Though long and featuring a bounty of ideas, The Electric Lady is surprisingly slight.

The most significant change is in Swift’s singing voice, a once-brittle instrument that of course has gotten deeper, huskier and more flexible since the late ’00s. But she only really takes advantage of that shift a couple of times. ... As for the lightweight bonus material, which she cut in the studio with her “Folklore” and “Evermore” collaborators Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, none of it argues that it deserved a place on “Fearless,” though “Mr. Perfectly Fine” comes close.

The Lips' catalog is exhaustingly long, but Arabia Mountain is a fine reassertion that its talents extend far beyond running from venue security.

AC/DC’s legendary stylistic consistency is on display across these 12 tracks. ... But with a group as locked on a signature sound as this one, the quality of the individual songs is paramount, and too many of those on “Power Up” — from the hookless “System Down” to the blandly bluesy “No Man’s Land” — are forgettable even after half a dozen spins.

Occasionally, as in “The Sound,” Jepsen musters enough feeling in her high, slightly raspy voice that you can understand why her fans view her with a kind of protectiveness; only Robyn does crying-in-the-club more vividly. ... But too much of “Dedicated” blurs together in a mix of lovelorn confessions and throwback grooves you’d have to listen to obsessively to differentiate. For some, that’s just the invitation they crave.

“Star-Crossed” is actually a less emotional experience than the blissed-out “Golden Hour,” which practically vibrated with feeling. ... Musgraves’ writing on “Star-Crossed” is squishier and more prone to cliché than on “Golden Hour” or her earlier albums.

She's clearly capable of belting a worthy song out of the park, but once again she's hampered by bloop singles and the infrequent double.

In his determination to establish his own lane, though, James has let his once-strong songwriting sag.

As a set of songs, though, Divine Fits' debut feels pretty process-oriented, more workbook than showpiece.

The King Is Dead clings so closely to formula that it doesn't sound like homage or even truth; it sounds like the studious but unconvincing work of an extremely gifted mimic.

If the style is intact, though, the songs here seem a bit lackluster; only the relatively jangly "Harmony Around My Table" and the Velvet Underground-ish "Peanuts" (think of O'Hara in Moe Tucker's role) really stand out from the tasteful mid-tempo blur.

1989 is a deeply catchy, sleekly-produced pop record with the slightly juiceless quality of an authorized biography, a would-be tell-all bleached of the detailed insight she’s trained us to expect from her.

There are exceptions, but most of "Talkie Walkie" is static and not fleshed out, like a perfectly produced series of unfinished demos.

The album's polished, middle-of-the-road approach isn't exactly for everyone, but its agreeable heart doesn't hit any sour notes, either.

There's no denying that, three albums in, the winning novelty of Art Brut's tightly defined project is beginning to wear off.

Acoustic guitars replace glistening synths, bittersweet steel guitars slide in to provide the patina of rural rootsiness, yet Richie still never really steps away from the polished sheen that characterized his musical heyday.

Suck It and See (English slang for "give it a try"), slows the pace but ultimately feels even more detached.

By the time the band rumbles into album-closer “Glendale Junkyard,” its engine may be glowing and the radiator overheating, but somehow the wreckage has stayed intact, no worse for the wear.

As impressively specific as those sonic ideas are, though, Deschanel's songwriting here is less distinctive than it was on "Volume One." Too many of the tracks bleed together in a well-appointed mush of major-minor melodies and hand-me-down lyrics about the inevitability of heartbreak.

The Wack Album feels awfully short on fresh ideas.

Where Does This Door Go feels like a once-promising OK Cupid date that's gone off the rails.

Yet for an album that promises revelation, Meaning of Life is full of generalities.

The sounds are largely tepid arrangements that fail to generate much excitement.

And musically, at least, that journey paid off. ... Martin can be awfully simplistic in these songs — a problem in any context but especially on an album otherwise marked by some of his most nuanced words.

Freeway's penchant for ham-handed hooks and emotionally flat attempts at introspection ('I Cry') and romance ('Take It to the Top') reveal, over the course of these 14 songs, an ultimate two-dimensionality.

It seldom gathers enough momentum, and doesn't feel the least bit cohesive.

The cussing, the horror, the anger, the disappointment, the alienation, the frustration, while real and scary and sad, gets tiresome. That's a lot of Tyler, and so much ego-maniacal nihilism, while fascinating and at times revolutionary, wears thin very quickly.

In his quest to impress, Big Boi short-changes the street-level swagger that always kept his partner Andre 3000 here on Earth.

Yet for all the sleek settings and the vocal firepower Ledisi deploys, Turn Me Loose doesn't really present an artistic persona any more memorable than the earnest traditionalist from "Lost & Found."

"Idlewild" leaves the ears longing for something. Coherence, basically. There's no sustaining mood, no clear message, only Benjamin and Patton's efforts to outdo whatever they came up with last.

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.

It's unclear whether the creative languor stems from the inherent commercial pressure of being the Young Money meal ticket or whether Wayne has exhausted his ideas after compressing a career's worth of songs into three years.

A competent but very late-adopted pop-trance slurry.

Toning down the sonic drama creates an appealing intimacy, but an hour's worth of blues- and folk-flavored ballads becomes monotonous.

However well-crafted and hummable it is, Exhibitionists is hardly groundbreaking. Each song feels borrowed rather than handmade.

That spitfire spirit carries over into the most electrifying moments of Just Like You, a batch of tuff-girl tunes for the torn-fishnets set, but too much of it sounds impermanent, like so much Manic Panic rinsing down the drain.

A sense that his musical vision hasn't stalled in 1978 might add some urgency. Some kind of retooling might also help with his larger problem: trying to do the same job with old equipment. [11 Sep 2006]

The album should keep him atop the country commercial firmament, but doesn't really advance him as an artist.

Once you get past the surface attractions, Sam Endicott's arch singing and rock-rebel posturing are forced, and his production is as stiff as the mechanical discoid rhythms. [24 Apr 2005]

Nearly every song overstays its welcome; what may have felt like a bunch of great jams in the studio grows tedious over the course of 12 tracks.

As meticulously as these sounds and instruments are recorded, as beautiful and haunting as they sometimes sound, they don't add up to more than one or two truly memorable songs.

Chesney's tone-deafness here seems especially egregious because it's surrounded by better, smarter material.

It's all very fun and creative, but, ironically, the duo fall into the common hip-hop traps of being short on actual hooks and not knowing when to edit themselves. [15 Dec 2004]

It may not be fair to rag on the group for picking the wrong decade to rip off, but right now Kasabian's allegiance to the '90s sounds especially uninspired.

All that star power can leave little room in these futuristic R&B songs for Hilson, whose sturdy but unremarkable voice rarely transcends its role as a melody-delivery device.

On Made in the A.M. the group takes advantage of its nothing-to-lose position with a handful of cuts that feel even loosey-goosier than usual.

One just wishes the band did it with a bit more grace and inventiveness than on Appeal to Reason, where straight-outta-the Nation song titles like 'Collapse (Post-Amerika)' and 'Re-education (Through Labor)' disguise some pretty conservative ideas about how modern mainstream punk should sound.

She's sounding as genre-bound in her way as the synthetic singers she was supposed to be a relief from.

At 16 tracks, though, Fifty Shades of Grey is a bit of a slog, with too many dreary midtempo numbers--by Sia, Laura Welsh and Skylar Grey--that only feel more glazed (and less enticing) the longer you listen.

If only the others brought aboard were extended as much freedom to do something other than trace outlines over the contours of this familiar canon.

It’s a disappointingly ordinary effort that for the most part merely does what modern Nashville product is supposed to do.

It’s an unpredictable mix of sharp, artful commentary, wildly creative song making and, despite the album’s title, plenty of aimless, indulgent meandering.

Don't expect a record as breathtaking as U2 at its best. Rather, this is average-grade stuff with a couple essential songs.

But extracting a narrative from these delicate sounds can feel like more trouble than they're worth--even if you haven't half as much happening as Albarn does.

E=MC2 is a little better--the songwriting is more consistent, the feel a bit more natural--but it too lacks a ruling temperament or artistic vision.

The cartoonish sound compensates for Spears' lack of range and lung power by allowing her to ham it up.

The album offers evidence that the singer has fallen behind, that she is no longer setting the conversation in a genre she essentially invented - blending Top 40 pop with club music.

It surrounds a handful of his sharpest, most insightful songs with far less effective material--tracks that either vague out into club-rap utility or sag hopelessly under the weight of cornball sentiment.

For all the innuendo and introspection, Talk That Talk contains little sweat, slobber or fluids and a lot of plasticized, inflatable insinuation.

Her sadly depleted voice is again propped up by multi-tracking, and the occasional dog-deafening shriek hardly proves she's recaptured her early acrobatic power. [10 Apr 2005]

While the depressive stuff is unsurprisingly disturbing--“I Thought About Killing You,” which opens Ye, evokes a school shooter’s nightmarish manifesto--West’s moments of euphoria prove no less vexing. ... This hymn-like ballad ["Violent Crimes"] built on churchy keyboards is so exquisitely rendered that, like much of Ye, it threatens to bring you over to his point of view.

What the album leaves you with is the image of a little lion man, rattling his ever-expanding cage.

Not surprisingly, the music is heavy on acoustic guitars and steel drums, light on powerhouse percussion, making for a musical tour as relaxing as a ride in a hammock strung between two palm trees. And about as uneventful. [23 Jan 2005]

As with all of the installments, half are good, half aren't--all depending on your mood and tolerance for soft rock.

Picked by music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas, the second volume has a lot of good makeout songs and just as many calls for courage.

The album lags in its second half with songs that feel half-baked and are not aided by clever production. Many were penned by Sparks, whose writing abilities are far from hopeless; they simply need more development.

There might be a compelling story in there, but when the Furnaces' songs come in to elaborate on her tales... it's all but impossible to figure out what's going on. [6 Nov 2005]

With imagery haunted by death and lyrical allusions to alienation and angst, Avenged Sevenfold's fifth full-length is almost impossible to appreciate unless you fit the prime demographic: tormented teenage boys.

Gentle on the ears and soft on the heart, Kisses might be of no greater or lesser consequence than an easygoing golf outing among friends or a weekend spent digging a garden near the back fence, but its pleasures, though small and sleepy, can be gratifying.

Trouble is, there's never been an ounce of menace in his boy-next-door vocals, so there's a credibility gap in those performances, no matter how catchy they are.

...And Star Power is scattered, often silly and mostly inconsequential.

With 16 tracks in a wide variety of styles and moods, Bieber’s centerless sixth studio album is noisy and grab-baggy in a way that once was typical for him (and other major pop acts) yet now registers as shallow and unsatisfying.

Emotional Traffic isn't dramatically better, worse or all that different from what he's been doing since the beginning.

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]