There are glimpses of risk here and there on City Sun Eater but a few more curveballs could really be the remedy that brings home a larger reward.

If the Lumineers debut record was a representation of their metaphorical college years, Cleopatra is definitely their more mature, but confused, post-grad understanding of fame.

Jettison the Valley doesn’t quite hit the highs of Freeclouds, but it remains a strong, consistent record from start to finish.

The Coathangers bring some good punk sensibility to the table but the majority of these tracks lack the velocity that would bring them into moshable territory.

Silicon Tare is a Com Truise EP for Com Truise fans, and as nice as it may be to add five more perfectly calibrated tracks to the collection, it seems like an empty gesture at the same time.

Given the album’s origins in a world that, from a contemporary standpoint looks rather quaint, it’s little surprise that it does not possess the potential impact it might have if released when initially recorded.

The album, one that focuses on and attempts to make peace with various anxieties, is at its best when the distorted and confused clash with sunburst pop structures.

Welcome the Worms lacks an awareness as to how lethargic it can be. Its lack of energy can demonstrate how tiring life is, but it can bring discomfort to an audience that might want to rock to a devil-may-care attitude.

While relatively restricted and one-note throughout, the homemade feel of the result--with its hazy mix of dirty, live drums and samples--preserves its originality.

While his veteran presence allows him to sufficiently navigate his way through introspective material, Kano’s simply more commanding when he’s at the helm of so-called bangers. Consequently, Made in the Manor is an exercise in dashed expectations.

All other songs have excellent moments in them, assuring that Grapefruit is indeed a good album. Had they happened more frequently and with shorter intervals though, we’d be looking at a great one.

Though This Unruly Mess I’ve Made is decent, its biggest failing lies in its quality control. For every good song, there are two mediocre and/or forgettable ones next to them.

This record is late ‘90s/early ‘00s radio rock nostalgic and comforting. It feels good, but like most things, not as good as the first time.

The Thermals have had a long, productive run, but it feels like time for a shake-up. This album reveals a band that’s still capable, but when it’s a trio that can produce better than that, the term “capable” shouldn’t appear.

They’re still on the side of the angels and fighting the good fight but for a band that once excelled at being extraordinary, Chaosmosis is, occasionally, too ordinary.

There are undoubtedly gems to be found, but the rewards are clustered on the first half.

Stripped down, these ten tracks are pleasing pop nuggets, though sometimes stretched out past the five-minute mark.

Guerilla Toss is headed in the right direction with Eraser Stargazer, but the band could sometimes stand to remember that they can make us dance and scratch our heads at the same time. They don’t have to sacrifice one for the other.

Wise Ol’ Man won’t go down as one of the essential puzzle pieces to the story of the Fall, but it at least boasts a killer title cut.

Sometimes, the band stumbles around with their influences, with the servicable-but-unimaginative chord progression of “My Wilderness” sounding like something Robert Smith scrawled on a napkin before throwing it away, a sort of bland imitation sound that carries over to other tracks like “Tear”.

While it occasionally points towards new and different paths that Yuck can follow, it also finds them returning to a comfort zone that may not be as comfortable for the listener.

Mostly this is just another album in the band’s discography. That makes it solid and shrug-worthy simultaneously.

Music for Listening to Music to is surprising in that it hits the thresholds of likeability and then runs away from the conceptual bar in favor of speeding faster than light. It might dabble in simplicity to a fault, but it makes up for it with instinctual choices like rusty strings and perfect harmonics.

While it’s a decent comeback effort Dystopia is nothing close to recent comeback triumphs like last year’s Purple from Baroness, or 2013’s The Next Day from David Bowie, however that doesn’t mean it’s a flop.

The Ridge proves to be a competent, technically accomplished piece of work, one that is aimed at sound designers mostly.

Many of Lion Babe’s ditties fall short of achieving anything in particular, making it a pleasant enough album, but one that is quickly forgettable.

Spirituality is more overt on The Life of Pablo than any of his previous sets, but it’s damn near impossible to decipher. Sure, The Life of Pablo‘s obscurities and eccentricities make it ripe for endless dissection by West’s fans and followers, but make no mistake: this albums is flawed, it’s problematic, and most of all, it’s no masterpiece.

I Need Your Light clings stubbornly to a spotlight on songwriting and band format that others of their former cohort, like Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors, pursued exceptionally. Most tracks feel caught in between the two. Like some kind of indie pop puberty.

Ultimately, Human Ceremony is unremarkable despite its flaws. Its moments of vigor and excitement are repeatedly undercut by the overwhelming familiarity of it all.

These are tracks that have the ability to win over those who wrote off Rachel Kenedy’s vocals from the first album: it’s a step forward for weird-voiced frontwomen all over.

Structurally, the album makes itself up to be an emotional story, one lacking in complexities that would make such a skeletal frame have its flesh. But that facet is not easy to gauge with the bare repetitions of phrase that have little in mind but cause those reluctant to view electronic music to roll their eyes, while also making prided veterans give DJDS’s effort the benefit of the doubt.

It’s a shame that St. Lucia’s work is riddled by persistently criminal overproduction and weak moments.

In fleeting moments Grasque offers glimpses into Makrigiannis’s inventive musical mind, but too often it gets stuck wandering up in the clouds.

Painting With is unmistakably an Animal Collective album, but in its eager familiarity, it ultimately neglects the one all-important quality of any Animal Collective record: novelty.

The likes of Velocity Girl, the Sunflowers, and the Belltower are indie pop that happens to use the odd distortion pedal. Not unpleasant, but only marginally part of the story, if that. By the last couple discs, you have bands like Blind Mr. Jones which are rehashes of the “classic” sound of Slowdive et al, but with a flute.

A diverse album is a thing to strive for, but trying to temper the optimism of a luminous, mother-of-pearl record like this by repeating tired ideas culled from the last decade of songwriting is not the way to go about it.

This is the kind of record you could pack off to the beach for an entire summer then promptly forget about. Too bad. Lobsinger deserves more.

EVOL doesn’t stand up to his critical peaks, but this could easily be seen as but a release to tide fans over before the next blockbuster.

All the songs on Big Black Coat sound like love songs, all eleven of them.

Jamie Woon seems to honestly prefer the slow observation of growth to the harsh, quick mistakes of an unobserved life. And yet, in the process he seems to prove the point: a watched pot never really boils.

Ultimately Hymns leaves the listener as exhausted and listless as Okereke’s downbeat lyrics (which too often read like adolescent poetry). The elements just don’t come together.

On this, their second album, MONEY have created a difficult listen on two levels. Firstly, in creating a collection of songs which, if not directly about suicide, often convey a hopeless state of mind and heart. Secondly, owing to the awkward collision of some fine playing with a largely monotonous production and some painfully strained singing from vocalist/guitarist Jamie Lee.

At its best, Is the Is Are is a fine album with plenty of immediate pleasures to offer. However, digging deeper won’t unveil anything really tangible.

This Is Acting, for all its backstory, rousing highlights, and questionable stylistic choices, actually feels like more of a placeholder than it was probably intended to be, continuing on the radio-ready success of 1000 Forms of Fear but doing very little to push her craft forward outside of exciting productions like “Move Your Body” and emotional breakthroughs like “Space Between”.

There are a handful of songs here that go a touch beyond just recreating an earlier style, and those are the best ones. If The Cactus Blossoms can expand their ear for detail more consistently into their songwriting and lyrics, they can be flat out great. But they aren’t quite there yet.

The recordings have a live and dirty feel to them, which makes them endearing and easy to cosy up to on the phonograph, even if the songwriting doesn’t always warrant a close headphone listen.

Sadly, with Anti the intent and promise is more admirable than the end result. There’s a certain dreary joylessness to it that saps any energy the songs might possess.

Its insular lack of adventure ultimately delivers disappointingly dull listening.

When Kanye West went through a similar transformation from 808s to the absolute perfection of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he laid a roadmap for what artists could do once they’ve hit that “acceptance” stage. Purple Reign hasn’t followed this template well, and the music comes across as flat because of it.

Life in the town portrayed in Rattling Trees continues as it has, with little change, much like the High Llamas’ music. This can be comforting, but also a little dull.

Only one of this Club’s already modest, eight tiny dancers dare to shake their booty beyond a clock-watching, Cinderella curfew of three minutes. The result is Pleasure delivers a slightly less memorable night on the tiles than it could.

It’s populated with misguided love songs (“Sorry”, “Can’t Say No”) and paranoid musings (“Crocodile Python”) that on previous Ross albums would’ve instead been replaced by devoted brag fests.

It’s not that there isn’t anything to love in Songs from the North—there’s plenty, especially on II and III. Instead, the listener is given far too much. With such excess, “too much of a good thing” though it is, diminishing returns are bound to follow.

Though Lowe’s lyrics tend to wander into meaninglessness (“The best is yet to come / I know what you’ve done”), it’s clear that Find What You Love and Let It Kill You is meant to be more therapeutic than artistic.

By applying Warpaint’s thin sonic veneer to yet another decade past on right on!, jennylee runs in place rather than moving forward.

The more you dive into these strange Dreams, the more it’s obvious that after trying to stylistically copy various groups on Ghost Stories, here they’re outright ripping them off.

Fall Out Boy have risen to be emperors, and though Make America Psycho Again is a dull excuse for a remix record, several features make it so that the ride is at least bearable.

Molnar and Nelson’s production enhances the intimacy of the recordings. Like the old cliché says, it’s just like being in the room with the artist.

Three bad songs on an album of 15 tracks shouldn’t sink the entire album. And it doesn’t sink Heart Blanche. Not quite. But it happens that those three tracks are probably the album’s biggest and boldest in one form or another.

Too often, though, Return to the Moon seems stuck in place. It’s as if Berninger and Knopf are too relaxed for their own good; the album feels more tossed off than anything else.

That’s not to say it isn’t a pretty powerful album with a few moments of greatness buried somewhere beneath. It’s just to say ... come on, man! Get those hands dirty!

There is nothing wrong with working a beloved genre and working it hard; however, if faithful imitation is substituted for inspiration and energy, the results tend to be kind of underwhelming.

Courting the Squall is a solid first solo outing for this music veteran, one that reveals an important truth: no matter how much experience you have making music, if you take the risk on something new, you’re going to find that there’s plenty still to learn, and even more to improve on.

The material on show may be uneven, but there is more than adequate promise and sheer ability to make you think that one day Bill Ryder-Jones may deliver an absolute masterpiece.

In short, the band is better when their brand of noise rock resembles sludge metal than when they focus on hardcore.

Angels & Ghosts is in many ways accomplished and often very pretty. But it’s pretty in the way of a postcard, and Gahan’s been around long enough and been through enough to warrant something deeper.

Kylesa stick to their home-brewed brand of lyrically ambiguous sludge metal meets psychedelic rock with touches of Americana, some ‘80s goth moments, and a hearty smattering of doom.

The increased use of synths on the album shows them edging a bit towards really carving out their own style. But right now they seem content to keep mining shoegaze and non-grunge early ‘90s guitar rock.

There are many moments of magic on Now I’m Ready although its reverent, over familiarity with its ancestry sometimes exposes its Achilles’ Heel. Keep Shelly in Athens clearly know all the right moves but perhaps need to reveal a bit more of themselves.

Unfortunately, Hunger proves to be largely a blues-based affair that has the band sounding more like a second-rate Steely Dan (“And We Were Young Again,” in particular) than the baroque psychedelia of their original recordings.

There are only two songs here on Blanket Waves, and they both go well past 10 minutes, and are certainly pleasing if not extraordinary.

Despite Rudimental’s non-stop performances, several of the songs drag.

The Dears are such a talented band of songwriters and musicians that even when they are not at their very best, there’s still plenty to explore that’s well worth your time.

If it doesn’t quite hang together as a complete album, The Diet demonstrates that, as ambivalent as they are about the modern world, Wagner and company are comfortable and more than competent at operating within it.

If the execution isn’t fully there, however, it’s still more fascinating to hear Deerhunter take on whatever style Bradford Cox endeavors than most other upper-tier indie rock bands.

As it is, City and Colour achieve only part of the goal here, that is, to make an album that represents the totality of Green’s one man, overarched vision. That he succeeds even partially is a credit to his willingness to at least try.

Whilst there are flashes of the burning ambitions of yore too much here is bland, formulaic and depressingly dull.

The album consists of a number of tracks that failed to stick on prior releases as well as a few tunes that seemingly attempt to capture the sound and feel exemplified a year earlier.... For an album that slogs along unassumingly, it’s not surprising then that the bonus material fails to make much of an impression either.

So dreadful are these two [additional] recordings that they bring down all of the preceding several notches simply through their having been included on the same album.

Colvin needs to bring something new to the songs, but for the most part does not perform them much differently than the older tunes.

There are only a couple truly great songs here, so the aforementioned first section doesn’t rival much of his prior output. All things considered, though, So There still packs plenty of strong melodies, lyrics, and vocals, and the wise contributions yMusic scatters throughout the duration are impeccable.

At the album’s best, Henley conjures up the push-pull between restlessness and contentment in a way that jibes well with the musical interest in the traditions of the genre. At its worst, the album makes me want to throw it out the window, either for the cliches or more often the way the persona of the album comes from a lecturing place of “wisdom”; an I’ve-lived, so I know attitude.

Sadly, Parks’ spectral strains are probably the most memorable part of her hookup with Brian Jonestown Massacre’s sitar swinging Svengali Anton “Keep Music Evil” Newcombe.

There are indeed a few singles here that, in a just world, would put Love back on the charts, but, as far as late-career comeback albums go, Love deserves so much better.

It’s just a shame that as entertaining as such popular revisionism can be, his 1989 will be remembered more as a curiosity than it does a full-bore artistic statement.

Although it’s the band’s weakest outpouring of material, it’s truly impossible to loathe In Through the Out Door because of its charm.

His demeanor and cultural significations work to blur the reality of his musical contributions, consisting of, on the one hand, jolting blasts and twinkles, syrupy phrasings, disjointed melodies, and, on the other, forceful misinterpretations of self-worth, love, sexism, communication, epistemology, friendship, listening, asking, requesting, demanding, self-expression, and self-protection.

While not everything here succeeds (much of the album is, in fact, a sprawling mess of ideas) Cyrus deserves a great deal of credit for unabashedly taking chances with her music, her image, both past and present, and what will ultimately be her controversial legacy within pop music.

While the artwork borders on the iconic and the concept is very much in sitting with the band’s oeuvre, musically, The Night Creeper is a sub-standard addition to the canon of one of the most promising bands in modern rock.

Barring a couple solid songs that fit their catalog fairly nicely, What Went Down offers nothing that their previous albums don’t deliver in a much more satisfying and ample way.

What the World Needs Now… still has punch and variety.

Despite their success in covering themselves, a cover album truly lives and dies by the songs that the band chooses to cover, and in that Yo La Tengo flourish.

Despite such strong highlights dropped in the album’s middle section (the acoustic guitar ballad “Shameless” easily vying for the album’s silver medal after the gold that is “Can’t Feel My Face”), Beauty ends up having a strange beast of a failing: none of the guest spots really add to the album’s overall vibe.

There’s no doubt that his first LP as Silicon is the work of a talented multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, one who will only go from strength to strength. It may suffer from some of the falsity it wishes to expose, and it may be a little too pessimistic in its outlook, but it melds its diverse influences into tightly composed songs fit for the 21st century.

Though Elbow is right to take pride in how well they pay tribute to their city, in terms of musicality this is far more interstitial than it is standalone.

Some minor, targeted deviation from the formula would have pushed Depression Cherry to an unprecedented level of novelty for the band, but as it stands, the record falls into a creeping, achromatic daze far more ambitious than it is visionary.

If you’re looking for something to break totally out of the rock-ready bro country mold, Wild Ones most certainly isn’t your bag. If you’re looking for something catchy, and somewhat more relatable than other offerings within the same expanse, than you’ve found just what you’ve needed.