West of Eden is a flawed album, a patchy album, and an album with some really bad lyrics in it. But nonetheless a very fun record. It might lose its magic quickly, as most of the thrill comes from the band’s willingness to skip from genre to genre, but every so often you can forget the flaws and get lost in the many worlds it tries to create.

Much of Glow is tasteful to the point of bland inoffensiveness, the sort of thing that'd suit a branch of All Bar One at half nine on a Friday night.

It's only at this point, ["Incredible Exhausted Bunny Ears"]... that Transistor Rhythm actually feels vital, resulting in in a luscious closing suite to an otherwise arid record.

All in all, though, a sort of affectlessness emerges here as one songs blend all too smoothly since, not unlike an automated playlist, the whole becomes less than the sum of its parts.

All too often the album lacks the requisite light and shade to make for a consistently enjoyable listen.

Feel The Sound, their first album since 2007, boasts the kind of incremental shifts in emphasis that no one but fans will savour.

Hype and arrogance created Watch the Throne and stifled the creative revelation it could have been. It would be nice if that could serve as a kind of lesson for the hip hop world, but somehow that seems unlikely.

This is a timid stand for a band who've made a career out of courageously embracing their fears.

Honey, when it works at least, is the sound of piecing together the night before: a love letter to not making it home, to the Tequila salt still stuck to your hand, to hands brushing under the cover of the smoke machine. Unfortunately, half of the time, it says precisely nothing and if that unquestionable potential is to be realised, Kathleen Brien has to make a choice.

The Flower Lane is far from a failed endeavour, but something special has been lost in the graduation from bedroom to studio.

The demand for our awe at an accomplished--yet unfinished--triumph is confusing. The feeling each song inspires is indeed that of a religious service, one in which the endless standing up and sitting down leaves one a little exasperated. And fatigued.

Belle And Sebastian fans have long ago learned to take the rough with the smooth and the quality control on The Third Eye Centre is all over the shop. The odd flashes of wonder within show they're still not a lost cause though.

It's clear that this band has focused too much on referencing and too little on songwriting.

Unfortunately, with an appropriately filmic, best-part's-in-the-trailer irony, it seems like Timberlake gave away too much by making 'Suit & Tie' the first glimpse of the record. From hereon in, it's a fairly dull affair.

Three good tracks [songs, "Motion Sickness," "Ends of the Earth," and "Flutes,"] do not an album make - and, unfortunately, this is the sum of the worthwhile moments on In Our Heads. Elsewhere the album is pure drudgery, remarkable only in its dullness.

Recorded in Budapest with a 40-piece string orchestra in tow, the Iris soundtrack feels far too paint-by-numbers, gathering yearning strings to ebb and flow atop xeroxed prairies of arpeggiating synths. It’s muzak for gritty thrillers, maintaining a thin soup of emotion with enough colour to paint the background without muddying the foreground.

Even without the cushy padding of Welcome to: Our House's clutch of Alex da Kid, AraabMuzik, and Hit-Boy beats, No Love Lost predictably sounds an awful lot like everything else on the radio.

One play is enough to confirm that defining moments refuse to peak through the murk.

Blake may have dispensed with some of the more experimental and emotionally obtuse trappings of his debut album on Overgrown in an attempt to engage more directly with a wider audience, but his intentions are all but drowned out by a thick glass porthole being hammered on feverishly by a dozen drowning onlookers.

The result is something of a mixed bag: moments of tender and enduring beauty broken up by landfill indie pop with a French accent.

Though their sound is undoubtedly unique, their music has become formulaic.

Without a single in sight, even by Outkast's loosey-goosey standards, Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors feels like three or four different records surgically stitched together illicitly by some cross-eyed back alley quack.

On the whole Body Music's tracks feel like little more than fairly unimaginative collage pieces: fifteen years of pop trends, compressed into one very indistinct style.

Even the most hardcore of Yes fans may forget that this exists in a couple months.

EP1 was a mixed bag.

The Saga Continues is lacklustre. At times it ventures into sellout territory. It’s not a terrible album (maybe I’ll add a few tracks to my ‘Chill’ playlist) but it never breaks new ground and it never touches the magic of 36 Chambers. Instead, it settles in a slightly anaemic midpoint between nostalgia and commercial compromise.

Whales And Leeches ultimately fails to capitalise upon or recapture the spirit of their previous releases.

Miss Anthropocene is a Kanye West of a listening experience. Strengthened by listening less hard and chilling out. Weakened by due diligence and the artist’s cerebral disconnect between what she's great at making and who she believes she is.