Brandt Brauer Frick's contribution to the series, while not a classic, is still a little treasure trove.

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.

If there is one main flaw you could attach to Rapprocher, it's how Harper sticks so slavishly to the template laid out by her dance pop mentors.

Where Bad Vibes had a dynamic range of feeling, Dark Red is melodramatic to the point of being alienating.

For sure, Animal Collective still have plenty of whimsical creativity left in them, but on Painting With they mostly color inside the lines.

The album's mix of chipmunk samples, sound shards and tender melodies sounds contemporary, but it fails to bring out the ingenuity and energy of Carnell's best music. On Value, he bares his soul, but we don't learn much.

It's appealing stuff, but dig deeper and you'll find there's not much beneath the pristine surface.

The album is overproduced and polished to a fault, often vague and uninteresting. It's the defining characteristic of Become Alive. The individual performances are undeniably full of flavor and complexity, but put together they can overwhelm.

As you unspool slowly into Aimlessness, you can't help but wish for a more mediating human touch.

There's an excellent 12-inch (or two) hidden in Addison Groove Presents James Grieve.

Those few powerful moments [on Boy] are the exception rather than the norm. Their rawness is an essential element that could have lent Skilled Mechanics the sort of organic, internalized anxiety that once defined Tricky.

Clearly, Stewart's future does not lie in crossover R&B--he should drill down into his musical imagination to open up ever weirder, deeper seams.

The album is a ultimately a disappointment, but it has its moments nonetheless.

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

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.

Perhaps most frustratingly, Scintilli doesn't have as much of a sense of continuum as the aforementioned trilogy--which is something that any good album should have.

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.

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

Hotel Amour doesn't cover new sonic ground.

The inherent structural flaws of any given remix album also plague TKOL RMX--a lack of consistency, flow or narrative.

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.

The fundamental problem with Mst is not that it sounds like someone else, but that these ten tracks rarely match the profound emotional gravitas of that significant other.

The whole album sounds like it was mastered from a chewed-up old C90--it's post-chillwave music, busy and glitchy, but as relaxing as a soak in a warm bath.

Pagan is a singular vision. There's plenty to enjoy--no individual track is a misstep. But consumed as whole, Pagan goes from sugary pop to sickly sweet, and is ultimately unsatisfying.

Considering the odds, it shows an animated and still vigorous trio worthy of its semi-legendary status.

Glow dumbs down Niemerski's music into mass market-ready chunks.

As nice and welcoming as Getting Closer is, it'll never challenge you.

Even though Brighter falls short, in this context it does illustrates that the indie WhoMadeWho infuse their dance with has more funk and attitude than most.

Too often, Letherette is synthetic and manufactured, but in those slower, stranger moments it feels like the real deal.

Though it's often lost in the overwrought emotions of Dva, her gift for sound remains even when she overshoots the mark.

The endorphin-rush techno of "Forgive Me," meanwhile, is sure to ignite one of his main stage festival sets. That's the setting in which Boratto shows his energy and confidence as an artist. Too much of Pentagram, by contrast, feels tired or confused.

These songs still aim to elicit an emotion from you, and they're still not particularly subtle. The difference is you don't feel like it's being shoved down your throat.

Runddans is an intriguing and sometimes fun experiment, but it's not quite a meeting of great musical minds.

Listening to Imagin is like pulling on a old pair of trainers: comfortable, familiar and, ultimately, rather boring.

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.

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.

Even at its biggest, it sounds disappointingly thin.

The duo's linear arrangements could keep a dance floor chuntering along, but they make for clunky pop songs.

It's an unadventurous but pleasant effort from a talented artist who used to make everyone else look boring.

There's the occasional hint of another, more vivid album.... Elsewhere they often seem all too separate, like combatants squaring off in a strange, airless room.

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

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.

While Orbits is a tighter record, its joints are still too weak to hold it all up.