The tempos vary, sort of, but there’s a mood on this record that’s hard to qualify and never wavers.

Backed up by masters of electronica David Guetta, Diplo and Swedish House Mafia’s Sebastian Ingrosso, they all make sure to drop a storm of ugly, trite and utterly soulless EDM breakdowns and dubstep drops whenever they can.

UZU is further indication that Yamantaka // Sonic Titan aim to get bigger, but hopefully they don’t forget that coherence suits them well.

It’s a familiar story to hear DIY bands frustratingly avoiding their past strengths once they secure some proper studio time; both records have a more “mature” sound than their lo-fi predecessors, but I find the songwriting largely forgettable.

Chance of Rain is a good techno album, but never strives for much more than that. It’s a bigger adventure, for sure, but it never feels more adventurous.

There is little in the way of actual technique or subtlety, and as an album, Prism falls short of its predecessors in the innovation and charisma department.

Static is remarkably self-assured and meticulously produced, but such traits cannot disguise its throwback trappings. It’s hard to look away from its unfortunate backstory, and the music never really makes a point to consider it outside of its context.

These singles are still some of the best music being put out today, but the filler songs are so forgettable that it's hard to see the forest through the trees.

It has ten passable tracks and one certified super-smash that will either get listeners gleefully singing-along or reaching for the skip button. You decide.

When it’s all said and done, it’s a bit of a blur, but in the same way that looking back on a good evening might be when you wake up for work a day or two later. You’re glad it happened, but it might not stick with you.

Part 2, by comparison [to Part 1], simply feels like an inessential cash grab, and it's strong evidence that everyone’s favorite pop star might be overstaying his welcome.

Bloom’s vocal debut with Glow & Behold is solid without ever being magnificent, staying within its means and applying a decoration to a sound that is cleaner and melodically stronger than its predecessor.

While this leap into the big leagues proves that he’s still very much a rare talent, it unfortunately seems that genuine inspiration is even rarer.

It quickly veers into a curious stream of whim with their most alienating, and unfortunately, their most characterless yet--they deliver an onslaught of acrimonious synths in the post-apocalyptic, jazz-tinged Mystery Disease, while Cool Song No. 2 shamelessly takes a page out of the Can playbook with its grimy, overcompressed effects.

Imperium is more homage than innovation, and while it further preserves the integrity of early indie rock, it only hints that Blouse is more than a revival act.

Crystal Stilts won’t be winning many new listeners with Nature Noir but that won’t matter to the band’s fanbase, as another album comparable to their previous work has been created, albeit with an improvement on the production side.

It’s never a bad record, or even less than listenable--the individuals behind it have more than enough good taste and sense for that to happen--but it is a mildly disappointing one, considering the sheer potential of those early releases.

It’s a loud, raucous affair for sure, but as much power and aggression Pop. 1280 can inject into each and every track they create, it can’t distract from the fact that Imps of Perversion is a muddled, frustrating affair, and it’s clear that Pop. 1280 still have ways to go when it comes to developing their sound.

By the end of the album, the technical ability of Hindman and the lyricism of Versprille feel exhausted, gargled, and outsized by the very same influences that they try to honor in their thoroughly hackneyed attention to 80s Cocteau Twins-inspired rock.

Pond constantly struggle to find a balance between prog, classic yuppie rock and psychedelia in Hobo Rocket, cramming a cheat sheet of tired rock trappings and psychedelic clichés that were already fatigued even before corporate rock detoxified its very essence.

So while it’s worth checking out, DVA lacks any real core.

What we have here is an album’s worth of incredibly passive, indifferent music-making.

Crawling Up The Stairs has strong riptides that have no qualms over carrying you away, but if you embrace them you may be pleasurably surprised.

While it would be remiss to question an artist’s chosen working methods, perhaps if Elizabeth hadn’t been quite so fiercely independent in its recording, and had had to compete with the usual unwanted distractions of the outside world, then Dancing might not have been just an impressively accomplished album, but a more striking, perhaps even outright essential one.

Any band that can turn over vocal duties as often as they hold onto them and somehow make all the music sound like their own is a band worth watching, and despite its inconsistency and even its lack of imagination, there are a lot of thrills to be had in this hour.

This is an album of average to good songs, with only a few highlights.

Obsidian is a shallow and unsatisfying exploration of this dark side.

What starts out as inviting, quickly becomes a bit irritating and ends up overwhelmingly draining and drab if tackled all at once.

As it is, Big Black Delta offers more than its fair share of thrills, but there’s the sense it could be so much better if Bates didn’t feel the need to draw the line quite so clearly between his various projects.

Melodies swoop and soar, vocals are sweet and clear and some of the choruses are truly fantastic. However, its lasting impression is as an omnishambles of poor choices and awful skits and is, simply put, an absolute mess of an album.

Slow Summits presents The Pastels at their most amiable, bearing the quiet, understated splendor of a picnic with friends on a warm Sunday morning.

he Way We Separate is an undoubtedly intimate and romantic synth pop album that, for better or worse, pulls no tricks on the listener.

As an initial barrage of sound, Weird Work can seem overpowering; but as we begin to divulge pockets of sense in the chaos.

Good but not as good as you might think it is on a song-to-song basis, enjoyable but somewhat less memorable.

The Thermals promised that their next album would be “loud, fast, incredibly scary and undeniably catchy.” The album we received, Desperate Ground, succeeds in most of these characteristics, but only at the bare minimum level.

Maybe it’s a struggle to really get your teeth into Mosquito because of the track listing; the three song dry patch after Mosquito is a huge problem considering the ease these days of being able to find something more interesting to listen to.

Despite many good songs on this album, you will definitely get a sense that Depeche Mode is in a holding pattern.

There’s just not enough that grabs you by the throat and pulls you back to listen over and over again.

Whilst the majority of Stygian Stride is an abstract pulsing mass, beneath there is a narrative that draws the listener through an intense display without losing purpose.

Presley’s made a competent facsimile of a 60s psychedelic album.

Certainly this record is relevant, and maybe even worth listening to with some regularity. But I can't help but feel that this album is just a watered down Arcade Fire rather than the aural adventure that others seem to hear.

It's terrific fun while it lasts, and Moon's knowingly gawky charms just about manage to stave off any lingering Jimmy Ray (remember him?) related doubts, but the general lack of content does offer fairly compromised value for money, and raises questions as to if he'll be able to think of ways to expand his repertoire without ruining the central conceit, or just end up being an oddball one trick pony.

Bleached have discovered that they have a canny knack for inoffensive rhythms, melodies and harmonies which will immediately appeal. But where this record needed to provide an abrasive counterpoint in the lyrics, they’re more sickly sweet than the music.

Bloodsports is fine, pleasant even.

Just like the band itself, it presents something of an ongoing identity crisis for the band, one that hasn’t figured out how to advance their sound except to put more meat on the bones.

There’s promise here to be sure, but it’s a promise as yet unfulfilled.

What I hear is basically a mildly enjoyable set of songs, whose lackadaisical delivery and spacey major second chords could easily accompany my Sunday afternoon nap.

Naomi is a decent album, not a good one.

In conclusion, solid record, but it simply does not hit home hard enough.

The lyrical flaws are not a fatal stab, but it’s an enormous burden.

Through their first two releases, Foals were able to showcase their evolving sound, but with Holy Fire, their evolution stops dead in its tracks.

While the better songs sound rough around the edges, their inferior material here sounds scrappy and juvenile.

This was an interesting direction to go in and it definitely has a lot of potential. But the duo will need to do a better job balancing the synths and the songs to succeed.

It’s difficult to qualify Somewhere Else as middling because it proposes a whole new set of exciting challenges for Shapiro, but it also brings about a befuddling, poorly sequenced effort that crosses out songwriting ingenuity with across-the-board dancehall padding.

This album may have been a growing pain in their attempt to evolve past their initial signature baroque pop, but it sounds like they missed a few steps that needed to be taken.

There’s uncertainty whether the controlled experiment of Confrontations resonates, not sonically, but emotionally.

It’s nowhere near as annoying, despite my physically manifest aversion to it, but it definitely is not trying to please you, or make you comfortable, or even happy in any way.

Kitty is clearly just having fun enjoying her time in the spotlight here, and for that it’s an enjoyable and endearing effort.

Largely, the band’s turn from paradoxically sweet Goth-pop to the more treaded territory jangle-pop works against them.

To her credit, she has absolutely carved out her own unique sound, far from the epic, prog-punk productions of Titus Andronicus. However, in the process she failed to deliver a consistent batch of songs.

While they haven’t quite found out how to convert that into an entirely compelling experience as an album, Wash the Sins... is still very much a welcome step in the right direction.

Candela has some shining moments but, overall, is an album that teases the palette instead of really satisfying.

Though Owens takes precise measures to avoid it, the downfall of Lysandre ultimately comes down to this same-y-ness, as the majority of the album's tracks do very little to truly grab the listeners attention.

Sadly, the interesting ideas fall at the place on the spectrum where it jives for just a short time, at least for this particular listener.

They are only a few steps away from making a truly great record, because they certainly aren't lacking in talent, they just need an identity to give it a purpose.

Overall, Almanac is a good follow up that helps cement the band's holding in the new age of dreamy folk rock.

All that it has going for it is the promise of adolescent wit, and even in that regard it completely fails to deliver.

Villagers ought to be applauded for their ambition to heave themselves away from expectation, and then mourned for their lack of conviction which discards them back into it.

It feels churlish to criticise Everything Everything for trying different things, but all too often their efforts feel like lightweight flirtations with a style rather than committed explorations.

Anyone expecting some sort of lost treasure in this collection will be let down.

These songs just lack that certain oomph to separate Free Energy from the thousands of groups who have sang about girls before.

There is just too little here to distinguish Wild Nothing from the vast sea of mediocre 80s revivalists, all getting a kick on overhyped nostalgia.

Too often the way of the beat ends up a distraction rather than a fully incorporated addition to good songwriting.

When this album hits, it hits hard, but for the first time in their career, the barrage is intermittent instead of constant.

While all of the songs on the Ghost are good, the EP's identity crises will keep pulling listeners out of the experience.

For a collection of songs that are supposed to be carrying the weight of an imminent apocalypse on their shoulders, there are very few moments to be found on Top 10 Hits that seem to be affected by this burden.

It's short but manages to feel long. It's interesting but manages to feel dull.

A lot of the time, this album doesn't do enough to sound much more than merely pleasant.

The Hood Internet couldn't decide whether to make a party record or a moody record. They tried to do both and succeeded at neither.

These songs feel more accessible and much less significant. There are a few tracks here that reanimate that sense of excitement which permeated his previous record but they are few and far between.

At times, the songs feel a tad underdeveloped, with sumptuous hooks shining bright over slipshod, kraut-inspired synths and metallic percussion lines... [Yet] Banks can still write a killer song like Summertime is Coming, which greatly overshadows most of the others.

Long Slow Dance might be a strong garage pop album with some incredibly catchy songs, but it could definitely be grounded from its chick flick sensibilities.

Trash Talk are still far from a pop group, and the album features some highly destructive moments in its 22-minute span – but unfortunately, 119 features too many weak spots of lukewarm punk that suggest the group is beginning to slip away from the fully realized and perfectly balanced sound the group was just starting to master.

Barring a few notable tracks, this debut from Snaith under the Daphni name, fails to coalesce into anything resembling the creative designs of his previous records.

It's like a Jason Statham film, leave your brain at the door, don't think, enjoy it for what it is.

It doesn't really work for either audience it aspires to please, and I'm left feeling a bit bored.

This album displays the band at an absolute low-point in their career.

In all, ERAAS, though fully invested in the possibilities of their vacuum and their vocal prowess, are at their best when the instruments can breathe.

Strapped's thirty-something minutes of southern California rock doesn't turn the page on anything new, but is still a worthy listen. The album holds true to the band's striped-down signature sound from their last two albums, with a sprinkling of a few stand out tracks.

Perhaps the best way to approach Theatre Is Evil is not even as an album, but rather a collection of songs--all fairly similar but often good, sometimes very much so.

The 2nd Law is a love-it-or-hate-it record. It contains some of the best songs Muse has done in recent memory, but also the worst

[The album] is disappointing, but not because it's unmusical or masturbatory or boring, although it is sure to be dismissed as all these things. On paper I love the idea of the musical direction of the record – there are just some insurmountable problems with the execution of it.

It's not much different to a Sleater-Kinney record in second gear, which still means there are flashes of brilliance.

They're much fuzzier than Deerhunter, more jam-inclined than The Horrors, far lighter than Slowdive – and if it's true that they're introducing the kids to krautrock and psychedelia I'm all for it. Perhaps more of an homage than an invention, then, but still, an absorbing debut.

Without him [Machinedrum], it's a well assembled but dull record. With him, it's sublime.

They manage to satisfy the listening needs of die-hard Fleet Foxes fans, but fail to truly carve out their own unique musical identity. This isn't to say Poor Moon doesn't offer up some great moments-they really do-just not ones that stick with you long after the record is over.

At present, their light out-of-the-box exploits feel more like comfort food, but there's no denying that once they develop their experimental ways they'll move out of stagnancy.

He's given us a lot to unpick, even if the record isn't as cohesive as it ought to be.