Lacking compelling hooks, a unifying mood, or a clear narrative, his debut is oddly inflexible and over-calculated.

The group's first album since 1996 just sounds like the one they would've churned out in 1998.

Though often disjointed, when some of these fragments manage to really connect, it's hard not to imagine Supreme Cuts as being able to hit a decent stride in the future.

For the wary or outright dismissive, however, The Resistance is also a very smartly sequenced album.

With keen observations and piles of swagger tucked away somewhere for the time being, the Rakes could still be the soundtrack to plenty of lives-- or at the very least, daily commutes-- if only they could find the strength to muster a smirk.

Everybody Wants to Know is the kind of album that grows more rewarding the second and third times through, as the subtle hooks gradually sink in. But once those hooks have engrained themselves in those old skullbag, it's pretty unlikely they'll offer anything you can't get from any other anonymous alterna-rock record.

They were and continue to be first-wave, American indie rock survivors whose legacy has become, at this point, less about their music and more about surviving. Riot Now!, the veteran outfit's first full-length in five years is a meat-and-potatoes rock record that goes one step further in explaining why that it is.

Poor Moon turns out to be a wisp of a record, intentionally light and certainly promising but also oddly--and perhaps ironically--weightless.

Standouts struggle to hold their own amid the album's more overwrought anthems and straight-up misfires.

EAR PWR were once a band that refused to tie a tie or recite the silly rule--it could be annoying, but at least they were being themselves. Here, they prove how hard growing up can be.

Waterhouse scrambles our expectations of old-school musical styles while underscoring how much pure listening joy can be found in these elements. Yet Nick Waterhouse can’t really make them add up to much beyond themselves. His references remain references.

Some of its songs deserve to be cut into halves, while others should have been chopped wholesale. With those snips, Exai would be a really good Autechre album that summarizes the various successes of their career in an hour or so. As is, it's as much a frustrating obstacle course as it is a grueling marathon.

What feels missing from Heavy Mood is specificity: Where are the characters, and what became of those kids passed out on the lawn? The heart of Heavy Mood is lost its in own sloganeering.

As big as the heart-swelling hooks get, though, Fields are more memorable when they let their early-1970s folk ghosts creep into the corners of their songs like dusty cobwebs.

By drawing this deeply on both the physical and sonic landscapes of their forebears, and with too many go-nowhere solos blotting out its songs, Fain winds up feeling stuck in time.

The band sound thoroughly comfortable. ... It's a shame, then, that on their own album, Phantogram foreground their most conventional, clipped pop selves, when their quietest moments are often the loudest of all.

This uniformity of tone and tempo understandably causes You & Me to wilt through its middle stretches despite its relatively brief running time.

Whilst there's no getting past some of the duller and more unbearable material on this record ... if she'd made a record full of songs as unaffected as these four ["Lies," "Starring Role," "Power & Control," "Living Dead"], Electra Heart could be one of the year's most acclaimed pop albums.

For a group who traded so well in whimsy, who got off to such a kaleidoscopic start, Original Colors can feel unusually drab.

The trouble with World of Joy isn’t that it’s bad, but that it seems perfectly content to stop short at “pretty good.”

Aside from its appropriate feel for a good time get-down in a surprisingly cheerful cartoon post-apocalypse, it's hard to get any real emotional connection from these cuts.

Though it’s mostly a pleasant record, there’s not much from it that sticks around long after listening--for all the talk of deluge, More Rain manages to wash itself away.

Torrini's voice is pleasant but also pretty anonymous, so it's therefore well-suited to any number of (mostly mellow) musical settings.

The Singles' six originals would make for a disconnected night out, and no doubt an energetic live show, but they're a wild ride in headphones.

The Drums are at least halfway to amassing a pretty great singles comp--they just can’t really call it a Greatest Hits.

There is a lot of loud, full-bore belting. It's a little showboaty and on occasion his voice threatens to overpower the song itself.... Still, not a note of Magic Moment rings false.

His message loses strength, in part, because he doesn’t fully commit to it.

Unveiled and ineffectual, Matthewson’s gripes get boring quickly. The sense that you’ve heard these songs before--or at least their frameworks and tricks--doesn’t help.

Now that the veil has been lifted, there’s not much on Tides End worth the price of progress.

Keeler succeeds in meticulously reconstructing the electronic music he clearly has a taste for, but without stirring in any of his own personality the songs do little more than run in place, joylessly hitting the marks without changing the rules in any meaningful or attention-grabbing way.

Money is no less creative or searching than Skeletons' previous works, but it trades too many of their fantastical charms for scurrying reality.

He has the ideas: ISAM's pieces keep wandering into unmarked industrial zones, evoking broken things and blight. But this is heavy, foreboding music; Tobin hasn't yet learned how to balance his robust sound-art impulses with footholds for his listeners.

So Barking stays the course, with the added prospect of a fitter, happier Underworld on the horizon. It's about time.

Like much of Rhett Miller, and unlike much oft-unctuous power pop, it's music seemingly made to softly impress rather than outright inspire.

This quartet's assured sound-and-fury is perplexingly difficult to care about.

Let the Festivities Begin! is music to dance to, to roll a joint to, to solve a decades-old mystery to, but it isn’t a masterwork that unfolds with multiple listens. It’s exactly what it promises, and that’s a party.

The five tracks here differ from their predecessors only by degrees, so if you liked the previous records there's little here to find too upsetting, but as an EP it feels like a stopgap ahead of the next Com Truise album.

Windy City never quite reconciles her genre history with her populist ambitions, creating an album that toggles back and forth between the two poles and then ends abruptly.

Trickfinger often provokes an engaging anxiety, but when Frusciante's not pushing at the edges of the form it can lack the magic of his otherwise unapologetically experimental solo work.

Although Good Arrows is aimed in the direction of a synthesis between the band's two predominant elements, the result misses the target by just a bit.

When they play it safer, like on their workmanlike strum through Joni Mitchell’s “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” or the easy-listening wistfulness of their take on Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over,” the results are less remarkable. And while it’s a relief to be spared Morrissey’s bitterness, sometimes California Son feels too frothy, and he sounds like he doesn’t have any skin in the game at all.

Z's biggest problem is that, despite choosing a sound that is soft and somnolent, SZA is too often overpowered by the music.

Jacuzzi Boys is a collection of well-recorded, well-constructed, boring songs.

It displays the boundlessness of her vocal talent but finds her tethered to a frustratingly limited aesthetic.

Taken together with her other albums, it’s a part of a motley crew of modes that is shaping Princess Nokia into a great experimentalist. On its own, it lacks the completeness of a coherent project of genre hybridization, and lacks a standout single on the level of, say, “Tomboy” or “Kitana.”

In retrospect, it seems Giant will function less as a career highpoint for either artist, and more as a historical marker of the career trajectories of each participant.

On Heaven Upside Down, his 10th album, Manson embraces the tropes that made him a menace and a rock star and a stalwart of goth.

As the band churn up sound and fury, we can hear the strident strains of Balliet’s cello, scribbling suicide notes in the background and lending some gravity to an album that sounds, tragically, weightless.

The album's best songs ("Tough Towns," "Fame II the Wreckoning," "Treat Em Right") temper the stream-of-consciousness and ramp up the atmosphere instead. When they resist the urge to troll (tell me a sardonic chorus that goes "Just like a tactical maniac/ I WANNA SHOOT YOUU" isn't trolling), Nevermen possess a deadly grace befitting Doseone's beloved hydra metaphor; for now, those necks are tangled.

Guillemots cram themselves into awkward fits, and Dangerfield has to squeeze the hardest--whether he's tying himself to a straightforward ballad instead of clamoring for the rooftops, or standing up for a fight when he's so much more comfortable slipping into a dream.

All together, it sounds like a poorly organized collection of demos and ideas.

Mordechai doesn’t quite commit to delivering fleshed-out songs, or to synthesizing Khruangbin’s influences into something new. It’s too busy to settle fully into your subconscious like the intercontinental ambience of Khruangbin’s 2018 breakout Con Todo El Mundo, but not substantial enough to satisfy more active listening.

With Coolaid, arguably Snoop’s first real hip-hop album in half a decade, we find his reinvention back into “Rapper Snoop” to be a bit wobbly.

Deliverance might work best as something else entirely, perhaps as a beat tape filled with reference vocals for the sort of stadium-status UK indie stars that know how to squeeze the maximum amount of drama out of the minimum amount of wordplay.

The constant malaise keeps these songs from generating the ridiculous, heart-swelling feeling of transcendence that the best big-room dance music can achieve, while the duo’s relentless approach keeps the music from feeling particularly intimate.

Too often, it tries to get by on what it's opposed to instead of what it stands for, a gambit with little margin for error if you don't have a viably exciting alternative, or enough trust in the taste of the listener.

Throw Haerts on shuffle and it’s uniformly accessible and uniform, period.

There's nothing wrong with tempering one's stance or mellowing out--and to We Are Wolves' credit, the slowest, spaciest numbers here are the most unexpected and most satisfying--but the driving momentum and risky harshness of past efforts are missed.

The album’s interstellar concept is interesting enough to get it off the ground, but too quickly Jonas retreats to his domestic comforts, without really probing the relationship that so inspires him, or charting any new territory in the pop universe.

The common threads celebrities try to establish with civilians have proven to be pretty flimsy throughout the past year, but they’re enough to give OK Human an emotional binding missing from nearly every album they’ve made in the past 20 years.

Is a Woman is a disappointment.

The dull patches are particularly depressing when you realize how much work went into them for so little payoff.

Two years after WOMB, the graves EP is firmly rooted in the same subtle reconfiguration that comes with each new Purity Ring release. Some songs even sound outright regressive, which isn’t always bad.

Tickets to My Downfall was memorable for the way it treated pop-punk like a natural palette for his emotions, but this too often feels like a concept album about rock, a stodgy record that’s too busy using “real instruments” to do anything interesting with them.

The Posies, if you'll recall, used to compose entire songs of understated pop brilliance, instead of just moments.

It’s disappointing that these songs don’t have the bones to stand on their own, especially since a precedent for truly great Major Lazer songs exists.

Dreams, with its ability to shuffle through genres while maintaining a cohesive sound, should please though who were looking for a little more ambition.

A darker album, a slightly clumsier album, but an album with a strong unifying themes and a few songs worth stepping away from the bar for.

Where their earlier records thrived on the tension between Stollsteimer's gut-spilling confessions and the band's raucous, raw-powered attack, on Love, Hate and Then There's You, we get all the pleading, but without the violent, cathartic release.

As a distilled 5-song EP, Stockholm might have served as a refreshing slap in the face--a potent reminder of what a vibrant jolt of lightning Chrissie Hynde can be--but instead, it's a rather wan listen.

Fortunately, one song on the album is unhindered by Artaud’s ramblings: the only track that Smith wrote, “Ivry.” ... It is a moment of clarity on an otherwise foggy and disappointing record, and it leaves you feeling full of light and ease, at least for a moment.

When No One Is Lost tries to blend in with the youth, Stars sound like professors rather than participants.

Artificial Sweeteners certainly isn't a terrible album, and it does the trick if you're just looking for a quick pick-me-up, but it leaves a bland aftertaste.

A passive-aggressive album like Clash the Truth, which just sounds kind of confused.

Music that, while often pleasant, lacks the power of not only his best work, but also most of his successors' stuff.

The discrepancy between Steadman’s skill set and the kind of music he’s trying to make here is hard to overlook.

Isbell is obviously familiar with the music of the region, yet Something More Than Free sounds nondescript and--worse--placeless.

After a supreme early demonstration of pastiche, Alive As You Are's back half reveals a capable pop band writing capable pop songs.

You suspect The Painter may ultimately have been more rewarding to create than it is to listen to. It comes off as a therapeutic act from an artist who, assuming he’s managed his royalties, never really needs to work again, rather than an album that simply had to be made.

Breakbeats have become fashionable again, so a dusted-off track like “Undone” doesn’t sound quite as dated, with Paradinas playfully bouncing between tympani boom, percolator bip, and dramatic background strings. ... But “Bassbins” also shows that the more aggro and cartoonish take on it (which anticipated the rise of breakcore) remains out of fashion for good reason.

Too much of Going Grey seems oddly unwilling to risk offense--the concepts of “Far Drive,” “Everyone But You,” and “Grand Finale,” songs about various lovelorn states, could be the work of any pop-punker with a passing AP English grade, feeling as perfunctory and indistinct as the hyper-compressed, airless music surrounding them. Stella’s still got his tics, but by this point, they can feel like shtick.

If it's any consolation, the songs are interchangeable and accomplished enough that long-time fans will be relieved that they didn't embarrass themselves. Newcomers, if any, will almost certainly wonder what the big deal was.

While these songs can occasionally find that perfect balance of catchiness, sweetly familiar sentiments, and home-recorded charm, there a few too many lemons for this to be a record worthy of vibing out.

With today's cartoons darker and more violent than ever, I'm sure cartoon music could someday sound as though influenced by Suspended Animation, but I highly doubt any rock music will.

While Black Rainbows may represent more of a flickering flame than a raging inferno, it at least yields some evidence that Anderson's once-fiery persona has not been completely extinguished.

For all the mission-statement confidence that its title exudes, Sondre Lerche sounds strangely divided: It's too pristine and too scattershot.

If Liam seems hamstrung as a rocker on BE, at least he’s showing more promise as a balladeer.

Oceans Will Rise is not a bad album, but it is very much the sound of a band still trying to figure out who they are--and in fairness, they have lost and gained a member since their first record. But three albums into a career, they should have a better idea than this.

Even with the decibel meter dialed down to accommodate his wounded croon, Mendel struggles to assert himself, flattening out the album’s dynamic variation in the process.

In between bursts of inspiration, Ardipithecus is largely a record of growing pains.

The Neon nestles the duo back into their musical comfort zone when they’re exceedingly capable of more.

The downside of Belong’s greater tilt toward pop and feelings is an occasional lurch into treacle.

There’s plenty Sia could do with an album entirely of Christmas originals, but too many are underwritten; there’s more consistency in the art direction than the songwriting.

There are hints of this fledgling growth throughout Good Intentions. ... The most fun moments on the album are the ones where Nav gets out of the way.

Despite the emphasis on atmosphere that pervades the album and that seems like a necessary byproduct of its creative technology, The Fall may be the most earthbound Gorillaz album yet--and at times, therefore, the most banal.

While nearly every track on Nausea finds Vallesteros trying to grapple with these issues [feeling displaced and connected at the same time], he rarely wrenches out any insight or personal detail.

On a purely sonic level, TIM is an easy listen to a fault, but taking in this final artistic statement is more difficult when focusing on the lyrics. ... The effect of these [guest] contributors effectively recasting his personal sentiments over once-unfinished music is haunting in all the wrong ways.

Frustratingly, Trust Now doesn't advance on the better ideas from Shadow Temple, particularly the elements of dance music that occasionally surfaced.