Gravebloom is a fun album. Honest. But it’s also a rehash, plain and simple. Nothing done across its eleven tracks hasn’t been done on previous Acacia Strain records.

At its worst, Younger Now is inoffensively bland, wasted Dolly Parton talent aside. Songs like "Love Someone" are dead on arrival with their lifeless energy and forgettable hooks.

Unfortunately, Wolf fails in the very same manner as Goblin, albeit with slightly more class.

Is 4 Lovers isn’t a bad album, it just lacks that much-needed energy and purpose. A lot of the songs here feel like they’re going through the motions.

At its best, the album embodies the curiosity of revisiting audio or video recordings, scanning for oddities which could possibly be the etchings of spirits crossing the veil between worlds. At its worst, Gallarais fools you into thinking its divination has lasting credibility.

The Future Bites traverses a strange course ripe with rewarding avenues and detours of failed attempts alike. It’s nothing if not fascinating, and will perhaps be more rewarding to those with a high tolerance for unorthodox marriage of various elements influenced by Prince, 1980s pop, modern electronic music, and alternative rock.

In trying for everything, they’ve highlighted the disjointedness of the end product, turning a fully-fledged transformation into an erratic collection of middling-to-great Belle & Sebastian songs.

As far as simplistic and generic post-rock goes it’s fantastically inoffensive. Yet with the face of the genre ever changing, God is an Astronaut and their sixth are slowly becoming a relic of the past.

Its moments of potential aren’t to be to be trifled with, but neither are they enough to elevate it from a stale sequence of overthought ideas, and this is a real tragedy given its stark contrast to the preview performance the band gave on KEXP back in April.

As a result of their indulgence, The Night Creeper feels somewhat forced to be something it isn't. The mindset is far from what we heard on Vol. I and Blood Lust, although the ideas are the same. Recycling is good, however, 4 albums later it turned against them.

There's No Leaving Now was almost as good as The Wild Hunt--and now I Love You. It’s a Fever Dream. is almost as good as There's No Leaving Now. It’s diminishing returns on the same approach, and with this album we’ll definitely find ourselves satisfied yet again--only with another layer of appreciation eroded.

This time around, deprived of their usual energy or lyrical quotient, they are nothing more than a momentarily likable diversion.

We have Gone Now, which alternates in black-and-white fashion between intriguing and utterly flavorless.

For about nine songs, Experience is good.

Truly, the blame lies at the feet of Sean, whose limp bars and flow make middling fare of ten reasonably well-rounded bangers.

The good thing is this second record, Born Pink is a slight improvement overall, feeling a tad more cohesive, despite its modest runtime of 24 minutes. Their debut was simply a mixed bag of tracks thrown there to please the horde of fans who insisted on a full length release.

Laugh Track makes several welcome adjustments to their present-day formula, but it’s hardly a wholesale reorientation – and make no mistake, the National are still very much in need of one.

Post Human: Survival Horror doesn’t break any moulds, it’s the sonic equivalent to fast food, by which you’ll consume it, enjoy it, and forget about it right after you’ve finished it, but it’s fun while it lasts.

To be blunt, Tesseract are entirely too reliant on ambiance as their "secret sauce." Where a proper use of ambiance can add a pensive tone or an opportunity for emotional reflection to a song, Tesseract rely on it both as cohesive glue on nearly every track on Sonder and as a melody replacement. It's simply not enough.

It's really unfortunate that Inc. hasn't been able to elevate beyond these very basic production mistakes; they give an impression that No World was either unmastered or mastered haphazardly.

It just lacks in a hallmark of all prior Ducktails releases: imagination.

This is an album of songs for a big idea before it was shrunken down and packed into the blockbuster money machine, and its well-intentioned attempt at bringing legitimacy to Marvel leaves Lamar and co. alone on a podium, broadcasting their passions through a megaphone to kids who just came to see superheroes do some backflips.

JAY-Z tries to invigorate his musical career by connecting with himself for other people's sake. In total, it sounds like what it is, a business leader for whom the personal proves troublingly difficult to connect with.

On balance, Lost Worker Bee simply does not do enough to distinguish itself from the rest of Elbow’s oeuvre, and therein lies its greatest failing.

The album's aesthetics are vaguely mostly there, but their function feels overly superficial. Giving The World Away does raise the bar over Keepsake in that it explores a wider range of palettes (jangle pop, gazey noise pop, synth-pop) and backs itself with a more momentous set of beats, but this is largely undermined by Pitfall the Second: Hatchie the vocalist.

Even with its glaring issues, Rise shows a lot of promise for Hollywood Vampires. If the band should ever choose to proceed further, an exclusive focus on original material seems like the best way to go, given that this is where Rise displays its, and the band’s, strongest attributes.

Aureate Gloom distinguishes itself in Barnes’ catalog as its own inexplicable set of contradictions: a record rendered inert and sabotaged by its own ambitions.

Felt, in turn, is not Suuns going through the motions; it's Suuns putting down their guitars and dusting off the synthesizers and scrounging up less than stellar material.