The reality of A Pill For Loneliness is that it gets carried away with flights of fancy that are, more often than not, boring. In the past 14 years City and Colour has released some vital albums, and while this certainly alludes to them, it isn’t quite on a par.

What made M83 so great was its inclination to look forward as well as backward. Unfortunately, DSVII —like Junk— looks backward without bringing anything new to the table.

Among the 21 tracks of Close It Quietly there is plenty that is amiable and whimsical, pleasant and inoffensive. There is also, however, almost nothing affecting or memorable.

Lost Girls is fundamentally disappointing. It is an album devoid of originality from an artist who should be reaching for the stars instead of looking back into the murky past for inspiration. No doubt it will sell by the bucketload, but then people like Coldplay and voted in the Nazis so what do they know.

The majority of Fear Inoculum’s songs are more or less interchangeable, achieving the same overall effect in slightly different ways. ... Toolheads will find much to enjoy here, I am sure of it.

Their newer, glossier pop sheen pedestals them as the makers of proficiently written and intently catchy tunes that are inoffensive and innocuous - and never adventurous enough not to be.

Dwyer’s band are still the masters of genre-leading and genre-defining garage-psych-founded mayhem but Face Stabber veils that slightly behind bloated long cuts and a lack of standout individual tracks.

i,i is an album meant to please their least demanding customers; a session of pure, light nostalgia, and given the band’s rabid following, it’s still certain to succeed, even to receive knee jerk, overeager accolades. That’s all well and good, but it’s hard not to recall just how much more these guys are capable of.

File under: Works better if you think of it as a remix album.

Younghusband's new record shows the band can turn out a great sounding bunch of songs and the odd moment of brilliance. If they spent longer letting their songs grow before unleashing them they might have produced something more distinctive.

‘Unspoken History’ and ‘I Want U’ show she has real talent. With more work, and more pain, she might graduate from The Best of Luck Club.

The talented likes of Lisa Hannigan and Sharon Van Etten attempt to breathe life into affairs, but there’s no resuscitating a creature that never breathed to begin with. No less, they for some reason decided to draw this death rattle out across their longest album to date, blindly moping through an inexplicably sixty-three minute run time.

It feels Mac also went through these motions creating Here Comes The Cowboy, something is lacking, and it feels like it was motivation. That being said, with this record Mac has taken some creative risks.

While calling Fishing For Fishies stale at first may be a bit harsh, it becomes pronounced once you consider the adventurous image King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard has carved out for itself over the last five years. With this passive listening experience, rarely was I ever intrigued by the band’s songwriting.

CrasH Talk is an unfortunate example of what can happen when someone gets the creative validation they’ve desired, only to find themselves at an impasse.

At their core, the songs are fundamentally concerned with unguarded and confessional intimacy yet the manner in which they are presented is a hindrance as, on the whole, there is a sheen to Designer which it could well do without.

Sometimes he lands on stanzas worth savoring (“All that I fear is that all that I have given you is a ship out to nowhere that wants to be out of control/but I see the light in oh so many things out here, and a lifetime so gently now sits on the stairs to my home.”) Other times, timelessness gives way to stuffiness, with lyrics that act more like riddles he doesn’t really care about solving (“When every wind is an afterlife out here, what language do you dream in when you’re drunk?”)

There is a pleasing directness of intention to the metronomic drumming and the arpeggiated keyboards that would be sufficient to keep a crowd dancing but look beyond the surface level and there is unfortunately plenty to make you cringe, too.

Hourglass Pond is an off-balance album. If you played the album to someone who didn’t know Tare had a new album, it would be very unclear where it belongs in his discography.

Doko Mien indeed falls short of the bands body of work but that doesn’t mean that every song on its own has something to offer. For the most part the group is still never derivative as their own unique spin is still apparent on every track. For the most part it is just too subtle to be noticed.

He and his brother have made an album that’s too impersonal to provide an actual emotional connection but also lacking the vision necessary to provide something out of this world.

The result is a mixed bag of songs with which the group continue to earn their moniker, through moody orchestral pop pieces adorned with the group’s signature electronics, but we’re left wondering whether the soundtrack might have been more interesting.

The band still show the glimmer of potential they’ve always carried, and it’s nice to know that consistency is possible with the band. ‘Doctor’s In' ends with an abrupt fadeout, and your memory of Tasmania can depart at a similarly unsatisfying rate.

If, after an absence of 19 years, you are happy to engage with a band who are reprising much of their musical and lyrical themes whilst also dipping their toes into unexplored (and poorly realised) terrain, then no doubt there is much within White Stuff which will tick all of the appropriate boxes. But, oh man, that Kool Keith track.

So many tracks slip through your consciousness, particularly with how much he sticks to the formula of chorus/verse/chorus/verse/chorus. His dullness sucks the life out of typically energetic guests like Playboi Carti, whose feature is less Die Lit and more Diluted.

Individuality has been smoothed out by production and a lack of lyrical diversity. Undeniably a star, Maggie’s light has been dimmed here.

Only ‘Peanut Butter’ stands out amongst the morass by dint of its crashing introduction. Even that track eventually settles down into the record’s bloated template. It’s a shame, because there are some lovely moments.

Come at a pace so consistently slow the album's charm begins to ache.