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

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.

It's pretty much a greatest hits album, which conceptually blows an opportunity right off the bat.

Where lyrics are concerned, be prepared for plenty of eye rolling (or eye gouging).

Stripped of its clever concept, Top Ten Hits for the End of the World can be apocalyptically bland.

A nicely composed mix, no doubt, and one that's often gorgeous to boot, but Penny Sparkle mostly sounds like a band getting complacent with age.

Anastasis demands intense, patient listening, though it rarely rewards it.

The ideas behind Weight have some potential, but Editors can’t seem to pull them off successfully.

There are moments when the synths, pianos and strings coalesce to form something resembling the urgency and poignance Swan Lake is capable of, but these spare highlights are only barely worth looking for.

British singer/songwriter David Gray last released a proper studio album in 2005. It was called "Life in Slow Motion," and it was lovely. It was also a complete waste of that title, which could be far more accurately applied to his syrupy new LP Draw the Line.

Common’s inability to sound sincere about a man he spent two years championing is the most telling part of this consciously shallow caricature of hip-hop’s dregs.

Barfod has more faith in his electronics, and when he’s playing something he trusts, he permits the songs to venture out and reach greater emotional heights. But that comfort doesn’t extend to his human players, and his hesitation to let go and explore permeates the album.

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.

It’s an occasionally comical throwback to when they were at their biggest, with a few good-not-great moments. One can only hope they chill out and come up with something better in a few years.

Heavy production, heavy hooks and heavy club-friendly beats are the status quo, everything coming across like someone else’s tampering rather than Allen’s creative doing.

Everything about this record is a shame: it explores new creative territory, the rhyming is solid and syntactically delightful (Big Boi's pronunciations are always more quotable than his lines), and it's a deserving outcast trying to make good as one-record-every-two-years lifer. And it simply does not work.

By the time the pop-induced sugar rush wears off you realize that, besides being done before, these songs have definitely been done better. Worse yet, all you've got to show for it is a headache.

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.

Levon coaxes an intricately textured tone from his saxophone on 'Over Her Shoulder,' but generally, Joe’s erudition gets the better of him on this strangely dim and twinkleless album.

Tonally, however, Bish Bosch offers nothing dramatically new, just (a lot more) of what Walker's done before.

Speaking of The Beatles, Different Gear continues the Gallagher quest for the perfect Lennon impression. It's yet to be found.

In its song choices, if not necessarily in its treatments, Run for Cover is more ambitious than it needs to be--than it should be, in fact.

While † threatened to alienate with its sheer abrasiveness, its long-awaited follow-up succeeds in boring with its sprawling and unfocused Queen-meets-Skrillex mashups.

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.

Crows isn’t without merit—Moorer’s voice is beautiful, and the themes are on an emotional canvas that anyone over 13 with a normal amount of chromosomes has experienced, making her album relatable if not particularly memorable.

Mmost frustrating about this album are the shades of old Morrissey.

Jay overreaches, leaning too heavily on by-the-numbers production from Kanye West and Timbaland, and muffling his own voice in favor of a guest-heavy tracklist.

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.