Rice, singing [on "Light Industry"] about “Bennie and the Jets and dreary weekend sex,” plays perfectly into the song’s hesitant mood. It’s the one moment on Gulp! where his audible exhaustion fits, a song that makes you wonder what the rest of the album would have be like if only the band could translate Rice’s weariness into something more suited to their strengths. Instead, Sports Team take a swing with Gulp! and barely make contact.

Entering Heaven Alive is seldom actively bad, but the most interesting component of either of White’s 2022 albums is that, well, there are two of them.

The third disc, annoyingly titled Kid Amnesiae, starts off promisingly enough with a straight piano version of “Like Spinning Plates.” ... Only four of the 12 tracks here stretch past four minutes, with the majority of them clocking in at under two. That would be excusable if these leftovers revealed anything about what it must have been like to be in the room while making a pair of classic albums.

It is an album that would make Tenacious D roll their eyes and make metal fans scratch their heads.

By track four, a whimsical-by-numbers reverie called “Dinosaurs on the Mountain,” American Head starts to fall off an American cliff. The tempos are slow enough to deflate even Coyne’s considerable charm, and the record’s rootsy, pastoral spin on the Lips’ sound is undermined by the band’s maximalist production ethos. Nearly every song is overstuffed with queasy synth textures and sleek, digitized strings, and Coyne can’t resist warping his vocals in a grab-bag of ugly processors.

The chillwave movement has always channeled nostalgia—warm echoes of a distant past, faded and warped into a new aesthetic. Purple Noon, though, mostly just elicits nostalgia for the glory days of chillwave itself.

Where A Brief Inquiry… excelled due to its exceptional pop songwriting and well-calculated sonic departures, Notes… is far too ambitious and self-aware (“Will I live and die in a band?”) for its own good.

Making a Door Less Open isn’t as memorable as its predecessors on its own: Toledo’s vision as a whole never feels truly fleshed out, representing the first legitimate misfire in the career of one of this generation’s most talented indie-rock songwriters.

Uneasy Laughter is fine. It’d be much better if it was either divorced from ruminations on honesty, or if the band actually managed to define themselves without leaning on ’80s nostalgia.

Where these two songs [“Darkseid” and “4ÆM”] burst with fervor, Miss_Anthropocene’s other tracks often stumble and limp.

It’s a record in total lust and fealty to Hailey; you’ll probably want to duck out to use the bathroom halfway through.

An album that needs a bit more of its own personality, but it’s sung with the confidence of someone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out.

Sitting through a slogging collage of beats for 40 minutes before ever hearing a verse is no easy task. It would be one thing if these tracks had a common theme holding them together, but there’s no central voice to bind one to the next. ... The only thing that will keep listeners pressing on is the star-studded back half of the record. The incredible amount of talent Shadow recruited is exciting.

High points feel scattered among a patchwork of pillowy piano tunes, conspicuous genre experiments and politically charged trial balloons. There are good things and not-so-good things here, but there is no cohesion in the overall work. Closer Than Together doesn’t hang together as a whole.

Even the bright spots in the album’s composition—the off-beat piano cascades in “Death By A Thousand Cuts” and the pulsating synth of “Cruel Summer” (thank you, St. Vincent) are particular standouts—are overshadowed by the musical anticlimax on most tracks, especially on “The Archer.”

What’s disappointing about A Fine Mess is not just that the songs are unremarkable but also that they don’t deviate from the band’s usual approach in any notable way. There are no oddball experiments here, no genre strays, no real risks to speak of. There are just five more songs that sound a lot like Interpol, for fans for whom that is always enough.

Throughout Father of the Bride, a record with half-baked political commentary (“Something’s happening in the country / And the government’s to blame”) and lazy wordplay (“All I do is lose but baby / All I want’s to win”), it feels as if Koenig turned away from what made his band so great in the first place, instead electing to adopt a sound that doesn’t necessarily fit him, one that comes off as derivative and frequently boring.

Not everything has to be pure pop, but nothing else on Brutalism even comes close to sounding like a complete song the way [“Body Chemistry”] does.

Other artists, such as Florence and the Machine are creating better, more interesting music with the same techniques. Seek them out instead of wasting your time on this one.

The end result is an incredibly inoffensive album, one that’s perfectly lovely without offering any striking new ideas or features that make it memorable.

The whole album sounds like it was recorded to be played in an H&M. It’s bland and forgettable, fuzzed with a faux-depth like an Instagram filter.

Sometimes Romano manages to pull off an unexpected success: a repeating thinly strummed acoustic guitar chord and quavering vocals at the start of “Empty Husk” eventually build to a catharsis of overdriven electric guitars and a vibrant melody. More often, though, these tunes just idle.

It’s a recipe for Joyce Manor at their slickest power pop yet, even as it lacks the narrative depth we’re used to.

Tatum and his collaborators nailed the sounds, but they don’t come close to finding tunes that resonate.

Dawes’ latest may well sound fresh and new, or at least vaguely soulful, if you don’t know it’s a retread, but Passwords is all too easy to crack, and what’s inside isn’t really worth protecting when others have been doing it all better for decades.

The two started jamming together and the songs evolved organically. Before the duo knew it, they had an album’s worth of songs. And that’s basically what the album sounds like--two guys of a certain age doing stuff they think is really cool that only winds up being cool to guys of a certain age.

With no dramatic tension, pathos or even story arc, these songs are little more than piles of slack words from an artist who has confused saying whatever comes to mind with having something to say.

It’s not terrible, it’s mostly pleasant to listen to, it’s beautifully produced and it’s easy to recognize the skill it takes to craft their saintly, synth-driven sound. But when you couple a critical reputation like theirs with the band’s own claim of making a big artistic jump, mostly pleasant to listen to shouldn’t cut it.