It's beautiful, spectral, dreamy, but never makes your pulse quicken.
I Should Have Helped ... is a fuzzy, K Records-style lo-fi ballad that knows its charm lies in its brevity, and Back to the Bolthole is an impressively heavy sludgeathon – but it's all a little too faithful to its template to be truly arresting.
What Born to Die isn't is the thing Lana Del Rey seems to think it is, which is a coruscating journey into the dark heart of a troubled soul. If you concentrate too hard on her attempts to conjure that up, it just sounds a bit daft. What it is, is beautifully turned pop music, which is more than enough.
It's clear that Red is another chapter in one of the finest fantasies pop music has ever constructed.
More often, it sounds as if Grizzly Bear have spent their time away digging out the emotions that sometimes get buried beneath the technical fireworks.
For the most part Coexist's songs are defined as much by space as by sound. The gaps bring greater emphasis to the spidery guitar lines, the occasional steel pan, the distant icicles of piano, and the voices of Romy Madley-Croft and Oliver Sim.
Virtually every instrument is caked in distortion, but not the warm, familiar fuzz of an overdriven amplifier. It feels digital, alien, the sound of modern machines going wrong. All this is underpinned by genuinely great songwriting.
From its ambitious narrative arc to its fine linguistic detail, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City is a honed and deliberate major label debut.
The best moments of Swing Lo Magellan transcend whatever intentions their author may have had, as amazing songs are wont to do.
Throughout Devotion you're never told to sit up and pay attention. Instead it quietly works its magic, a genuinely individual statement by an artist who didn't expect to become a pop star, but might struggle to stop it happening anyway – after all, the groove is in her heart.
It's fit to burst with bone-bending synths, insistent beats and a sometimes shrill vocal that manages to both charm and unsettle.
In a formulaic era, his production is impressively idiosyncratic, heavy on hazy electronics and cavernous, dubby reverb, and packed with weird touches: the melodies never quite pan out as you expect them to, while the backing shifts and changes unpredicatably.