It’s an album that discourages sitting still. Too bad the icky lyrics ruin the mood.

You and I is more a raw sketch than a fully formed portrait of a 26-year-old artist still coming to terms with what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it.

In emulating great vocalists he has admired, from Jeff Buckley to Judy Garland, the guitarist conjures a serene lyricism. Female vocalists drawn from the worlds of opera (Olivia Safe), swing (Imelda May) and soul (Joss Stone) provide window-dressing, and the symphony orchestra accompaniment is gratuitous.

The boilerplate swagger is balanced by the falsetto sweetness of “There Goes My Baby.” And a couple of songs actually live up to the promise of the album title and its suggestion of a more emotionally complex Usher.

Songwriters Linda Perry and Billy Corgan (moonlighting from the Smashing Pumpkins), producer Michael Beinhorn--sand down her rough edges and turn Nobody's Daughter into a dreary piece of middle-of-the-road product.

Its best music shows what it might have been. The rest feels more like an obligation reluctantly met, a difficult bridge to the next phase of Lupe Fiasco's career.

Young remains a treasure because he refuses to bow to convention, and his inherent distrust of studio sugarcoating or polishing has led to some of the rawest, most powerful music of our time. But it can also lead to slapdash projects such as this one.

Most of it might fascinate for a listen or two, but presenting this as new work at top-end retail prices is the type of barrel-scraping exploitation that would've made the ever-wary Cobain retch.

It falters beneath its own cynicism. Rather than continuing to forge his own sound in tandem with longtime producer Soundtrakk, he chooses to co-opt mainstream currency--the gangsta tropes of trap music, the club rhythms of EDM--and delivers a mix of parody and second-rate would-be radio singles.

It would've been fascinating to see how far a full-blown collaboration might've taken her, but Aguilera spreads out the songwriting and production credits in search of more hits, most of which come off as flimsy gimmicks.

Too often, Timberlake sounds adrift.

It's not that Michael is embarrassing, it's just below par, a warehouse for songs that languished in the vaults for decades because they didn't quite measure up.

It's hardly ground-breaking, but when Tyler brays, Perry blooze-ifies on guitar, the cow-bells ring and the back-up singers wail, Aerosmith approximates a cartoony version of its glory days. But the album's second half nosedives.

The gospel-singer moments (the stirring intro to “God Is”) and the verses by the Clips’ Pusha T and No Malice on “Use This Gospel” provide most of the musical sparks, with West allowing message to trump musicality. ... Otherwise, this sounds like a walk-through to West’s next destination, a tentative step that feels neither accomplished nor particularly memorable.

Greta Van Fleet now adds its name to the list of Zep disciples who have made albums that sound kinda, sorta and sometimes exactly like its primary influence. If nothing else, the quartet has demonstrated that guitar-rock can still be popular with a young audience that either hasn’t heard of Led Zeppelin, or prefers Greta’s version to their grandparents’ original.

With music as rigidly formulaic as this, no wonder the teens in her songs want to party until they blank out.

An army of producers, including will.i.am, Diplo, Dr. Luke and David Guetta aim to keep Spears centered in the hit parade, but don't take many chances.

The vocals are slathered in Auto-Tune (didn't Jay Z proclaim Auto Tune dead once already?). The rhymes are simplistic ("You're the gas in my car, you're my petrol/You and I go way back, retro") or silly ("This is the original, this has no identical"–-really?). And the music's reliance on rhythmic and lyrical repetition (as opposed to progression and surprise) becomes wearying.

LuLu is a work that invites derision, an album that wallows in a tarpit of ugliness.

With the relentlessly bland Live It Up, he becomes the latest in a long line of folk-pop singers air-brushed to melt into the pack, not rise above it.

'Famous Girl' throws the album off balance, and makes every note feel exploitive and self-serving. In trying to restore his reputation, Brown ends up damaging it even more.

Chris Brown's fifth studio album, Fortune, is a pure-pop candy cane, meant to be enjoyed, consumed and forgotten.