The Roots have always been more about the music than the lyrics, but "Tipping Point" excels at neither. [11 Jul 2004]

More often than not, though, Nas offers windy whines instead of innovative ideas.

“Ice Cream,” the song with Gomez, is the most gratifyingly stylish track here. ... [The Album] plays like a transmission from a previous era. “Crazy Over You,” with its airy wind-instrument sample, rewinds even further to the hip-hop exotica of Timbaland’s late-’90s heyday. ... There’s something vaguely oppressive about “The Album.”

The singer has no trouble making herself at home in these cuts, but the flimsy material can't quite conceal her hit-hungry desperation. Braxton fares better in the album's slower, more sensual songs.

If Gaga had only spent as much time on pushing musical boundaries as she has social ones, Born This Way would have been a lot more successful.

Between this and the first "Alone" installment, there's enough gristle for the third-best Weezer album as yet unmade. Cuomo's Patron problems are beatable--it's the "Pork & Beans" that's really derailed him lately.

Home may be where the heart is, but Bentley was a lot more compelling when he was poking around up on the ridge.

Hombre Lobo is much more effective when Everett keeps things one-dimensional, as in 'Tremendous Dynamite,' a deliciously fuzzy blues-punk rave-up in which he describes being "on the prowl for a restless night," and 'Beginner's Luck,' a jubilant ode to the boundlessness of new love.

The duo's taller half, Ronnie Dunn, was long regarded as the more distinctive singer, and on his solo debut, there's no more sharing of the spotlight to hold him back. That's about the only difference between a Brooks & Dunn record and this similarly hit-and-miss collection of odes to blue-collar empathy, patriotism and the transformative power of love.

Mostly, though, Blown Away finds her using her remarkable voice to deliver feel-good bromides.

The fuddy-duddy stance--thou shalt rise from the streets and compose by hand with paper and pen--feels bitterly defensive, even when Minaj lives up to her boasts about her hard-won craft, which on Queen is almost all the time.

The latest in a long line of Madonna songs that ponder the many responsibilities women are asked to shoulder. The problem on “Madame X” is that neither the post-trap grooves nor the winding melodies are sturdy enough to make any of this stuff stick in the way her old classics did. She seems to have assumed that the force of her personality would put the songs across.

“Shoot for the Stars,” an ambitious but scattered expansion of Pop’s sound, is widely expected to top the charts by a long shot next week. But it can’t do much more than fill in the cracks of what his life and career should have been.

The album is a pointedly minimal production, though -- most tracks are simple guitar-bass-drum affairs with a few tasteful harmonies that put the surprisingly durable hooks up front.

The singer cuts loose only as '8th Wonder' winds down, building to the kind of fury that causes one to wonder what this album could've been with less polish and a lot more Ditto, unfiltered.

The singer, no surprise, sets off all kinds of vocal fireworks. But as the painfully familiar images in “Southbound” demonstrate--another pontoon boat?--the songs on Cry Pretty (most of which Underwood co-wrote) cast these emotions and experiences in such generalized terms that it’s hard to come away with a clear sense of a human in the world. TThe effect is of a gifted strategist trying to cover all her bases.

Bryan, never a particularly flexible singer, sounds even more wooden than usual in these tracks; for the first time, this 39-year-old father of two seems a bit embarrassed here, which threatens to topple the whole enterprise.... The singer is far more convincing in the album’s slower, quieter tunes.

The characteristically festive result is generous to a fault: Collins triggers warm memories but leaves us with only a shallow sense of how precisely his four decades in the business have affected him as a man.

The challenge in coming back for Round 2 was to make it more than a one-note joke, but the Darkness remains in its Spinal Tap mode for most of "One Way Ticket." [6 Dec 2005]

It's all familiar stuff - too familiar - to warrant sustained attention.

Snoop and Wiz make a sweet couple, but this lightweight trifle is unlikely to cement a committed relationship.

The third studio album from Major Lazer, Diplo's project inspired by Jamaican dancehall music, features a few hot tracks and a few so tepid that we need reminders about what made Diplo interesting in the first place.

Klaxons, if you're going to shout in our ears a bunch, can you at least have something to say?

This is pop music, and it's all in good fun.... I just wish the recipe would have included a touch more poetry.

Working together, they [Mark Ronson, Beck, Father John Misty and dudes from detail-obsessed rock bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Tame Impala] assemble some gorgeous pieces. ... Yet other songs, for all their vivid sonic color, lack strong stories.

The 16 songs vary in tone, from grease-and-nicotine-stained jams to spit-shined ballads, but too little of it is adroit enough in construction or execution to stick in the craw.

In almost every way This Is Acting feels safer and more ordinary than “1000 Forms of Fear,” with familiar (if sturdy) melodies and lyrical clichés about houses on fire and footprints in the sand.

It rarely puts the original material in a new light or reveals much about songs that were already close to perfect.