He's re-released a handful of already beloved songs in a version that rarely match their initial power.

There’s a locked-away sadness to Death Magic’s deadened, industrial take on electronic music.

Even a few shiny remixes can't save a floundering sophomore album like this one.

Despite more of the foul-mouthed impish fun, Ten$ion doesn't offer much punch or cohesive power.

Save for the singles, it all feels inconsequential. It plays more like a young band who grew up worshipping Up the Bracket, rather than identifying with the songwriter who helped forge the sound.

It’s a technically sound addition to a well-regarded catalog. But if you’re looking for an album that pushes sonic boundaries, provides new challenges for the artists that created it, or even just sounds fresh, All Your Favorite Bands probably isn’t your best bet.

Production value has upped the ante sonically, and while there are those who might scoff at such a thing because lo-fi makes you cooler, Showroom Of Compassion does not shoot you in the eardrum with loudness battling, or undue sound effects and segues.

Beware and Be Grateful, as pleasant a listen as it may be, carries with it a feather's weight, and that usually equates to an album with little staying power.

When he gets super romantic on the uber garage-y “If It Speaks”, he makes that scene feel newly authentic and fresh. Sadly, he and his bandmates can’t regularly maintain this balance, leaving us with the mess.

KISS may have set out to sound like their old selves on Monster, but they strayed from the pop sensibility that made them great.

While it's clear that the album is a true labor of love for Kenniff, its 15 tracks are an exercise in patience despite lasting only 33 minutes.

Recorded just a few days prior to the Guggenheim performance, the textures that continue to develop during repeat listens of EX hint at a producer with minimal analog dreams flooding his brain.

The downside of All of Me lies in the fact that this album arrived just a little too late.

On their own, each of the 16 songs are mildly admirable. Altogether, they're incredibly grating. In fact, if you weren't paying close enough attention, you'd be convinced the same song had been spinning for nearly 35 minutes.

The album’s 10 tracks are likely to frustrate as much as excite Thompson loyalists.

Remedy is a mostly pleasant, forgettable dose of Americana.

Ultimate Painting is professionally executed, but at times underwhelming. Still, Cooper and Hoare have undeniable chemistry, and the album seems to be the start of a promising partnership.

The album is only about 30 minutes long, but the desire to move on hits long before that, and two strong tracks aren’t enough to save it.

Emmylou Harris has rightly earned a reputation as an interpreter of songs and as a songwriter. Most on this offering are her own and not all hit the spot.

So, sure, Beady Eye's first effort is worth a listen. It's not a throw away by any means, and has its keepers, but it does come with its share of faults.

While it’s a relief that there’s no supergroup pretension present, it’s also a shame that it sounds like the original projects of its members thrown into a blender cranked to its highest setting. That kind of blending obscures the individual contributions of each musician, which ultimately renders Echolocation a dull effort.

Unfortunately, this formula grows tired by the end of the album and paired alongside questionable tempo decisions, Death of a Decade ultimately loses too much steam for redemption.

On the surface, it looks and sounds (somewhat) like P.I.L., but in the end, it's a rather soulless copy.

QUAVO HUNCHO ends up being a half-and-half affair: half making it easy to hit the skip button and the other half highlighting the talents Quavo brings to Migos.

It’s upon closer inspection that You And I starts to lose some of its luster. To start with, some of these songs have appeared in various forms across his live catalog.

Three is a Phantogram record in that it’s a well-crafted release, but it lacks the originality Phantogram prided themselves on.

While This Is My Hand carries the celestial torch held high by My Brightest Diamonds’ previous works, and does so with a discerning eye to continuity, it also doesn’t break any ground.

Relaxer represents ambition and a willingness to take chances. The downside is that it finds the band in a state of confusion, pulled in all directions and sacrificing a sense of cohesion.

Mess gets caught in an odd trap in that it’s neither patient nor nimble.

For All Kings--like Repentless and Dystopia and Death Magnetic--is a safe and agreeable slice of thrash, but it’s also robotic, formulaic, and dated.

Not everyone is interested in branching out, which is the album’s main shortcoming. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with Tweedy or fun. sounding like themselves, but it feels like a missed opportunity to try something different.

We’re left with a decent covers album that will probably fare better than their Dark Side tribute.

While Ilp proves he can walk the walk, he often fails to talk the talk.

It’s great hearing Anselmo unabashedly projecting his aggression, but Walk Through Exits Only lacks variation, making the 40-minute runtime too long.

For an artist who lets as much time pass between albums as DJ Shadow does, his ideas shouldn't feel as undercooked as they do here.

Despite the years spent on it, the Original Cast Recording of Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark is a mixed bag. It would seem that Bono and Edge went into this score thinking it would be quick, easy, and painless. The truth is that Broadway musicals are none of those things, and their lack of knowledge washes over these 14 songs.

It’s full of pitch-perfect songs, but it will lead to digging for the real emotion, the heart buried somewhere at the center.

Certainly there is enough here to delight die-hard fans. But, overall, it’s barely more than a set of curios, which may have been better off released as a free download.

While many of the ideas on Hypnotized are promising, many are also beaten to death.

Her construction techniques have always made for gigantic sonic treetops, and even better, the wind that rustled the entire forest. But when concentrating on placement rather than scope, simple additions don’t go as far.

At its best, KEN Mode grabs handfuls of patches from heavy, pissed off bands and sews them together into a single misanthropic flag. By honing in on a smaller set of influences on Success, the trio are forced to blow up their image to a much larger scale.

While they stick fairly close to that line most of the time, the effort takes some of the wild energy and fun out of the results.

June 2009 plays out like a sketch of a very particular moment of time for Bundick, notably one that predates his maturity as an artist. This isn't something to win over new fans, but to give background and deep-cuts to hardcore appreciators and completists.

A portion of Tides End listens like a dramatic over-correction into the electro-pop realm. However, by album’s end, Kilfoyle and Verbos find the intersection between vocal melancholy and production excess.

Witness has great singles, forgettable singles, forgettable filler, and songs that go clunk.

If I’m Honest starts with a barnburner about lacking suds (“Straight Outta Cold Beer”) and ends with a call to Jesus (“Savior’s Shadow”). It’s a trajectory seemingly dictated by Country Albums For Dummies.

As a full-length record, Fellow Travelers includes too many songs that come off like that neutered high note as opposed to an original, undeniable, caterwauling scream.

Unfortunately, tracks like [Rihanna's "We Found Love"] and, to a lesser extent, Welch's slightly crowded "Sweet Nothing" float like life rafts atop a sugary sea of tunes that will be the soundtrack of television commercials for months to come.

Sublime With Rome is its own creature, and Yours Truly is a very decent jam album.

Between the abundant déja vu and the periodical redundancy (doldrums which would be easy enough to overlook on a full-length, but prove problematic on a brisk 21-minute listen like this), Not the Actual Events’ purported “impenetrability” manifests as a riotous retread instead.

While Sisyphus doesn’t sound like an interminably boring case of forever rolling boulders, it does fail to live up to the talents of its cast.

Silesia is certainly a pleasant listening experience but not quite a memorable one, stopping just short of developing its own unique personality.

Muse’s firm embrace of electronic tropes risks fragmenting their fan base, particularly those who had been by their side since their earlier days and would find certain elements of Simulation Theory to sound shockingly foreign. ... Listeners who had previously revelled in the moments where Muse dipped their toe into electronica will delight in finally seeing them cannonball into the pool. It’s polarizing for sure, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

When Tripwires push so far out of their confines that the boundaries can’t be seen, the uncertainty and frustration of the lyrics starts to make more of a connection. Unfortunately, too often on Spacehopper they stick too close to the traditional patterns of orbit.

There are many excellent, surfy noise rock albums that eclipse Mostly No, but Cohen's laid-back vocals and howling guitar are enough to merit at least a listen.

Tough Love relies more on gravitas, allowing more space for overly serious numbers like the Emile Haynie-produced “Pieces”. Sometimes sweetness works better.

No matter how overblown or nonsensical Coldplay have progressively gotten since 2002’s watermark A Rush of Blood to the Head, as long as they deliver one gobsmacking single per album, they’re kings--and rightfully so. That’s how you build a career. A Head Full of Dreams follows suit with first single “Adventure of a Lifetime”.

The album rarely manages to break free of its ’80s-lite inspiration, its tricks little more than emulations--not innovations--of the source material.

A greater emphasis on humanism would give Dungeonesse more soul and, perhaps most important of all, more hooks.

It’s more of the same. It seems to be needing something more. An extra spark of interest.

Young long ago figured out how to write rants that engage. The Monsanto Years, listenable but dusty, is no different; it’s music you’ve heard before with a new bad guy as its target.

The thorough arrangements on Piramida continue to be the reason to come to an Efterklang disc, but they are rarely matched with equally strong pop components.

For the first time ever, CYHSY is clearly not a full band playing in a room together; Ounsworth and drummer Sean Greenhalgh are the only two regulars here. But it also doesn’t sound like a freshly band-less songwriter trying not to sound band-less.

The end result plays like a record for the band much more so than the fans, who might be hard pressed to hang in there with it for repeated listens after the curiosity factor wears off.

As an EP, it’s not much to look at. But, as a quick footnote at the end of II, where it’s placed on the album’s deluxe edition, it’s a nice bonus, an insight into an artist’s process.

The False Alarms is marked by a frustrating lack of movement, direction, or variance.

Even with some of the more outstanding flaws, the album is worthy of a listen by both post-hardcore aficionados and fans of the group members' other bands.

That energy and excitement [from the band’s past two albums] is severely lacking here, replaced by by-the-numbers pop punk that is uncharacteristically complacent.

Being surrounded by the attention of reputable producers and recorders helps make an album like Night Visions find its place on the charts. But leave room for the twinge of disappointment that comes from the lack of that Imagine Dragons edge that made them stand out in previously heard singles.

Likely as clean as you have ever heard it, Big’s flow is the glue that holds an otherwise disjointed project together with cadences that kick the songs into hyperdrive, cement his versatility, and prove that he and the Organized Noize production team--the guys that built The Dungeon and the bulk of the joints on this album-- might be close to returning to form. Their indecision about the creative direction of the project, however, takes away from the overall quality of the release.

Wake Up is happy and very danceable, but it should only be consumed in small, commercial, or movie trailer-sized doses.

Nodzzz are best in small doses, their tooth-achingly sweet indie pop causing some trouble after more than a few tracks in a row. Too many songs sound too similar, and that use of "effortless" at the beginning proves to be a deal-breaker.

It's a welcome escape, but it doesn't have the shape and form of something worth escaping to and remains at best a quality xerox of pop music today.

On Black Hours, Leithauser tries on a bunch of outfits, and at times those outfits are more costume than something pulled out of his own closet.

Ultimately, Finally Rich exposes the limits of Keef's chosen lane and, worse, doesn't point toward a more optimal route.

Throughout, Wale captures the weight of facing criticism and prejudice, of being an outsider looking in. Unfortunately, all that weight sinks his ambition as often as it lends his words impact.

The result is that most of what makes Goulding's work appealing, such as her voice and instrumentation, is lost underneath generic synthesizers that turn these songs into standard pop fare.

With so much good (and weird) folk music out there, it's difficult to strongly recommend something so sleepily middle-of-the-road.

Lights Out offers plenty of pop nuggets--a few of them punchy and expansive, most others losing steam right out of the gate.

There's some fun stuff, but nowhere near enough.

Confrontations, is more body-snatcher than horror slasher, the anxious fear more related to peering at the glowing horizon than over the shoulder at the murderer chasing you through the woods.

early tracks contain all the stuff Jenkins excels at; hell, there’s even a kind of charm to cringe-worthy lines like, “Go ahead, take my heart up/ Roll it up like a joint.” Unfortunately, that charm wears off as the album drifts away from wistful pop rock and Jenkins visits some of his other, less enthralling ghosts.

The whole album feels like it has been flattened out for the sake of streaming services. Without the big, chewy hooks, the songs tend to bleed together indistinguishably in hindsight.

While the band’s proficiency can create high spots, the overall sense is that its tight-knit tunes and detached feelings might have been enhanced more under a Californian sun than worked out in bleak midwinter experimentation.

An outing as plain as its title. It is the band’s most consistent album in years, never dipping into any true clinkers but never approaching anything close to a risk either.

Overall, The Abandoned Lullaby is a texturally interesting marriage of genres, but hardly a unique one. As solid as the music sounds, it's just not special enough to crave, making this collaboration rather forgettable.

Since the LP’s 11 tracks always keep the listener at arm’s length, it’s best to treat them with the same indifference. Don’t be the reacher in this relationship.

Illusion is simple and retro-sounding, and as a short first record, it shows promise for future albums from this group of old friends.

Three Men and a Baby just happens to be one such experiment that doesn’t land with the blunt force fans might be used to.

The double album concept only waters down Kozelek’s biting social commentary and exquisite observations on living.

It’s certainly not the worst Lil Wayne has done, especially with fluid performances on “Fingers Hurting” and “You Guessed It”. It’s that recklessness that’s absent.

Mylo Xyloto feels like the group's mid-life crisis.

This apparent quest for new sounds produced Death from Above’s belated sophomore slump, a collection of songs that finds the duo pulled in directions that play against their strengths and makes them sound, for the first time, a little dull.

After exploring BBD, it seems the rest of Mellowdrone wasn’t needed for idea creation as much as containing and editing the various artistic notions generated by Bates.

In general, though, the first half of Inner Classics feels more convincing than the second.

Though it’s a bit flat dynamically, Chung has a fluid, strong control of the vibe.

The music never threatens to eclipse the message. If anything--and this might sound like a strange criticism of a Christian rock album--it’s too reverential.

Altogether, Acoustic Sessions just lacks a lot of emotional depth, ditching conflict and challenge for sap. Shame.