Blood Bitch commits the ultimate crime of all so-called concept albums: there is undeniable effort in the subject and story it was supposed to tell, but little magic in the execution.

...Like Clockwork is a droning, incoherent endeavor, and it simply doesn’t reward the attention it’s asking for.

A record this nondescript’s just detracting from what we could be listening to instead.

The album doesn’t take nearly enough risks.

Until Ex Cops stumble upon a niche and make it their own, their career is going to be eclipsed by listeners hearing influence over innovation in their music.

For The Future’s Void, she’s traded in the tarnished grace and drug-ravaged ten-mile stare of her past life, but it’s not always such a fair deal for the listener.

Honest is a good deal more middle-of-the-pack for a post-Yeezus 2014 than its creator wants to admit.

Only the opening stanza of “Waitress Song”--in which a major label signee fantasizes about escaping heartbreak by assuming a romanticized working class identity--is outright egregious. The rest is just innocuous.

The density of Tetsuo & Youth just could have benefitted from even the slightest dose of levity to throw its rhetoric and messages into sharper relief.

True, not every album needs to make a statement; sometimes it’s just nice to have music to listen to with your eyes closed and your brain off. But they can do better.

The best offerings here are “Blind Faze” and “2 Shy”, Fleetwood-fashioned tracks that sway playfully, celebratory in their own modest way. The rest doesn’t hit hard enough, and doesn’t even really seem like it wants to.

New album Hot Dreams still struggles to find a unique vantage point on its assembly of vintage sounds and gothic vibes, but fans will be more than satisfied.

Add production issues that have marred the bulk of their discography to the lack of tune and we have something that never lifts off: everything sounds mixed at the same level, resulting in mush.

Ultimately, The Unnatural World is a frustrating album.

Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son is long on atmospherics, but woefully short on songs.

As with The King of the Limbs, Beautiful Rewind is always keeping us at arm’s length, coldly allowing us to admire the craft without letting us in on the secret. It can make for a lonely listen.

Good Luck and Do Your Best is dull, an affair that lacks curiosity because the answers are in front of him. None of the production is outright bad, just done before by the likes of Four Tet, Nujabes, and John Talabot.

Forest Swords' second record is simplistic on purpose, but that doesn’t make it feel less empty.

The art-rock band’s third LP Infinite House combines tentative dips into R&B and soul with a firm foundation in jittery, spindly, angular NYC rock, resulting in pop songs with a deliberately nervous, ungainly, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink feel to them.

Unfortunately, Night Time, My Time goes awry at “Omanko,” a grave misstep that verges on parody. From there on out, the record’s spotty.

Some passable stuff here, mostly confined to the second half.

This is the kind that makes you want to go back and listen to his older stuff, if only to remind you he’s capable of wonders.

Del Rey has struggled to back up her provocations with substance. Ultraviolence was an exception, a singular breakthrough. Honeymoon is, sadly, a slip and fall after a promising stride forward.

It’s not breaking news that reunion music isn’t a revelation, but this album seems worse than the merely dull crop of new Owen material.

There are over-arching problems here: the lyricism that doesn’t relate to anyone except the singer, which is especially troubling on the mostly lyric-driven “Widow’s Peak”; the lack of color from the lugubrious and minimalistic approach (excepting the vocal shading of “Joe’s Dream” and the Western-tinged “Honeymooning Alone”); the dearth of melodies, make the relatively short album get wearying over time, especially when you add the too-pristine production.

Will is a wobbly baby step from a well-honed sound to something greater. There’s not much reason to listen to it over any of her other albums, and it’s less interesting for the music it contains than the music it promises.

It’s simultaneously daunting, exhausting, terrifying, all at the same time. It’s all a lot to take in, with not a whole lot of the Gambino we are familiar with to help wash it down.

The supple dynamic shadings of earlier Projectors material is gone; everything’s annoyingly crisp, with lots of things at the front of the mix that shouldn’t be and Longstreth’s pitch-shifted voice running near-constantly throughout.

Most of the time, Nabuma Rubberband sounds well put-together but empty, all style and no content, the kind of album that won’t offend you while you’re listening to it but which you’d be hard-pressed to remember any of once closer “Let Go” comes to an end.

IV feels subdued and professional, something you would never expect to associate with the quartet.

They do work up some magic every now and then.

Heard consecutively, these songs sound disappointingly like one another, and while one good belter about the pain of unrequited love is a blessing, nine in a row turns out to be real drag.

In finding their way back to what works, it too often sounds rehashed to make it a true return to form the band has been yearning to find.

Ruins isn’t a bad record, or a weak one, it’s a boring one.

The genre-spanning approach dilutes what could have been a memorable project, leaving 32 Levels with a storage of untapped potential and only a few beacons shining their fullest light.

Even if we were to give ALLA’s abysmal lyrics a pass, the production doesn't help, either.... Still, Rocky can, at times, be an engaging figure that radiates charisma when he wants.

Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino is the best possible kind of average record, one that goes out swinging. One that goes for it on every level. A record that, although it isn’t great by any typical metric, is extremely curious and entertaining.

As it stands, Hang isn’t an unpleasant listen, but it’s an oddly frustrating one.

Lurching drum-machine beats, gentle piano chords, and somber string arrangements form the musical groundwork upon which Albarn sighs about the encroaching dominance of technology. If you’re the kind of person who shares this worldview, you may find Everyday Robots an often lovely demonstration of post-millennium tension. If not, the album’s monotony can fast become punishing.

Here, as he seemingly aims for something like hard-won, grizzled wisdom, he often trips over his own lyrical ambition.

Lyrically, High as Hope forsakes Welch’s knack for vibrant imagery and symbolism for more human modifiers and concerns. While it allows her to share more personal information, Welch’s straightforward songwriting means there are no “Howl”’s or “Ship to Wreck”’s present here. ... Despite these critiques, High as Hope surpasses many of them to solidify itself as a decent record.

Rarely does The Documentary 2 feel, or sound, important enough to warrant a double album, especially not one that spans three hours. The Documentary 2 perhaps works best when Game suffuses tracks with growing pains.

It isn’t so much that this record is weak as it is well trodden, and the recipe is out.

This is Diamandis’ break-up album in more ways than the romantic sense. She also severs ties with popular expectation, and the end result is regressive rather than revolutionary.

Unlike the best of the Notwist’s output, Close to the Glass isn’t emotionally nourishing, primarily because there’s no real sense that anything is at stake.

Teeth Dreams is nowhere near the best Hold Steady album, but it shows the band aging in a direction that fills us with… hope? Perhaps that’s all we can ask for.

There’s honestly no real low moment on Life of Pause, but then again, low moments were never this album’s problem. The problem is that there’s really only one high moment.

Banks’ debut, sometimes promising and even wonderful, could have been revelatory.

Clocking in at roughly 47 minutes across a charitable eighteen tracks, Always Strive and Prosper does not seem to break any new ground.

Not To Disappear is an intermittently pretty affair with painfully little substance, an album that spends so much time wallowing in its own self-indulgent loneliness that it fails to offer up anything listeners can actually relate to.

Jack White missed, but in the best possible way. As weak as this record is, its extremely entertaining.

For now, Little Red stands as an example of what happens when the zeitgeist leaves you behind.

It still sounds like The Afghan Whigs, but it sounds more like re-workings of b-sides that may have shined in the sun of another decade.

Neither engaging enough to be exhilarating, nor boisterous enough to be obnoxious, Perpetual Surrender simply gazes at its shoes without making much of an impression at all.

Despite the glorious melodies hidden within so many of these tracks, like the opening duo of “Name for You” and “Painting a Hole”, huge potential is undermined by ham-fisted executions and depths you could wade through.

Static lacks variety. It’s just a short-fused, gloomy rehash, and what little has been changed isn’t really an improvement.

A record that’s all too often content with mediocrity even though its finest moments reveal just how close it came to greatness.

It’s a solid record and one that’s sure to please fans, myself included, even if it doesn’t meet the highs of its predecessor.

They’re neither particularly evocative nor pleasant to listen to, meaning they fail at being ambient music in all respects but slipping into the background.

Colors is the opposite of The Information. The first time you listen to it, you know its average and you keep listening, begging it to give something that hasn’t had its edges shaved off by a production style that strips all weird aesthetics in favor of aerodynamics that no one wanted and no one will like.

Born Under Saturn is only intermittently gripping. Certain tracks feel heavily procedural and oddly joyless given the album’s lighthearted tone.

As an artist revisiting a previous masterwork, he’s chosen to add maturity in all the wrong spots. Lowbrow nods interspersed with pointed criticisms of nearly everyone of note made Eminem a star, but most of the references and insults here feel dated. It’s about as timely as catching up on last year’s episodes of TMZ on your DVR.

Overall, no risks are taken: all of the lyrics want to be mantras but end up as little nothings instead; practically all of the songs reveal their hands way before their often too-long song lengths; they mistake reverb as a songwriting tool.

Its songwriting, production, and delivery harbor no risks, and therefore the album safely passes by its listeners without leaving anything but a want for something a little more lively.

Is the Is Are is certainly honest, but it could use a little more optimism, and the music’s circuitousness only adds to the feeling that a single issue is being poked and prodded to exhaustion.

As a mixtape, I understand why Campaign sounds so derivative, but still I wish Griffin had pushed a bit further in terms of musical experimentation.

While Mensa’s flow is capable enough (especially on the opening two tracks, which are some of the album’s best), he also indulges in some painfully cheesy lines, from references to television shows long dead (“Tryna take over the world like Pinky and the Brain”) no matter how ham-fisted (“If she see her name, she get Goku tough”).

Cuomo seems to have found his commercial home embracing a beach-party rock flavor for California kids who’ll “throw you a lifeline” and “show you the sunshine”, and indeed the beach tone persists through the album. This should be fine and modest, but in Weezer’s hands it’s just too overbearingly gross-sounding to let off that easy.

Liberation never reaches the heights fans likely wanted from Xtina, it serves as a pleasant refresher for a voice that has earned its place in the annals of pop history. That said, it’s a bit sad to feel like her finest moments are, at least for now, also in her past.

It’s just a quick way to get to what’s relevant about them, an I.V. drip of catchy tunes from a time when your emotions were still raw and tender.

On Wonderful Wonderful, there are glimpses of that ambition on an otherwise routine album from a top-notch band on autopilot. But if the Killers want to capture the moment like they did a decade ago, they’ll have to want it more.

Reputation is, too often, an ugly sounding album. But Taylor Swift has a superhuman knack for a stunning melody. Many of these songs are downright sweet.

The album’s 12 bloated, mostly mid-tempo tracks drone on and on, and even when they aren’t technically long they sometimes feel like they might never end because most of them fail to find a hook.

The sparks of great art are there, but the brain behind the creation lays dormant. Time will tell where Domo goes, and honestly Genesis isn't a bad beginning.

The aquatic theme of the album is appropriate and in line with the atmosphere Lennox’s quirky, gentle guitar-plucking consistently evokes. But this, nor the occasional flashes of beauty throughout the album, are enough to recommend Buoys’ unremarkable lonely beach music.

Alt-J remain impossible to put a pin in, which makes This Is All Yours almost as frustrating as it is absorbing.

Almost thirty producers were affiliated with the album, yet the music is shockingly simple.

Once you’ve heard one track from Waterfall (ideally “Salt Carousel”), you’ve pretty much heard them all, and while such a lack of variety might not be a nuisance to a live audience, it’s a problem when a four-song, fifteen-minute EP already feels a little stale halfway through.

It feels disjointed and incomplete.

It starts off brilliantly, but by the end of twelve tracks, it tapers off into an incessant and increasingly underwhelming performance.

Chrissybaby Forever is the music of Owens’ heart--unfiltered and unpolished, both to its credit and its detriment.

The main pitfall of this record is its pacing. Bob’s best moments are lightning fast, like the 28 tracks in 41 minutes Alien Lanes. By contrast, this record is 32 tracks in 71 minutes. Its top moments are when it is moving the fastest.

Mechanical Bull is the sound of Kings of Leon de-fanged, de-crowned, and de-throned, further evidence of their inexorable slide towards artistic irrelevance.

DJ Dahi, Sounwave and Cardo handle the bulk of beats here, with additional help from ScHoolboy staples Nez & Rio, plus the venerable Boi-1da and Jake One. Except the results are less DAMN. and more Redemption, the Jay Rock album from last year that everyone has already forgotten.

Yes, Views is both overlong and underwhelming. But there’s a glimmer of something more poignant beneath its bloated surface.

The issue is in direction, and the real issue is that there doesn’t seem to be any.

An underwhelming record. Kitschy 70’s synths and live drums abound throughout. The lyrics and vocals continue to distract from the true draw of the production.

On Oczy Mlody they play out like a teenager trying to write a paper while he is high. The lyrics range from vaguely inspiring to cringe inducing, but just like their underrated At War With the Mystics, the record finishes with three strong tracks in a row.

Forcefield a passable, fun album.

Despite its outward bustle and injections of colour throughout, the album’s personality is also disappointingly tentative and placid.

Overall, In Cold Blood is a pleasant listen in small doses, functioning better in manageable chunks than as a whole forty-minute work.

Supreme Cuts know how to construct a track, but if it’s staying power they’re after, they’ll need to develop a more original sense of what their music is, what it can do, and the places it can go.

While Space Project ultimately feels more like a noble failure than an attempted Record Store Day cash-in, its general lack of wonderment adds little to the imaginative legacy of Carl Sagan and the Voyager Golden Record.

On Naomi, the Cave Singers don’t really fail at anything; however, save for a couple of moments, they don’t offer up anything all that memorable either.

The fun here is manufactured beyond belief, sometimes for better, but more often for worse.

Apocalypse Soon struggles to keeps things interesting over its modest seventeen minute run.

EVOL is the first time we begin to hear the ostensible rigidity in Future's formula revealing itself.

At its best, Rebel Heart has an ease, and a long absent softness, qualities sorely missed since her last masterwork Music. For every godawful moment, which come and go with a sad frequency on Rebel Heart, there are glimmers of virtuosity buried within the overworked mess.