Brace the Wave doesn’t really crest above Barlow’s torrential output, it’s just another pre-frayed entry in a catalog of scratchy home recordings.

Dead Petz is a short-lived album by design.

The song choices aren’t a deep excavation from the quicksand of their record collection (“Friday I’m in Love,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”), and the uniform decision to do these all in a clean format with brushed percussion and campfire acoustics is exactly what one would presume from an all-covers venture.

Though Crosswords’ lackadaisical pleasantness is by no means offensive, there’s no compelling reason for this EP to exist.

Deradoorian’s arrangements now feel less exploratory than rudderless, her harmonies more droning than direct.

He’s chosen good material and done right by it. But Kill the Lights sees him both at an apex and a crossroad.

The new three-piece is no supergroup. Robyn’s best work rises above mere competence, and while every song here will keep people on the dance floor, Love Is Free transcends nothing.

The seven-, eight- and nine-minute lengths grow as wearing as the man’s past releases always threatened to, without actually losing momentum.

Misfires aside, it’s tough to dispute that although Born in the Echoes may not be a great album, it is generally a competent one.

In the case of Twelve Reasons to Die II, the glass is slightly more than half full.

FWA is slicker than most mixtapes--and on tracks like the opener, his flow remains a spectacle--but there’s also the pervading sense here that he’s playing it safe.

Occasional static aside, it seems Refused are really making good on their long-stated goal to take the airwaves back, or at least vibrating a little closer to the right frequency.

The results are hit-or-miss.

Ruess’ songs are a puzzle: They contain no memorable lines but the arrangements act as if they do.

This is a concept/protest record about Monsanto, and unless your blood boils as intensely about the issue as Young’s, the protest element of that is handled so clumsily that it sinks the album entirely.

It’s a record full of fits and starts, baffling successes and giggly failures.

Diplo and Co. threw everything at the wall and turned around, pretending it stuck when all that’s really left is the splatter from undercooked leftovers.

Highlights finds the former remix project paring down to less imaginative drum/guitar basics, sounding like a 5 a.m., post-Tiki party K-hole, or sex with a Cabana boy you thought for sure would blow your mind--and then just laid there like a starfish.

On True Colors, each track tries to be a separate statement as Zedd tries to crash through his own, pre-existing glass ceiling--but the whole falls short of the sum of its parts.

We’re supposed to admire the fact that 30 years after their debut album, they haven’t moved an inch closer to definability.

Where the album fails to eclipse its predecessor, and where it fails to match the band’s new Brooklyn buddies, is in Marcus Mumford’s vanilla songwriting.

Though it manages to be both lovely and adventurous, too often MCIII sounds like Cronin falls back on the string beds instead of utilizing them with the same fervor he used to reserve for crunchy, just-this-side-of-DGAF riffs.

Your enjoyment of Love Story will directly correlate with the amount that you enjoy Yelawolf’s singing, because boy howdy is there a lot of it here. If you respect Yelawolf’s progression as a musician and wish him luck on his journey to artistic self-actualization, you will be pleased.

Hooks are typically meant to stick, and after the infectious opening tracks, very little of Barter 6 does.

The Dead of the World holds firm to the orthodox occult black metal machinations we’ve come to expect.

Cherry Bomb is both impressive in its ambition and absolutely stunning in its aimlessness, weaving countless genres into multi-part suites but still coming off undercooked in its entirety.

Gibbard’s downcast verses keep Kintsugi all too safely anchored and docked.

The majority of cuts on Goon still feel like demos: languidly spaced chords, carefully measured arpeggiation, and hardly anything so gauche as a groove. The twinkle, such as it is, comes from the vocal.