This is verse-chorus-verse as pleasantly intuitive as it comes, thematically light yet with enough room for the musicians to show their considerable skill.

Big Red Machine is an exercise in expectation and follow-through, and in how throwing a bunch of good ideas at a song doesn’t make a good song, nor a bunch of great tracks onto vinyl wax a great album.

The main problem it faces is trying to successfully combine her new, slower palate with the tense, rapid-fire elements she's known for. To anyone who has been listening to her discography for long, this is clearly something that will be difficult for anyone to pull off. And to her credit, she tries.

Reachy Prints is yet another tedious exercise in modern IDM attempting to stay relevant, and failing to do a very good job of convincing us listeners that it is.

Winter’s Gate is entirely enjoyable throughout--nothing is even close to being poorly written or executed--it is just that there are almost no moments in the entire 40 minutes that I would call exceptional, where the band went above and beyond to craft something truly memorable.

There are a handful of potential hits on Distortland, still they needed some structuring or at least a more powerful instrumental to be compelling.

Not everything's entirely stale, though. On the whole, the djent factor of the album is lower than most others (spare, perhaps, Juggernaut: Alpha) and the inclusion of orchestral elements throughout makes things feel a little more open, inviting, and intriguing.

Despite being frustratingly inconsistent though, Andrew McMahon In The Wilderness is still a step in the right direction.

Add Violence returns us to the bite-sized pop with-a-dark-side which has been Reznor's bread and butter since 2005, but without the energy of Dave Grohl pounding the drum kit like it said a bad word about Kurt Cobain.

While Die Without Hope is a mixed bag, I enjoyed it enough to at least recommend it to Carnifex fans, fans of deathcore, or even fans of blackened death metal who are looking at a band with some potential in the genre.

It's really cool on paper, a showcase of obvious and enormous talent with an extensive feature list that manages to satiate fans’ long-awaited fantasies while still giving them opportunities to explore new discographies. yet somehow it still ends up much smaller than the sum of its parts, particularly the main star.

Some of it wants to carry on the torch of its predecessor, other parts of it want to redefine Karnivool, and other parts don’t even seem to have any discernible purpose, like those god-awful interludes.

“Reluctant Hero”’s post-rock introduction and its booming mid-section pay-off delivers one of the crowning highlights for the entire album, while the rest of the record is peppered with great reverb-y, ambient soundscapes and really well-executed vocal performances from all parties involved, unearthing the squandered potential here. Unfortunately, these aspects are definitely overlooked in favour of the aforementioned thrash-y, hardcore sound.

Pure Comedy is definitively a headphone album; where I Love You, Honeybear made you swoon with its overt eclecticism, the gems here need to be unearthed after a few excavations. The album’s pacing does not help matters, burdened with a middle section that dares you to fall asleep and counts on a deep love of Tillman’s voice.

While often a little too unfocused, The Anthropocene Extinction is a fine addition to their catalog.

Whatever Funk’s motivation in pumping out yet another breakcore grenade in his long line of breakcore grenades, My Love is a Bulldozer is at the very least an engaging listen--make of that what you will.

As with many records that share Wake Up’s exuberant qualities, the individual tracks are largely hit-or-miss.