Green Twins is impeccably tailored and has some gorgeous ideas. What it lacks is the confidence to stretch its colour palette into areas the listener might not immediately associate with other, trailblazing artists.

Unfortunately, the album ends up being a whole that is less than the sum of its parts, making no real impact on the listener as it quietly meanders along.

To be sure, his willingness to descend into darkness, both regarding the world and within himself, is a large part of the man's appeal, but here he seems to have misunderstood, or simply ignored, what makes him truly great.

This album is just a few puzzle pieces shy of being great, and that’s a damn shame.

Volcano's songs seem to lack the spontaneity Sun Structures was built upon.

Where Nothing Feels Natural suffers is in the R&D department. Many of the ideas only make a couple of appearances. ... Still, there’s quite a lot to like here, and it’s mostly due to Greer--the speak-sing existentialism of ‘No Big Bang’, the Everything Goes Wrong-era Vivian Girls homage on ‘Nothing Feels Natural’, the ragged heartbeat of ‘Appropriate’.

Woman is by no means a bad listen, it just isn’t a very original one either.

Heads Up feels like an album bound to be forgotten.

The success of Emotion and its predecessor, Kiss, was a product of balance. ... Side B does not find that balance, and is most instructive in the ways it illuminates her process. It lets us peek in on the misfits that are the product of every pop album, and hints at the unsexy labor of music-making.

Her weary disposition begs for songs that are stripped down and reduced to their component parts--songs that don't fuss around. That's the problem--the fussing, the instinct to add more. It sounds like she's reaching for something, but she doesn't know what it is or where to find it.

There are a few truly memorable riffs, notably on 'Hum for your Buzz' and 'Bitter Fruit', it's just that overall, this music feels that bit too slick to deliver the 'unease' and 'winking ennui' that the record label copy promised.

Recorded in Los Angeles and produced entirely by Tommy English, most expressions of individuality have been removed and replaced with polished finesse. You are left with eleven songs that are entirely devoid of personality and the delivery only emphasises this.

Earrings Off! also features three instrumental tracks, but none of these feel like they add anything to the experience of the album, or its central themes.

Diamonds and company hold on to flimsy synth arpeggios and pop contrivances like a child would an old toy.

Subtlety is in short supply on Lost Themes II, with soaring guitar solos, industrial synthesisers and violent percussion throughout.

PersonA is an album based largely around Ebert's continued drive to reinvent himself to appease a particular audience. Unfortunately, the Magnetic Zeros and their brand of music is not one well suited to the audience they were attempting to find this time around.

The White Album is a return to a particular state, but it was never going to be a return to form.

It's hard to decide if what Yeasayer have created with Amen & Goodbye is a case of pop genius, of if the result is a load of over the top, art-rock pretensions. It seems that whether Yeasayer are really the future sailors of experimental indie, still remains to be seen.

There's nothing particularly wrong with Mass Gothic. There's clearly a compelling artistic voice in there.

What it lacks, though, is a sense of purpose, which is the precise thing this new version of Bloc Party needed it to have; they needed to make a convincing case as to why they still deserve your attention. Instead, they picked the worst possible time to lose their nerve, and turn in something so bereft of conviction and new ideas.

Songs in the Key of Animals lacks the focus of A Love Extreme, but then again, we're talking about an album that was supposedly written on the fly.

The majority of the track list is made up of songs that run far too long, have beyond cringe worthy concepts and lyrics (see: the attempt at love struck club banger, complete with Beyoncé, on 'Hymn For The Weekend') or simply sound too unoriginal to stand out from the others.

The Òran Mór Session is for Twilight Sad completists only. If you loved the originals, you'll probably enjoy hearing them in a slightly different style. Just don't expect worlds to shake.

Many Moons is the fussy, neat feeling we already know of him. The only real change is that we now have to look deeper and listen more closely to invoke a powerful connection between artist and listener. If the songs were more engaging, this would be easier to do. However, they all resolve to their same base parts, and thus become more forgettable than the feelings Real Estate's best songs have conjured.

White and Mosshart's collaboration feels like a tale of the proverbial nearly men--close, but no cigar.

For the year's most contagious artist, Fetty Wap's debut formula reads as follows: 20 songs x 4 billboard singles - 90% filler ÷ 1 melody = 1738. And somehow, that doesn't add up.

In terms of the surface tones and textures, the tracks in question are interesting enough--pretty, even. The underlying structures that govern these tones and textures, however, don't allow for anything approaching the band's typical intensity.

[FIDLAR] could potentially translate many of these songs into excellent bangers during concerts. But for now, Too is an irritating and frustrating disappointment.