Even though the 33-minute album comes off as slight, Pop still manages to reaffirm his gift for integrating seemingly opposed impulses.

On Blood Pressures, the fourth studio album from singer Alison Mosshart and guitarist Jamie Hince, the duo adds a few twists to the formula.

It adds up to another transitional effort rather than a major statement.

Had Broken Bells combined the best songs from their two albums, they would have made a heck of a statement. As it is, they offer promising glimpses of what might have been.

It adds up to an album that presents a fluffier version of an already pillow-soft sound.

Rogers is listed as coproducer throughout, but her distinctiveness only comes through when Kurstin and some of his other high-profile production accomplices (Kid Harpoon, Ricky Reed) take the day off. ... In contrast, Kurstin--with Rogers listed as a co-conspirator--swamps many of the remaining tracks in virtual choirs of wordless backing vocals and squiggling, squirming keyboard and synthesizer textures.

As mood pieces go, Fallen Angels is a notch or two below its predecessor.

As technical achievement, Amok is an amazing album in many ways. As a collection of songs, it’s as slippery as its rhythms.

Most of the songs are not nearly as immediate [as "On Another Ocean (January/June)" and "If You Need to, Keep Time on Me"], with elaborate and often pretty arrangements that hold the listener at arm's length with too-similar tempos and sparing hooks. Pecknold clearly has a lot on his mind, but he pays a price for stuffing all his ideas into suites.

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.

Though My Morning Jacket has been one of the most consistently brilliant live bands of the last decade, its studio albums remain hit-and-miss. Circuital is no exception.

This well-intentioned collection never surpasses the strong originals from which it draws. But in pointing young listeners back to the work of fine if mostly forgotten artists such as Baby Huey and Prince Lincoln, Wake Up! serves a worthy purpose.

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.

High Violet sees no need to tinker with a successful formula, and because of that it's less a step forward than a refined restatement of well-known strengths.

Georgeson was a key architect of the new Millennium's folk renaissance in indie-rock with his productions for Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart, among others, and his thumbprint is all over Morrissey's songs, for better and sometimes worse.

Things get more interesting when the band loosens up a bit on the multi-part title track; layered harmonies, elegant harpsichord and celestial synthesizers give way to a flamboyant mid-section with some unusually strident, glam-rock guitar.

It revels in pleasantness, peppered with quirky but cheerful touches that veil the mild unease expressed in the lyrics. In many ways, Father of the Bride sounds more like a singer-songwriter album centered on Vampire-in-chief Ezra Koenig rather than the interaction of a band.

It adds up to more of a transitional work than a reinvention, a placeholder until Reznor's next major move.

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.

As pretty and carefully detailed as many of these tracks are, their tempos are relatively static and the arrangements tend to drift. Over three discs, the lack of variation becomes problematic.

Arulpragasam is trying to negotiate a middle ground between her status as an underground rebel and rising pop celebrity.

Overall, the band has sacrificed the immediacy of the earlier records for something knottier and stranger. For those who once found the band a pleasant diversion at best, Modern Vampires of the City represents an intriguing left turn.

Most of the songs lack distinctive melodies, relying instead on shifting textures and trance-like rhythm to hold the listener's interest.

Bedroom jams, cameos and gimmicks pad the album’s second half. Paak resorts to a corny-sounding Jamaican patois on “Left to Right,” a cheesy saxophone disrupts “Cheers,” and Snoop Dogg appears like the avuncular ghost of G-funk’s past on “Anywhere.” After raising the bar with “Malibu,” Paak doesn’t quite reach the same heights this time.

[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.

Though it encompasses traditional elements, “Ode to Joy” falls on the quirkier side of the Wilco spectrum, an album that prizes subtlety and intimacy over immediacy and dynamics.

The boys with crow's feet and bum hips have made an album that speaks to the inner 16-year-old of their audience.

Wilk does an adequate job on these extended tracks, but it’s the vitality of Iommi on guitar and Butler on bass that impresses.... Butler’s lyrics find their perfect match in Osbourne. In these songs, the singer wrestles with demons--psychosis, self-abuse, existential dread--with which he’s had considerable personal experience. It makes 13 something a bit more credible than just a souvenir for a reunion tour.