Wonder Where We Land pads its vocal tracks with plush instrumentals, morsels of melody that would have been strong points if they weren't so half-baked.

A collection of big, bouncy and immaculately produced club tunes, it brings together some fine productions. But it's also a tough record to love.

There's something so inherently off-kilter about Scruff's kaleidoscopic production that it just doesn't jell with the sound of a human voice being all serious.

It's nice indeed, but it may leave you craving something a little stronger.

You'll have to cherry-pick the best moments from Wonderful Frequency Band, but that's Justus Köhncke. He may bemuse you, but you can never write him off.

Secret Life is undeniably gorgeous. But it's a mainstream, you-know-how-this-ends kind of gorgeous, like a Hollywood remake of some European arthouse film. ... It's difficult to be mad at Secret Life. But the bigger problem is that it's hard to feel anything at all.

While it might be beautiful to gaze at momentarily, by the end of the record it's treading water.

Without any contrast, his vibraphone seems to grin vacantly, as if pumped full of sedatives.

As its title implies, Migration was meant to be about Green's experience moving to a new home and traveling around the world. But rather than taking his sound anywhere, Migration stays put.

It's all meticulously crafted with a keen ear for mood and emotion, and yet Creatures has trouble moving beyond a pastiche of Castex's record collection.

In losing sight of the dance floor, Battle Lines does away with Bob Moses' greatest strength, and the quality that made them stand out from countless other pop and rock acts.

The problem is the tone, which, from the album's first whimper to the comically bad poetry reading that closes it, is hackneyed and overwrought all the way through. These ten tracks are defined by somber pianos, bittersweet strings and quivering pads--like Sigur Rós, but drained of all mystery. Worst of all, though, is the singing, a half-coherent moan that falls somewhere between Thom Yorke and '90s radio balladeers like David Gray or Five For Fighting.

If The Mainframe is a film, then it's a Michael Bay blockbuster: slick and engaging but totally adolescent in worldview, its plot tortuous, its characters flimsily drawn, all of it an excuse for a string of eye-popping action set-pieces.

Some of Davis's early records still sound exciting because of the raw talent and vision behind them, and because of the way he stitched together the threads of old songs into captivating new ones. Now, his music sounds bland, as if it was designed for chillout compilations or cocktail lounges.

King Perry (released on Tricky's label—he also co-produces four tracks) simply falls flat, lost in technological tricks and devoid of Perry's classic, quizzical warmth.

If you come to Foals from an exclusively indie rock perspective, this may blow your tiny mind. But if this is Foals' attempt to infiltrate clubland proper, it falls short.

Eve sounds self-referential, dated and pretty low on ideas.

Even at its biggest, it sounds disappointingly thin.

In its studio form, though, II remains a lukewarm, ambivalent understatement.

With By Your Side, Ed Banger and Breakbot seem more and more lost in a Tumblr-tinged display of self-referencing: very now but just not very new.

There's no denying that Iradelphic is Clark's most accessible and friendly work in ages... Unfortunately, comfort is boring.

Where their first album felt like a definitive statement, Natural Selection sounds, as so many second albums do, like a diffuse bunch of half-realised ideas.

It is the very overfamiliarity with those same [80's] tropes that makes TRST an ultimately unsurprising, par for the course listen.