It certainly weaves a wide range of up-to-the-second pop styles into the mix: throwback '70s funkiness, dance music's two-step and drum 'n' bass, new-wave soul.... Still, he is no Prince.

Eventually all this mellow reflection begins to resemble a retreat rather than an advance.

He and band move through riffs, guitar solos and drum fills with a compact tightness that shouldn't surprise; Prince is a legendary taskmaster. The problem, though, is that half the songs, most obviously "White Caps," don't pop, don't scream for replay and should have landed on the cutting-room floor.

While the new Rihanna record may be at times sonically exciting, what resides beneath the new bass-heavy, Skrillex-inspired music is still a fast-food burger, one with a lot of extra sauce and some very disturbing ingredients.

All the songs are encased behind such stylish glass that it's hard to feel much of anything while listening to Destroyed, much less identification with the plight of the nomadic musician.

McGraw's album leans heavily on the soap opera-ish tales that have brought him his biggest successes. [5 Sep 2004]

This album is not very good--and what makes it even worse is that it’s by Miley Cyrus.

The result is a disjointed, artistically confused release that's not only way too long but also doesn't really ring true as an "album" at all, at least if your definition is a collection of new songs with a central premise or statement that one listens to from start to finish.

Smoke + Mirrors puts across strong feelings, but it refuses to reveal how they work.

Overstuffed as it is undercooked.

While Rhymes has always been more pop savvy than his peers, his eighth studio album feels compartmentalized at the expense of cohesion and clarity.

Its latest album, Love Hate and Then There's You, is a stereotypical dilution of the Stooges/MC5 canon, there are a few unexpectedly tight tunes that hit as hard as, well, a sock in the eye.

As a rock star side project, though, Dead by Sunrise has an unlikely fault--it's not nearly indulgent enough.

Gloriana's pop acumen (and virtuoso hair-care abilities) are a sure bet to fill arenas very soon, but they shouldn't forget to toss an occasional 'Landslide' in for the grizzled oldsters out there.

The result, surprisingly, is Stone's most conventional record yet: handsome soul singing, sturdy blues-rock arrangements, lyrics about refusing to cry oneself to sleep.

It's an impressively focused and clever work. But this music is not transcendent. It's still stuck in Marshall Mathers' muck, his fundamental mistrust of pleasure and love.

the atypical sincerity of La Liberacion suggests that something--whether the burdens of relentless sexiness or beating pop music at its own game too soon--still does.

The downside is that along with heart and brains, Hollywood Undead has filtered out any sense of humor from its music, which makes American Tragedy virtually impossible to listen to for longer than a few songs at a time.

Blurred Lines is a celebration of plasticine funk, warbly bass and plump booties.... Just as often, though, Thicke and his producers, which include himself and collaborators Pro J, Dr. Luke and Timbaland, dip from the cheesier realms of '70s pop.

It all sounds great, too, with contributions from a vast array of players and producers, including Matthew Koma, Jacquire King, guitarist Greg Leisz and fiddler Gabe Witcher. The problem is Twain’s singing. ... [Her voice is] lower and less flexible than before, and that works out OK in the slower, moodier stuff here. That’s not the case, though, in the uptempo material, which feels flat and robotic.

Cyrus’ self-styled country album might be the most weakly considered event record of the year, with lumpy melodies, slapdash rhythms and lyrics that border on self-parody (and not in the way that Nashville’s finest know how to do).

A slickly produced collection of largely generic, meandering songs about self-affirmation in the wake of heartache and romantic disillusionment.

Imagine Phil Mickelson in a round of putt-putt and you'll get a sense of what's on the line for Beck's first studio album in seven years.

The default setting is polished professionalism; rawness actually takes time. And here Shelton seldom pushes beyond that finesse to reach something less smooth. Which doesn’t mean If I’m Honest isn’t pleasure.

The problem is the Duchess herself. Fergie exudes earthy charm, but can't keep up with the breakneck music. She forces emotion on the slower show-stoppers, and she's all cartoon kitten on the come-ons. [17 Sep 2006]

Ultimately, all his genre-grazing makes him seem slippery rather than adventurous.

Although her songs occasionally feature the alto piano of Apple or the otherworldly trilling of Morissette or Björk, her voice can sound thin and inconsistent, giving the whole thing a somewhat derivative feel.

The 11 new songs, Kiss' first since 1998's "Psycho Circus," hardly deviate from the band's time-proven formula.

Jigsaw tries to find common ground in a now-ubiquitous strain of electro-flavored club rap. It's sonically a good fit for her nimble and still undeniable flow, but the wheels come off whenever Sov's newfound earnestness undermines her insouciant appeal.

The presence of those strong women [Gwen Stefani and Haim] does wonders for Harris’ amped-up music. They bring out the man, not the meathead, in the machine.

The weird aftertaste of Raditude isn't that Cuomo has so surrendered the oddball charm of his band's first two albums, though. It's that his late-career pursuit of mindless, opulent fun is so transparent that it almost taps a deeper vein of interior sadness than anything on "Pinkerton."

Intuition presents a sampler of contemporary R&B styles from producers including Timbaland, Just Blaze, Butter Beats and Calvo Da Gr8, giving the collection a disjointed air.

Unfortunately, the slick, overproduced headbanger music feels anachronistic and wouldn’t seem out of place on a Korn album. While Cypress Hill remains one of the greatest groups of all time, “Rise Up” mostly flops.

Team-ups with Ian Astbury ("Ghost"), Chris Cornell ("Promise") and Wolfmother's Andrew Stockdale ("By the Sword") produce familiar sparks but die out quickly. And a ballad with Adam Levine of Maroon 5, "Gotten," aims for "November Rain" but ends up pretty soggy.

Most of the dozen tracks on Partners-- which features duet partners such as Michael Bublé, Andrea Bocelli and the singer’s son, Jason Gould--offer no such vantage [of a whole other way of looking at [a] song].... Yet there is strong work here--four songs that live up to the singer's stated ambition.

“Spheres” is in reality no more — or less! — on the nose than Coldplay’s earlier albums.

Expertly appointed but emotionally inert homage to the place that he says made him.

The ho-hum tunes on Forgiven won't flip your wig, but the playing-- particularly in the three cuts featuring Dr. John on the keys--oozes bone-deep feeling throughout.

While the interplay remains incendiary, the textures freshly incandescent, there isn't much in the way of memorable choruses or hooks.

It's obvious Aoki is a better tastemaker and label boss than producer, but then, didn't we all dream so big in 2005?

In glimpses it reaches that goal--like in maybe half of the sticky and finessed "Breaking Point"--but it's undone by the album's many other contradictory messages.

Play On exhibits a distressing lack of dimension for a singer with Underwood's obvious abilities.

Other than the album's highlight, the resonant break-up song "Still Missin'," Mail on Sunday rarely delivers.

Boyle is perfectly comfortable singing actual hymns like 'Amazing Grace,' though her take on them is pretty much on a level with any local church's choir star. She's at her worst when she pushes harder; she doesn't know how to build drama, and her throat seems to constrict as she reaches for bigger notes.

These days, of course, the documentary vibe of the band's earlier stuff has transformed into an air of escapism -- not for nothing is one track titled "When We Were Young." But that hardly detracts from the crafty throwaway pleasures at which Sugar Ray still excels; in fact, it actually provides a touch of sweetness that helps temper McGrath's innate sleaze factor.

Music From Another Dimension delivers riffs, clichés, solos, yowls and a virtual banquet of the same one-dimensional tropes Aerosmith has been offering for years. Mixed in, however, are a few gems.

Collins takes on 18 tracks in an outing as understandable as it is unnecessary, a high-priced karaoke spin for the ersatz prog-rock-percussionist-turned-master-of-the-'80s-pop-single.

One formula replaces another and another.

[Witness is] more jumbled still, with would-be self-empowerment anthems next to earnest ballads lamenting the end of a relationship. ... Witness contains strong moments beyond “Chained to the Rhythm,” which still feels like the beginning of an intriguing project.

Mudvayne has by and large returned to what it does best (or at least do frequently) on its new self-titled album.

Each shimmering track lights a momentary spark, but the attraction proves fleeting. [6 Feb 2005]

Hoobastank's newest album has more of the same, mingled with some energetic, inoffensive, mostly forgettable harder rocking tunes. [16 May 2006]

The album feels slapdash — a messy collection of stray thoughts about his mother, about divorce, about God, about the bipolar disorder he’s referred to as his superpower. ... The stylistic range is impressive but exhausting in a way distinct from 2016’s “The Life of Pablo”; this album lacks a sense of momentum to push you from the arena-rock guitar squall of “Jail” to the throbbing club beat of “God Breathed” to the dense choral vocals of “24,” which means nothing builds on anything else. West’s rapping is similarly scattershot.

It's like a series of beats in search of a firestarter. [3 Oct 2004]

The sonic equivalent of a blooper reel with a few solid highlights edited in to remind us of the player he once was, the 11-song album mostly rehashes ideas he's ruminated on with more focus and skill in earlier work.

With only a few exceptions, the material here doesn't live up to his performances, making the music easier to admire than to enjoy.

At a time when newer acts, from fringe to mainstream, are moving the band's old ideas forward, Duran Duran needs to do more than just mix in the blips and bleeps of contemporary dance music to prove it has something to contribute. [31 Oct 2004]

Oddly, the production in most songs allows lots of open sonic space that reinforces the wispiness of her voice, which rarely ventures out of a mid-range comfort zone. Beyoncé she ain't, much less Alicia. [27 Feb 2005]

Though it’s larded with glib disco-funk tracks and morose, One Republic-style pop-rock tunes, “Everything I Thought It Was” contains a handful of gems in “Love & War,” a Prince-ish ballad with his prettiest falsetto singing, and the spacey slow jam “What Lovers Do”; “Selfish,” the album’s coolly received lead single, is another highlight, this one with echoes of Bieber’s underrated “Changes” from 2020.

[His] mature eroticism is undone by overwrought production, eventually drowning every track in layers of instrumentation, vocals and other sonic drama. [31 Jul 2005]

By and large, Shaka Rock is an unmistakable and confident move toward respectability for Jet. But it does make you wonder why it's so rough for a band to be young, dumb and full of bad come-ons.

mostly, I Am Not a Human Being II shows us Lil Wayne responding weakly to the unsettling prospect of weakness.

There's a sense of urgency when he is inspired by the production backing him, but when the beats coast along without much flair, Method Man does the same.

This album is a purposeful move into Top 40 that misses the quirk of well written pop and the sonic inventions of EDM.

Even in the heavier material on Black Butterfly these guys make more room for melody than they ever have before.

Many of the same vices that plagued the first installment of "Shock Value" keep the second edition sodden as well: Tim's precise, micromanaged beats usually outshine his random collection of vocal collaborators.

Mostly, however, she's operating in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir end of the musical spectrum, with arrangements emphasizing massed orchestral and choral forces often overwhelming the songs.

The addition of superstar producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange to the mix ensures that everything here is as radio friendly and mainstream minded as heavy guitar rock gets.

The problem is that not enough of Elixer sounds strong or fresh.

The band does black and white, but nothing in between.

Consider it a musical Snuggie for tottering Valley party girls--it will feel marvelous in the cold, drunken and lonely hours of the night.

Despite all the work put into his workmanlike pop, it ultimately comes off as agreeable, but not memorable.

It doesn't have the kind of force and power that would show the kids how it should be done.

Instead of finding a different voice as a writer and producer of original material, Oakenfold seems trapped by dance-music genre conventions. [28 May 2006]