Although there exist exceptions, like the gorgeous “Used” (in which Monroe drops this corker: “Used, like a house where a family lived until they died and there’s a soul in every room”), the record as a whole slithers into a sort of unsatisfying middle ground.

Afflicted in the end with a touch of offputting sameyness, LEGACY! LEGACY! nonetheless has remarkable staying power and a gracious ambition to in some small way materially improve the world of which it is an image. Aesthetic or not, that's worth something.

It’s the first track that commands serious momentum, though the closer “50/50” isn’t too shabby either. ... Its novelty burns off by the halfway mark, but there’s a strong sense that here, at least, was a direction worth doubling down on. Kudos. The rest of the record is an over-calculated mess.

A good-to-great set of songs, that would make a fire mixtape if you cut the energy-draining bores "RUNITUP" and "I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE"? A half-finished classic album, powered by reckless abandon and thrilling energy, but too scattershot to make it over the finish line? It's both, and neither, and I don't know, man. ... Call Me If You Get Lost is too busy shooting itself in the foot and calling it coming down to earth to be complete, but following along with its fragmented course down is still an exercise worth engaging in.

Heaven to a Tortured Mind eliminates the diversity and nuance of its predecessor in favour of underdeveloped avant-pop.

There's a huge promise to Fleet Foxes, one that can't be ignored, but Pecknold and the rest of the guys haven't tapped into it yet.

This Is A Photograph is an album which aims for an impressively grand vision, but rarely hits the mark. In its less grandiose moments, though, it’s frequently successful, providing the listener with a number of lovely folk tunes.

Like Radiohead and Panda Bear before Bon Iver this year, it's not a problem that Vernon hasn't created music in the same style of the last successful album: the problem is that he isn't able to make that creative jump to a new aesthetic, or direction, successfully at all.

Koi No Yokan is a passable alt-rock/metal album by a band that is capable of much more.

It's hard to slate Harps and Angels too much, because the music is actually quite good in places and it's nowhere near bad enough to be a chore to listen to.

True to both character and the album’s palette it may be, but it’s far from her strongest statement and fails to carry a set of songs that all too often need a push in the right direction.

For lack of a better word, it’s dull. The subtext of this record is rich for those firmly invested in Swift’s personal narratives but, perhaps for the first time, outright irrelevant for anyone else.

It's clearly her best album, but it's also her most frustrating, because it really drives home her potential and hints at so much greatness without ever truly delivering it.

In the end, Fucked Up aren't nearly as good as Refused were thought to be, but hey, Refused aren't even as good as they were supposed to be, so Fucked Up may yet be remembered as revolutionary.

For all the razzle-dazzle of its surprise release, I’m struck by hard it is to draw a lasting overall impression from the record. It adds little to the reinvention established by Folklore and doesn’t deepen her work within this sound in particularly convincing terms. I want to credit her at least for keeping up an industrious streak, but this alone would seem patronising.

Mirror Reaper is a challenging album to listen to on multiple fronts. On the one hand, it is oppressive and deep music, wrought with heavy themes and even heavier aesthetics. On the other hand, it challenges the listener's patience with overcooked ideas that threaten to spoil what is otherwise an immaculately produced record.

I can't help but admire the wondrous technicality of the band members, but I wonder if they could have deployed it in a more tasteful way.

The result is an album that is being asphyxiated by an extremely strong hand, and that proves to be the death of it all.

It’s reductive and doesn’t help really anyone by saying the hooks just aren’t there on the level they used to be, but it’s telling that I searched the rest of Currents in vain for anything as immediate as the crashing waterfall of multitracked vocals on the chorus to “The Moment.”

As it stands, it’s just another Vampire Weekend album, except the songs are less catchy and more sterile this time around.

eternal sunshine, at 35 minutes, doesn’t leave much of an impression, its titular statement of pretty regard for memories lost and time regained ultimately registering not as a platform for yearning nor as a vehicle for regret nor as ironic joke nor social commentary but as the broadest possible thread of aesthetic inspiration for pretty regard for such immaterial concepts as memories, time, gain, loss. The songwriting is the main culprit

Tha Carter III is scattershot, which oddly strengthens its faults, as if any lull in quality means that the next batch of producers can just reset the formula.

There are plenty of loveable moments, sure, but they tend to congeal like sand passing through your fingers.

As it stands, Us lies at a precarious crossroads of self-help preaching and black history compendium, succeeding at neither and exposing a serious disconnect between lyricist and producer.

Ultimately, Harry's House doesn’t really go anywhere or do much of anything at all. It breezes by with songs that seemed designed for the festival circuit and that are interesting and experimental enough that they’ll fit with Harry’s aesthetic without being too alienating for radio, almost as if he and his team couldn’t decide which was more important to them, so they went with neither.

Ab-Soul performs well in this complementary role and shows how versatile he really is, almost a west-coast amalgam of Brown and Kanye West, yet still a slightly weaker and more inconsistent sum than the parts.

Overall, The Nothing is a huge step back for the band. The Paradigm Shift and The Serenity of Suffering were far from perfect, but they rode a line that balanced a contemporary vision with their stapled characteristics. This tries dearly to be nostalgic yet fresh, but the finished product just comes across forced and derivative.

Thus when taking in Attack on Memory as a whole, it sounds as if Cloud Nothings are, despite their best efforts, a pop band at heart.

While the instrumental mastery still impresses as always, the end result remains enjoyable but ultimately missing a key aspect of what made the driving, mechanical sound of Meshuggah so worthwhile in the first place.

M is painfully bland and too on the nose.

When the natural flow of Nas' rap elevates 'Success' to one of American Gangster's best songs, you kind of wish Nas could have just had the same idea and done the album himself. It shadows the finale of the album, even the tight, appropriately grand title-track that finds Jay-Z at his breeziest.

An album this tepid--which is to say, not completely tepid, but tepid enough--from a talent that immense, though, can only register as a minor failure. She can do better. The sonic virtues of her performance on Pang, however mixed, guarantee that I'll be listening.

No longer supported by two decades’ worth of prophetic scope or career-highlight compositions, Godspeed’s revolution feels as performative as it always has - and a good deal more hollow.

For metal devotees seeking heaviness and shred paired with otherworldly curio, Crack the Skye is the be all and end all, but for anybody without a Celtic Frost tattoo, do not follow "the wise man's staff / Encased in crystal."

For the first time, the band is inconsistent.

Steingarten is a unique take on ambient/glitch inspired music however it’s lack of musical progression brings it down.

Good at Falling makes little headway into its own unique musical space, that’s something fans can hopefully expect in the future as Bain continues to distance herself from this vigilantly-traced launching pad. For now, here’s to another round of synth-laden pop balladry.

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.

Parallax, unrealised masterpiece or not, sounds like the man in his bedroom with a thousand songs to leave unexplained.

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.

The majority of this new record feels stuck in a chordal rut. The dynamic tension between the musical surface and the tonal depth is alive and well, but Disappeared serves as an excellent reminder that good rock music needs more than just ideas to thrive.

It's contorted, full of loose ends, songwriting peculiarities and recurring cryptic imagery, and, although many individual moments do overtly recall other artists, it hangs together with such an uneasy balance of inner tension and stubbornly foregrounded idiosyncrasies that you will be unlikely to mistake it for anyone else.

Chalk Color Theory up as a sophomore slump - a misstep she’s not likely to repeat - and the most aggressively OK album of 2020.

At the end of things, Morning Phase remains exceedingly lovely but disappointedly insubstantial; not a sea change at all, but just another passing phase in a career that’s made a specialty of them.

Actress is known to be deliberate and, one might argue, almost ponderous in how he paces his work, but AZD is especially bottom-heavy in concept. Like in an adult store, the best stuff is at the back.

Without a doubt, it’s ‘heavier’ than past PoGs on a moment-to-moment basis, but its constituent pieces of songvomit are frequently disjointed and undeveloped to the point that you straight-up question why the band were so unwilling to dig any deeper into them.

You’re Not As ___ As You Think feels like the conclusion to something that was never started in the first place, it hasn’t earned any of the things it takes without asking, it’s a shallow pretender desperately fumbling in the deep end, and it’s an unfortunate development for a band that used to write dumb, fun songs about girls.

Vaxis II: A Window of The Waking Mind takes everything questionable about Vaxis I’s overall charming forays into stadium rock, castrates it of any semblance of grit, urgency or personality, and subjugates its once formidable trove of catchiness to an almost impressively bland slew of commercialised hard rock templates that, in conjunction with the record’s militantly pop production, render it a gormless caricature of everything once endearing about the band.

FM! might have personality, but it's of the more obnoxious and self-obsessed "Get the Fuck Off My Dick" variety, and there's simply not enough quality on display to justify its own brief and largely annoying existence. Next.

The real problem with The Money Store is MC Ride's consistently incoherent mumbling and meme-of-the-day approach to making hooks.

The Golden Age Of Glitter then, is a subversive record. Things may not be as they appear at various points throughout, but that’s no reason not to give it a go.

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.

Lyrically, it’s inconsistent, and doesn’t serve its title or occasional flirtations with current events very well besides a few references smattered in every other song. Musically, though, it feels more disposable than before, and less beholden to locking into deeper, more resonant grooves.

Atlas Sound meanders where it ponders, a purely ethereal trip without the oomph.

Agora is a lot of things, but one thing it is not is corny. But in the process he has sacrificed a whole lot of virtues. Where Fennesz once generated productive frisson in the mind-body continuum of his listeners, now his music stares blankly at them, as if hoping that their and not his affective dispositions will create the passion that sustains worthwhile musical practice.

Grande is adding herself to several distinct sonic palates, putting her own indelible stamp on fundamentally disparate productions while letting them exist in different spaces. It doesn’t sound as free and natural as much of her previous work, but maybe that awkward hollowness is the point.

Despite its frustratingly monadic nature Howl does hold attention.

With few exceptions, Ascension is channeled into one energy level, despite the variety of sounds. It’s busy lethargy: too hive-like to be soothing, too sedated to be invigorating.

Essentially, this is an album aimed at everyone – which could explain why it’s so long and inconsistent – and while For Those That Wish to Exist is far from perfect, I do feel everyone can take some good things away from it.

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.

The sound quality is, by all accounts, mediocre, but the raw nature of the music reflects the “one day” aspect of their motto.

The bulk of EVERGREEN does little more than yeeting a distorted riff at you, copy-pasting vocal melodies on top and subsequently repeating a few lines by way of a chorus (and, if you’re lucky, this is the part where Gunn’s vocals get a little grittier, yay!). While this affords the record an inherent sense of cohesion, none of the songs here are particularly memorable or uh, good.

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.

If you've heard the albums it's drawing its material from, you've already got all of those secrets figured out. Ultimately, that renders this album as a novelty of sorts, a release that should only have a footnote in the story of her career rather than its own chapter.

This latest Lana del Rey record does contain some measure of robust and moving songwriting about topics other than sex, death and California. ... Secondary highlights “Paris, Texas” and “Kintsugi” disappear into the background; otherwise cogent hip-hop flirtations turn into innocuous daliances (“Fishtail”); the middle of the road becomes the most desolate of wasted spaces (“Fingertips”).

S/T is a valiant try by a band that has a strong history of trying, but it’s neither an impressive return to form, a nostalgic trip back to 90s emo, nor is it a breakthrough in Rainer Maria’s sound, it mostly just exists.

Working at breakneck speed, Vivian Girls is sloggy, hampered by the cloying feeling that the lo-fi shtick is simply too on-the-nose.

Omens shows some return to form, but couldn’t hold a stiff one against the likes of Ashes Of The Wake, Sacrement or VII: Sturm und Drang and that’s not at all Cruz’s fault.

The End, So Far is lack-lustre at almost every turn.

Too often, the melodies are listless, the song structures are underdeveloped, and the album’s weaknesses are masked by waves of synths and ambience that add nothing to the experience other than time – and that, unfortunately, is time that we’ll never get back.

The compositions are solid, every member brings something to the table and Eddie sings just as passionately as ever. Despite all these, there are only a handful of songs that spark actual emotion or groove at least, whereas the others fail to deliver memorable hooks.

We’ve come to expect more than inoffensive, lukewarm indie-pop from these guys. MGMT should save that for the thousands of other indie bands out there that all sound exactly like this, and go back to the stupidly fun and unpredictably bizarre music that most of us fell in love with.

It’s a shame Eno had to make so much of The Ship’s artistic vision. Divorced from pretence and divorced from the rest of the album, his final moments here are enjoyable.

Near to the Wild Heart of Life succeeds only in proving that the Japandroids of 2017 will have a hard time matching their former glories.

Chromatica’s main flaw lies in its indecisiveness. Lady Gaga has a number of great ideas on this thing, but the problem is that she doesn’t know how to make them work with any pragmatic fluidity. There’s a lot of redeeming qualities to the tracks, but it’s a patchwork job more often than not.

What Relentless Reckless Forever boils down to is a pair of decent, if not good, songs at the beginning, several painfully average songs in the middle, and a mish-mash of mediocrity at the end.

Fans of the band will have a blast for as long as this one lasts, feel proud for the old boys, and probably revisit it very rarely in the future.

So while Velociraptor! takes us to a few different destinations than we may have expected, it is ultimately going to elicit the same divisive response which its three predecessors did.

Coupled with the fact that his synergy of indie, singer-songwriter, pop, and trip hop is never quite realized, renders Resurgam a few steps below the 2008 hip hop releases that have already proven themselves to be superb.

For This We Fought the Battle of Ages doesn’t feel like it surpasses space and time, or bridges a gap between consciousness and dreams. Once it’s over, it’s forgotten fairly easily, save maybe a couple of Vernon’s stronger melodies. It digs its nails into your scalp, but doesn’t truly grab at the psyche.

“She Shines” displays fleeting snippets of raw emotion over chunky guitars, while “In Time”’s surging, punchy, melodious hooks bring some recognition of greatness to the forefront, but overall, the majority of the album seems pretty content with functioning on passive, prosaic ideas with little staying power.

The Loveliest Time is the most B-sideular ‘album’ experience I’ve found in my paws so far this year: its consistency is gaseous, its stylistic hopscotch is even more erratic than that of its sister album, it is a product of the same sessions, and - most importantly - it contains a large chunk of the weakest Carly Rae Jepsen tracks to date.

Graduation is consistent, yes, but it's consistently boring.

The main problem with In Our Heads is its musical anonymity.

The first three songs will undoubtedly hook any listener into continuing the album, but the listener will find nothing as impressive as that opening statement.

It’s not the worst approach they could have taken, but again, there’s nothing super about adhering to the virtues of pop – and in turn, Bonny Light Horseman is a marginally decent record; nothing more.

A Kiss For the Whole World remains eminently-listenable low-calorie fun despite its intermittent slip ups.

The bloat of Transcendence seems to be a problem inherent to post-2011 DTP, and appears to be symptomatic of a group trying to deviate around a winning formula of the past rather than one keen on developing the innovation they were built to achieve.

The album musters such little excitement from its arsenal of dynamic guitar solos and yells of self-affirmation.

You will hear the first song five times on this album and the second song twice. Some might argue that mellow synthpop brain-emptiers of “The Darkness” and “Lifeline” constitute independent third and fourth songs, but these are such bland re-re-ree-renditions of A. G.’s longstanding crusty pop Cookbook that flattering them as autonomous entities demands a greater creative effort on your part than the man himself was ever minded to put into them.

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.

Water Curses sits just shy of being worth the price of admission, even if the individual tracks are.

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.

Live From The Underground offers nothing game-changing, but is definitely enjoyable (especially on high energy jams like "Yeah Dats Me"), emulating its influences well.

There’re a lot of fumbles here unfortunately, a couple tepid ballads, a lot of irritating goon-hop, and a couple songs that go on for far too long (though most of those fall under one of the former categories.) However, the band impress again on ‘Touch too Much’, possibly the album’s best track.

IDLES wanted TANGK to be their Kid A, but they ended up delivering their Tranquility Base Hotel Casino.

The Radio Dept. are comfortable in their safety, the masters of indie pop/shoegaze fence-sitting, neither here nor there in message or meaning. It’s a stance they’ve refined with each release and Clinging to a Scheme rocks back and forth cautiously over a safety net of the softest cotton, never in any danger of losing its footing in the first place.

With Leveler August Burns Red have reached the limitations of the metalcore rule book that they have been glued to ever since their debut.