Little wonder the two finest moments ["Hunter of Invisible Game" and "The Wall"] on this otherwise ho-hum Springsteen album are by a considerable margin its most understated.

Gabriel’s decision to pay homage to the core essentials underpinning these songs is a noble one, he also sacrifices many essential ingredients: rhythmic drive, dynamic surprise, harmonic and textural variety. As experiments go, Scratch My Back ranks as a well-intentioned dud.

Armstrong sounds detached, despite a stream of curse words, and the band plays with a machine-like efficiency.

Though the potential for melodrama is strong, Gibbard and his bandmates play with restraint.

He's a troubadour for the suburbs, a guy who sings about middle-class life with a plainspoken mixture of wistfulness and humor.

It's her most consistent album and also her most low-key.

Shadow's beats programming remains formidable, as he steers clear of standard bangers in favor of something far more difficult to pin down. This isn't an album built for dancing. It's more about its rhythmic intricacy, a master class for connoisseurs of nuanced production.

It's rare for an artist entering her fourth decade to keep releasing music of such high quality, but Phillips sounds like she's rejuvenated--and never better.

["Creature Comfort" is] one of the album's strongest moments, matched by "Electric Blue," in which Regine Chassagne's delicate voice floats over a wistful yet hypnotic electro groove. Much of the rest struggles to stay buoyant.

Ready to Die holds up as an unexpectedly sturdy late-career coda.

Cool little touches abound, from the chiming percussion that enhances the dusky "Dreaming My Life Away" to the waltz-time vocal coda in "Last Year."

Junk, M83's seventh studio album, sounds chintzy--a bubble-gum snyth-pop album that indulges Gonzalez's love of decades-old TV soundtracks, hair-metal guitar solos and kitschy pop songs.

Her voice often sounds overly pinched, and the horns come off as gimmicky.

[In the live arrangements] she sounds like a background vocalist thrust into the spotlight against her will. The real attractions are seven studio tracks, including a handful of leftovers from her "IRM" Beck sessions.

About half the album falls into a bland exercise in proficiency for these rock lifers, flavored by horns and saxophone that sound tacked on.

Unfortunately, much of the album shrouds the transparent emotions in slick production, most egregiously O'Connor's multitracked vocals. This is not a new problem for her, but it's particularly vexing in that it sugarcoats songs that should be anything but.

A cash-in thin on new songs that confirms Winehouse was still a long way from finishing up the five-years-in-the-making follow-up to "Back to Black."

Forget the punk and the old-school soul, this is a retro-leaning pop album--and a mostly good one.

Coldplay has a formula, and formula prevails on Mylo Xyloto despite Eno's presence.

Without Chamberlin's freight train roaring behind him, the hurtling "Astral Planes" never quite achieves liftoff. And one can only imagine how Chamberlin might've combusted the six-minute "Son of a Sailor," which sounds like a promising sketch for a "Stairway to Heaven"-style epic. Corgan's at his best when he takes a lighter tack and develops two of his more engaging melodies on the remaining tracks.

Songs of Innocence comes off as flat and strangely complacent, even as it pays lip service to youthful inspiration, notably the punk and post-punk of the late '70s.

The soundtrack strives for a quirky, melancholy resonance befitting its tragic subject, but too often it comes off as gimmicky and ponderous.

Both Byrne and Fatboy Slim have built careers on beats, the imperative of activating the hips as much as the brain, and they touch on everything from salsa to Philadelphia soul on Here Lies Love. But too often the needs of the narrative supersede the music, and too much of "Here Lies Love" falls into midtempo blandness.

In search of the grandiose, Kings of Leon seem to have forgotten how to rock. It's as if the quartet wanted to become the next U2 so badly that it lost sight of how it got here in the first place.

It's her best album since "Ray of Light" in 1998.

"Talk That Talk" sounds like a rush job designed to keep Rihanna rolling through the holidays.

Malice and Pusha T are at the top of their game on most of the rest; even when they swagger on “Popular Demand (Popeyes),” the wordplay is so thick and weirdly inventive that it’s difficult to deny them.

About half the album has West as a role player on tracks that suggest a theater scene, with a handful of voices playing characters (quite possibly all living inside West’s brain). The album moves from spoken-word monologues to more expansive musical settings that try to “take the top off (and) let the sun come in.”