down for a while now, but here they feel nearly worn out.

As an experimental electronic album, Reachy Prints comes off as milquetoast. As a pop album, though, it sparkles.

For all its emotional charge, Changing Light barely feels more intimate than Share This Place.

A handful of tracks on Volume X are decent placeholders that do nothing to expand or appreciably reinforce the band’s aesthetic, but “Ice Fortress” stands out to represent everything Trans Am does right.

Ghost Stories certainly sounds like the product of someone working out their private pain in public; unfortunately, the results are less Blood on the Tracks and more "Can I Borrow a Feeling?".

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.

It's true that the new versions sound more modern and souped-up than the originals (which you also get if you buy the "deluxe edition" of Xscape), but their producers don't have enough distance from Jackson's presence to reframe his voice the way that, say, Junkie XL's remix of "A Little Less Conversation" reframed Elvis Presley's.

Throughout Turn Blue, it's difficult to tell how invested these guys actually are in the music they're making, an indifferent attitude that encourages the listener to act in tandem.

In the Hollows never feels lived-in, or more generously, part of the reality Baldwin has found and written into these songs. The exception comes with the title cut, the record’s biggest production and the most anomalous and audacious pop anthem of Baldwin’s career.

Sheezus has a few good points and some admirable intentions, but too often it misses the point.

Nothing here bears the strain of overzealous ambition, there are no flubbed notes, unseemly textures, unfortunate lyrical ideas; everything positive or negative about Breathing Statues is simply too ephemeral to make a fuss about.

Artificial Sweeteners certainly isn't a terrible album, and it does the trick if you're just looking for a quick pick-me-up, but it leaves a bland aftertaste.

Get Back still finds McBean trying to tap into something risky and surprising, even if the results are the sometimes-egregious misstep of a mid-40s rock musician obsessed with the letdown of aging.

Z's biggest problem is that, despite choosing a sound that is soft and somnolent, SZA is too often overpowered by the music.

Taken as a whole, the album is exactly the sort of hastily tossed-off, forgettable project that legacy acts will sometimes tack onto can't-miss releases such as this. It's a shame they did.

The trouble with World of Joy isn’t that it’s bad, but that it seems perfectly content to stop short at “pretty good.”

At heart, this is an enthusiastic debut that can’t quite live up to its own billing, but at least it shows two veterans who have bravely embraced the neophyte’s challenge of figuring out their sound.

Convertibles ends up a low-stakes affair without being a low-quality one.

There are flutes and poetry readings, floods of noise and wisps of bass clarinet. Still, such an astounding lineup only serves to reinforce the disappointment of the flat and oftentimes gangly Field.

Most of it dips into detached terrain; the manic piano runs of “World Three” are rendered without drums, and the layered buildup on “Dissolver” is executed in such a precise manner that it’s positively suffocating in its rigidity.

Tremors is actually kinda intriguing in a “canary in the coalmine” sort of way.

The band has sharpened their focus on their most recent records, but in doing so has placed a spotlight on their songwriting and performance. It’s a shame that NOW + 4EVA can’t withstand this greater level of scrutiny.

The album is straightforward, but often so much so that it can seem as if there’s nothing below the surface.

Four albums in, it's becoming pretty clear that the genre in which Manchester Orchestra resides has more untapped potential than the band itself.

Dreams, with its ability to shuffle through genres while maintaining a cohesive sound, should please though who were looking for a little more ambition.

The progression from early singles to first album isn’t nearly the same arc as it was just 10 years ago, but it’s still weird that the first full-length showcase for Skrillex as self-contained album artist feels more like a transitional record than a debut that plays to his strengths.

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

If Rise of an Empire is meant to read like some kind of State of the Union address, it paints Young Money as a fractured team that’s lost its compass.

Many of Glow's songs are just-there, but a few manage to be engaging.

Kindly Bent to Free Us works as a sort of retroactive insult: It resurrects many of the misgivings people have always had about Cynic--the overindulgent vocals, for instance, or the ponderous new-age musings--and runs wild with them.

If only the rest of the record caught on to that out-front force--the words on Love Letters might scan as more than lonely fridge-magnet poetry, the beats might feel like more than just placeholders, and the music could be something to dance to instead of just drift off to.

The stiffly prefabricated industrial-dance grooves that Laibach habitually fall back on don't quite cut it any more, and without a monolithic state to serve as the object of their satire, they're reduced to mocking political fatuity.

Aside from its appropriate feel for a good time get-down in a surprisingly cheerful cartoon post-apocalypse, it's hard to get any real emotional connection from these cuts.

The moments where Mastermind gives us William Roberts the man instead of Rick Ross the gangster flick composite character with the borrowed name are scarce, and he remains committed to dialing in good life platitudes that increasingly ring hollow.

The net result of the half-thoughts that make up the patten mythos throw the music into a certain light, depending on how it's received.