There’s good reason to think that some of the more middling fare on The Way and Color is no more than growing pains.

Everything musical seems startlingly familiar, and not in the paying-homage-to-the-denizens-of-rock-past way the album’s conceit might have you imagine.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is ultimately an experience as disorienting as the sensations and emotions that Woodhead describes, strangely beautiful one minute and aggressively ear-splitting the next.

Let’s Go Extinct isn’t the breakthrough that will earn them that big wave of new press, but it’s good enough to warrant some recognition.

There are moments on Julia where he succeeds in creating the important and honest music he wants to make. Of course, when you’re using a shotgun, you’re bound to hit something.

The album is good, which is a component never worth underscoring. But it could be much more than that.

The album is one giant, immaculate anachronism, unimpeachable, but rarely brave.

Blade Of The Ronin is a well-crafted, entertaining, and moderately inspired follow-up that doesn’t do justice to the fourteen-year wait, but it reimagines Can Ox as competent storytellers rather than progressive geniuses.

While 99¢ manages to find its footing at a number of points, it never manages to prop itself up as a whole.

Although it exhibits significant growing pains, it still makes for an exciting and entertaining spin.

Whether we like her or not, Sia might be authoring the most iconic pop music of our generation. For this reason alone, This is Acting is worth at least one listen.

True Romance may not match Aitchison’s high ambitions for her debut, but it’s a hell of a start.

Overall, there is an unfortunate, unintended fatigue that permeates the rest of this album, likely due to the reliance of syncopated guitars to carry most of these songs.

Ruminations is ultimately a lamenting, low-key record. It’s sobering but never elevates higher than just a sparse collection of gloomy acoustic songs. It took just two days to finish and, for better or worse, that makes a lot of sense.

Short of their obvious opposition, there is little here in the way of meaningful tension between the Angels & Devils.

This Is… Icona Pop is not revolutionary, original, or inventive.... What This Is… Icona Pop, and Icona Pop as an artistic duo, possess that few others can lay claim to, is a firm grasp on the musical zeitgeist.

Sophomore album Always Strive and Prosper had ASAP Ferg striving to expand his lyrical and sonic palette and prospering less than half of the time. Still Striving then, perhaps self-consciously titled, course-corrects by dropping pretense and delivering what we came to Ferg for in the first place: banging beats, fire flows. Some of the time, anyway. 11 out of 14 of these tracks have guest features, and a high percentage of them don’t leave much impression.

Clocking in at 61 minutes, Alternate/Endings haphazardly splices together twelve breath-stealing drum & bass tracks recorded throughout 2012 and 2013; the result is more a tasting menu than an actual statement.

All told, Ye is thin gruel when placed next to Kanye’s intellectual transgressions, not to mention an impeccable oeuvre. As an aural experience, it offers a mix of triumph and nostalgia. Results will vary, depending on your willingness to embark on this very short, often thrilling, ride. But for an artist defined by grandiosity, Ye is frustratingly slight.

It is intensely personal, tangled in the sentiments that privately plague each of us. Untogether is meant for those cold, murky nights in which we feel completely and utterly alone.

The blip-bloops and motorik groove of “Dear World”, could’ve easily slotted in as one of the better tracks on Hesitation Marks, and then there’s the contrast between hearing the digital diary entries in the verses of “The Idea of You” with the exploding choruses (aided by Dave Grohl). But nothing here is truly great.

Five tracks, two very good, three just good, and three remixes, one worth your while, and two that don’t fight to be heard by anyone other than fans of the band.

Though More Life has its faults, Drake clearly worked hard on it. If the first thing you notice about More Life is its monolithic runtime, the second is how obvious it is that Drizzy is doing his damnedest to get your cosign.

Basically, this particular ambient music doesn’t lend much intellectual export or posterity that Eno so often claims to pursue. (Being slower isn’t necessarily a sign of intellectual maturity.) His approach may show it, but that’s his prerogative. Nothing wrong with staying in a mood, but this mood--whatever it is--sounds pretty played-out to me.

On his fourth studio album I Decided, he positions himself as hip-hop’s poster-boy for all of these qualities [hard work, sacrifice, persistence, gratitude], but in rapping about such unassailable ideas, he comes away with uninteresting results.

It’s one of Snaith’s least cohesive and affecting full-lengths, even as it provides us with some of his strongest individual tracks to date.

Crosswords, as a collection of loose leaves, doesn't have the weight of Grim Reaper but that also means it doesn't have the pressure. Crosswords is something you can just consume without trying to wring every inch of intent out of it.

The main downfall of Z is a lack of strong lyricism. In the rare moments that the murk clears or the light becomes too bright, what lies behind is less graceful than what it seemed.