Even as only the first half of a delayed double album, A Brief Inquiry already feels like a classically bloated example of the form.

The second half of the album dwindles and becomes too convoluted. ... Yet Mogic is Hen Ogledd's most accessible album. The hooks are catchy, and the music reveals fresh and nuanced layers after each subsequent listens. Mogic actualizes an illusive musical haven out of the dissonance.

What Dummy Boy lacks in maturity and creativity it makes up for in energy and vitriol.

By the end of the record, it's clear that the more focused Ling is on presentation and the more work Wrench puts in on actually making songs and not just scattered musical ideas, the better audiobooks are. It's a shame they didn't figure that out for themselves before putting out a full album.

Argos continues to be funny and charming, and the band has plenty of hooks. At the same time, the new record doesn't quite have the character of previous releases, and with the many superficial connections to the start of the band's career, it puts itself in a tough position. Art Brut still gives us plenty of reasons to rock out, but this album doesn't leave enough of its own mark.

There is just enough fun stuff with the band's basic sound and their occasional add-on instruments to make Darkness Rains an easy listen. But there isn't enough good stuff to make it a particularly memorable album. So it ends up being a record with a cool basic sound that doesn't stick with the listener for any length of time.

In addition to the foray into pop-punk, the album elicits elements from several genres without settling on a single soundscape.

Imagine Dragons are confident in their capability and knowledge of pop music, but Origins tries too hard to demonstrate their varied interests with the results generic and indistinct.

There is a marked contrast between the past-its-prime "Solara" and the electronic styling of "Alienation", a division that echoes the departure Smashing Pumpkins made starting with Adore. ... Beyond the instrumentation and the overall sound of the album relative to the band's past work, Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 is, in the end, engaging with the visionary spirit of Smashing Pumpkins.

Time 'n' Place is not a long album, and it doesn't have time to get tiresome. It feels like something transitional as if Kero Kero Bonito are working their way into something that is more sustainable than the often wild, sometimes too-cute experiments of their past.

On Halloween, there's nothing bar the title tracks to indicate this is anything more than a random grab-bag of middle-of-the-road electronica.

The surface boldness of the art cannot make up for how exhausting this record is to consume. Lamp Lit Prose is not for the faint of heart.

When Kasher and his bandmates really have something to say, this scream can be a revelation; when they don't, it sounds stilted, silly, like it's issuing from a mouth that has nothing to scream for but still screams anyway. On Vitriola, the band's eighth full-length, there are good screams and bad screams.

Throughout Wakelines, MacIntyre turns his gift for that style of music to good use. He searches through the past even while working to process the present. It makes for an afternoon of wistful reflection with a gifted songwriter, but it could still benefit from a little more meat and fricti

Not all of this experimentation works perfectly, as you might well expect, but the biggest disappointment has to be "House of the Rising Sun".

A memorable, albeit inconsistent, record by an unabashed futurist steeped in funk, jazz, electronica, and everything in-between.

Despite the album's distinct musicality, it's hard to shake the feeling that Miss Red is culturally appropriating Jamaican dancehall. She is clearly devoted to the history of dancehall, and her music is endowed with the cultural and musical themes that are the hallmark of the genre. But at times Miss Red's style is too archetypal such as in "Dust" and "Come Again" where her vocal affect sounds manufactured and trained.

On his sophomore LP Young Romance, Roosevelt, whose real name is Marius Lauber, never recaptures the effortless perfection of "Fever". But, he tries, and trying, for a producer-musician as gifted as Lauber, goes a long way.

Her voice as a lyricist (she co-wrote two-thirds of the songs) tends to drift just a little, with the more specific songs working better. With the thick production on the album, it models radio trends but doesn't advance them. Given Underwood's talents, it would be exciting to see her craft a character-driven album and some quieter production.

Kennedy can indeed wail, but he's a gleaming simulacrum. And this plasticity makes him too smooth against Slash's authentic grit.

The Art of Pretending to Swim is never less than pleasant, and there are no bad songs here. But it's only intermittently interesting because O'Brien's vocals and melodies are mostly just okay.

As the solidity of the term Mountain Man suggests, this band is more stolid. They are the anti-Roches, using the same group of tools for the opposite effect.

The result sounds tired, formulated, comfortable, and much too safe to be satisfying. If the album does one good thing, it's that it begs us to go back and listen to the catalogue of Clutch that was so bold and exciting.

There is a very fine line between contentment and the utter absence of feeling, and while Zebra's production and mix is flawless throughout, it falls too often on the wrong side of that line.

It rarely comes off as a direct response to his own discography. Rather, its scattered focus sounds like the result of someone finally letting that past be and trying to figure out what he wants for his future. Boratto's next great album isn't this one, but it holds a lot of promise for his future.

Apart from the reinvigorated songs from Woman, there's no urgency to any of the material here.

The Ophelias' lyrics are at times impassioned, but the vocals are banal. Yet the maturity that arises from their individual and musical self-actualization carries Almost.

While Is This Thing Cursed? won't win over any more acolytes, or incite anything close to a Billboard pop-punk resurgence, Alkaline Trio diehards will find themselves, by turns, nostalgic for what came before and thrilled by what they hear now.