In Colour breaks no new ground to be sure, but as an accessible crossover record it does a perfectly serviceable job. It's light, breezy and pretty, as ephemeral as the exhilaration of clubbing without really evoking the thrill of it all.

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.

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’.

God’s Favorite Customer isn’t a bad album, yet it still feels like the weak link in the grand scheme of things. Fans of his previous work will still get a lot out of Misty's latest, but despite its subject matter, this album feels a little safe and inconsequential.

Garbus' sound is still a little too vague, still in need of some real streamlining; the promise remains blindingly obvious, but the execution, for my money at least, is still missing.

Nektyr is a tough record to like. Fans of Cocteau Twins may be better placed than I to pierce the veil and properly appreciate the wonders within. For me, trying to pull away the mud and heavily-baked conceit left me exhausted.

This collection would've been much better off as a coherent release if it came on just one disc. Two discs and thirty-one tracks really is a bit testing and the songs eventually feel like they've overstayed their welcome.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Vessel's ambition has exceeded his abilities. By trading in his synth for sheet metal he has lost out on what caused people to stand up and take notice.

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.

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.

Rhythm is a collection of great ideas, improperly organised and occasionally poorly executed.

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.

Despite the lack of variance from song to song, each of the 10 songs here are finely written candidates for radio. ... The issue is that it’s not worth it to dig through all 10 of these tracks to find the nuanced intricacies that so frequently play second fiddle to loud rock and roll.

The album suffers from a bit of an identity crisis, it is an honest album as the name suggests but it seems Future has difficulties in being an artist who feels the need to balance his street upbringing with his skill at writing, what are essentially, hip-hop love songs.

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.

The production is tidy but one note, the instrumentation resolutely professional. The vocalist has a few touchstones and reverently shifts from one to another without exactly lighting any fires of his own. Back in 1992 they would call this alternative rock.

Darren Hayman has undoubtedly done a good thing here, and so it seems a shame that the musical result sounds so uninspiring.

This is still a lovely, lovely record, on the surface at least; I'm not sure it'll stand up quite as well to heavy rotation as its predecessor.

Crutchfield is baring her soul and just about every song shows some signs of greatness. It comes up short, but not for a lack of trying.

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.

Unfortunately, Morby's latest effort seems to purposefully aim for the very middlest of the road.

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.

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.

It has interesting moments and one cannot really fault Kozelek for looking to present a different narrative than his previous record. But there is no denying that Benji set a high bar and this record borrows elements from it, but does so with disappointing results.