There's little here that couldn't have been on previous albums; the difference is what's gone missing: the in-your-face homosexuality of Rough Trade debut The Smell of Our Own, the perverse grandiosity of 2004's Mississauga Goddam.

The first five songs at least are totally gorgeous, the strings glassy, the tone all understated seduction, the structures fluid and surprising. ... By the Homme-tinged desert rider "Used to Be My Girl," misanthropy has set in.

Though having one good trick in the bag keeps him from becoming a mere oldies jukebox like so many other 40-year rock vets, the sampler platter of Chrome Dreams II suggests his renowned versatility, by comparison to its cult-classic ancestor, ain't what it used to be.

At this point in her career, Thorn shouldn't be courting the middle, and considering the best moments on Out of the Woods, she didn't have to, either.

At times it’s almost impressive how long an album called Beerbongs & Bentleys can go without cracking a smile. It is more assured and impressive than its predecessor, Stoney, but it’s also more exhausting.

It creates an album weighed toward showcasing masterful execution that leaves a pretty muted general impression. Unless you're predisposed toward technical prowess and solo bass recordings, it's probably going to come off as more of a clinic than a collection of great songs.

The resulting clash can be momentarily compelling, but lacks the nuance and character and to really pull it off, which all leaves Seachange huddled on the cusp of something significantly worthwhile, but still a few wild, miscreant swings away.

Fishing Blues’ saving grace, the only song with any real passion and continuity, is one about police brutality written from the perspective of the officer.

Soft Opening maintains a sort of oddball consistency in this regard, but is ultimately so aimless, messy, and at times beyond tedious, it hardly matters how many hands were in its pot.

Generally, the tracks here are pleasant and well-produced, but are rarely engaging enough to justify their runtimes.

The failure of this album, in addition to being overlong and under-ambitious, is the idea that maturity should beget lazy, hammock songs.

What is frustrating are the infrequent but genuinely interesting moments of creativity and cohesion, which suggest that if Marching Church had taken their time and laid off the improv a little, there might have been something special here.

It's so clinical that it works better as an audition reel for their next round of features than it does its own statement.

The joycore bricolage of CSS is all but missing on Donkey.

Barring a few notable exceptions, World Music Radio is so beholden to its premise—so enfeebled by Batiste’s insistence on universality—that it offers up few opportunities to get to know Batiste himself: his stories, his struggles, his euphoric victories and devastating losses. That absence leaves the record feeling hollow, like a pretty house where no one lives.

Interpol might still be an exceptional act, but it’s a chore to have to squint this hard to see it.

These lyrics threaten to drag the rest of the album down if you listen too closely, but Stephenson’s vocal melodies are buoyant enough to keep it all afloat if you’re playing this in the background.

Its intentions are noble. Yet the album’s sentiments are often bogged down by cloying lyrics and worn-out arrangements. At times, the music feels conspicuously out of character for a band that has historically made tactful, if occasionally bland, rock’n’roll.

Whether it's a unique opportunity to peek into a talented musician's creative process or a throwaway collection of sonic gags depends on your tastes.

There is less to dig into on it's a big world. To be fair, there are two bona-fide new Kurt Vile songs on it's a big world out there.

Were its songs more dynamic, its arrangements less haphazard, its tone more even, its sentiments a bit more clearly stated, Elf Power could really be affecting. But as it is, it just feels affected; the sound of a band in mourning seeking a musical catharsis they can't quite extend to the listener.

You get the feeling as you listen to the entirety of Lost Themes II that someone let their finger linger far too long on the butter button at the movie theater concession stand.

Even its best moments sound like an amateurish reiteration of These Are the Vistas' quasi-jazz anarchy.

The lyrics to Mascis’ songs no longer resonate.

Uncool is not bad, and if anything, DISCO could stand more of it: to evoke actual disco in all its frisson and desperation, rather than the remembered-40-years-later version, full of kitsch and clip-art disco balls. The album, with a couple exceptions, has two modes: overly tasteful cruise-ship programming, and gauche rehashes.

Leo Abrahams’ stylish production steers the discussion toward his previous work with Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins, even if Shoals just as often makes me think of a weighted blanket or paint roller soaked in aloe vera.

There are a couple of good performances here and there, but no choice cuts, just songs left on the cutting room floor during sessions for recent solo albums and filler tracks from lower-ranking artists on the QC roster. The longer the comp goes on, the more obvious it becomes that nothing is happening.

Everything about Cast, from its high-end synths and imperious production to Biliński’s alabaster vocals, is superficially flawless and taken at face value; most of one’s time with the album is spent looking for cracks, hooks, or anything resembling a personality. The thing about perfection in art isn’t just that it’s unattainable--it’s also uninteresting.

For all the racket, there simply isn’t enough focus, enough control, or enough music. Improvisations hints at the duo’s potential but is a fundamentally insubstantial listen.

Psapp are certainly getting closer to achieving a perfect balance in their sound, and The Camel's Back is certainly lounge jazz of a higher proof than most, but save perhaps 'I Want That,' 'Screws' is the one number here that'd make you put down your drink.

Mirror Mirror smacks of a band struggling to be taken more seriously, but simply settling on a more stone-faced form of pastiche isn't the way to do it. All they've really done is trade a Halloween party for a history lesson.

These tried-and-true structures can seem fried-and-false.

For all that the band straddles the worlds of dance and guitars, the arrangements on Battle Lines are incredibly tame, as if the duo mistakenly joined the blandest of electronics with the politest of indie rock.

With that frustrating distance between Tiny Rebels' finely tuned sonics and Kelly's uncharacteristically indistinct lyrics, it's hard not to wonder what another week might've done.

The best moments all come courtesy of his guests. ... While Rich the Kid busily squanders goodwill, what a more engrossing rapper might have made of it.

It’s always just one move too many.

This generation-crossing collaboration feels like a record lodged in a sort of chronological rut, one where a young artist fronts an old-sounding record that sounds like it could've been released at any point in his lifetime--and helmed by any number of MCs that could've sounded like him.

There are real, new stylistic portents here. But Josephine mostly suggests new directions rather than moving in them, and the traceless ache of its muddy middle-third ('Hope Dies Last,' 'The Handing Down,' 'Map of the Falling Sky') is burdensome.

It's here we enter the world of the tame, a land where Sting is king and Phil Collins is raucous.

The busy arrangements and serious frontloading make Born Under Saturn’s 54 minutes a demanding investment, and the effort it takes to simply get any sort of visceral pleasure out of it makes it feel twice as long.

The original is a seduction; this [album] is food-court flirtation.

Kanye West, who once again produces the majority of the album, has tried making a tribute to Common's Jay Dee-fueled Soulquarian-era sound, and he doesn't fit it well at all, managing half of its vibe and none of its energy.

It's rarely boring, and often full of promise, but it's a direction that calls for further tweaks, experiments, and exploration to get the balance just right.

These 12 songs feel like whimsical larks, and Jackson's considerable charm should be able to put them over just fine in a live setting. But the record can also be too whimsical for its own good, and for most listeners, Jackson's Belle and Sebastian songs will be enough.

The tracks on Yanqui are content to continue building to bored, satiated endings we can see coming 20 minutes in advance.

A goofy, sloppy mini-album, cramming familiar Weezer fuzz, stoned piano ballads, playful analogue synths, and misguided Bad Company references into a little more than half an hour.

Greenwood and co.'s impulses have grown disappointingly easy to dissect. The result is music that, by any definition, remains experimental and difficult, but the invigorating internal tension between the ordained simplicity of American musics and the free-will noise jams has evaporated.

While 'Bruises' proves that a well-done song that sounds like other songs can make people take brief notice, Inspire mostly proves that recycling isn't the only answer.

It’s the pro-forma songwriting that transpires between those brontosaurus blasts that ultimately proves problematic. By using their muscular might to prop up otherwise featherweight tunes, Royal Blood have effectively built themselves a castle and furnished it with IKEA.

On Deceiver of the Gods, they are satisfied with plugging 10 new anecdotes into 10 songs they’ve made before and, unfortunately, will most likely make again.

Overall, CLPPNG is chock full of ideas, and if its failure is due to overambitiousness, well, there are worse ways to fail.

Melodies coast, but they don’t always stick; everything’s too mannered, too clean, and the album is marred by a clinicality further punctuated by its bonus tracks.

Butler’s commitment to the detached frontman where singing occurs barely or not at all robs songs of their emotional largesse, that basic thing we licensed to Arcade Fire and upon which their entire identity relies. What saving grace there is on Everything Now is scattered throughout its mercifully short 47 minutes.

Toggling between merely pleasant and overly precious, Melt Away is such a low-stakes endeavor that it never even registers as a comeback.

Four albums in, it's becoming pretty clear that the genre in which Manchester Orchestra resides has more untapped potential than the band itself.

It's hard to shake the feeling that the album sounds too comfortable, too familiar: It's so deeply entrenched in their comfort zone that it sounds too easy-- not effortless, but automatic and rote.

It’s almost as if the first half of the album is comprised of songs that Crocodiles had finished writing by the time they got to the studio, and the second half is all of the stuff that they came up with while they were there. And this exploratory spirit is where Boys finds its strength.

Ultimately, the picture that emerges on Twentyears is a simplified version of Air that swaps out most of their quirks for only their most palatable qualities. It’s a lite version of the band, and a frustrating missed opportunity.

Marketing aside, Phase doesn't sound unpleasant, just generic.

There is rarely nuance to Baio’s lyrics, and everything is offered up with little in the way of poetry or insight.

They’re a "the + plural noun" band. For those who felt the "New Rock Revolution" was exactly what its name promised rather than a revival of old aesthetics, the Districts' A Flourish and a Spoil signifies a restoration of order. For everyone else who simply likes rock bands, it's actually kinda quaint.

Ironically, in trying to tap into the mystique of America’s most storied cities, Foo Fighters completely demystify their own creative process, effectively turning the Sonic Highways project into a glorified homework assignment--educational, perhaps, but laboriously procedural.

The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness may attempt to forge a common ground between two trans-Atlantic artists, but even when working from the same instrumental base, the sensibilities at play here are still oddly segregated.

Remember My Name as an album isn’t going to change lives.

The disappointment is in how it sounds like their years apart have needlessly chastened them into fast-forwarding through the idiosyncratic streak they showed on Some Loud Thunder instead of embracing it, coming out of the wilderness only to end up smack dab in the middle of the road.

Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic smolders with emotion, and yet Kasan’s aloofness—even when he’s shouting—sounds like a protective mechanism against truly letting himself go. Framed by the derivative music, Kasan sounds as removed from his feelings as the rest of us do expressing them via memes from inside the stultifying safety of our digital cubicles.

Highlights aside, Total's belligerence is as predictable as it is teeth-grinding.

Despite its street-level money, power and respect rhymes, almost all of it feels divorced from reality, free of any kind of narrative grounding or personal disclosure.

Reading his explanations for choosing the guest rappers, it’s clear they moved him, but he might’ve been better off simply ceding them the space and stepping away. With this new tape, the Streets are officially back, but Skinner never convinces us why they should stay.

Green's self-consciously dweeby vocals hang his off-kilter lyrics like a doomed curveball.

The album doesn't have any of the euphorically propulsive standout tracks that held Redman's older albums together.

Hold it by its edges and the experience of this album suffers––the rocky center is where we find personal truths writ well.

From a production standpoint, the record sounds great, but at its core, it comes up empty, lacking a solid foundation of good songs to rest its adventurous studio trickery upon.... It's the most frustrating type of album there is-- one that's full of promise and shining moments, but never fully delivers.

The painstaking introspection here seems to stem from a need to use their success and exposure to deliver some definitive, U2-sized message when really they're so much more relatable when they're awkwardly sorting out their psychological messes on the fly.

If it doesn’t achieve the long-promised outcome of “filler-free” Foals, Life Is Yours unexpectedly thrives when it reintegrates the studio trickery that used to weigh down previous side Bs.

He doesn't exactly break free on Bright Penny, but typical of Hayes, it's not for lack of trying.

In the Lonely Hour comes from a personal place, it doesn't end up feeling like a very personal record.

Divest the Smashing Pumpkins or Hum of their singers, give the bands room to jam, and this album might have ensued. Without vocals, it feels slightly empty.

Taylor writes about big issues—income inequality, political corruption, a society fraying at its edges—but these complex matters are undermined by the rote uplift in his songs, an optimism assumed but never really earned.

Eternal Youth feels like more of a lackluster stopgap than equal-footing sidecar for Merritt's songcraft, a frustrating teaser from the Merritt portfolio of aliases.

The Weavers have no trouble sounding like themselves, but another voice in the room might have helped them flesh out some of the underexplored ideas on Primordial Arcana. Like the still life that adorns its cover, the album can be beautiful, but it’s fundamentally inert.

He’s so dedicated to synthesizing his most obvious influences--channeling Tyler, the Creator and N.E.R.D. down to their throat-clearing ad-libs and neo-New Jack funk--that he hasn’t quite established an identity of his own. That failing doesn’t dull the jams or diminish his evident potential, but it does hold him back.

Nearly everything he raps on Memories Don’t Die is something you’ve heard before, performed more ably elsewhere, and the few lines that aren’t are unbelievably simple-minded or straight-up witless.

As long as British Sea Power continue to exist on their singular plane, it's easy to admire and probably overrate them for their ambition.

I've rooted for these guys because they nearly achieve that fine mix between tackiness and genius perfected by bands like T. Rex and the Darkness. Unfortunately, I can only give them points for effort.

The nuts and bolts of the singsongy rhythms matter. Lil Baby is at his best when he’s using those tricks to switch between moods, but there’s just one on It’s Only Me, and it’s indifference: not in the too-cool-to-care kind of way, but in the way when words have no weight behind them.

While the band once pushed forward with a strength that seemed to surprise even them, So Divided ultimately feels scattered and flaccid.

Writing from the heart does not automatically imbue lyrics with depth. Never is it more apparent that the factory approach is not allowing Cara to fulfill her potential than on “Scars To Your Beautiful.”

It seems now that the band is terrified of change, leaving them to rehash what their first five albums accomplished in lieu of actual progression.

None of Corgan’s definitive qualities as a musician—symphonic grandeur, needling immediacy—translate to his production, which burdens CYR with out-of-the-box anonymity; a Smashing Pumpkins album that sounds like it was handed off to a guy at the Genius Bar. The production’s clinical competency only highlights the assembly-line songwriting of CYR’s back half.

Frustratingly, most songs have great ideas in them, sitting alongside creative dead ends. The overall sound of the record--to be reductionist, rave-rap--is a welcome trend, and it proves they have their ear to the ground.

Ugly sounds like something far less interesting: the sort of generically angsty guitar music that only a ’90s major label executive could love.

While his singing is strained and incompetent, at least he’s going for it. Too much of the album seems satisfied with the small space Lean was able to carve out for himself.

Songs usually don't develop past their first five seconds, and the album slides back out of your attention field quickly.

Pole has some worrying problems, starting with the tracks featuring Fat Jon.

At least he hasn't lost his wry sense of humor. But about this newfound singing business: Argos has discovered a voice that sounds a bit like Jarvis Cocker's, only if he'd lost it after a long night out drinking-- a little hoarse, whispering low so as not to upset the hangover.

It feels like exactly what it is: a slipshod collection of songs constructed intermittently, in broad strokes, over a period of years.

If this album is indeed the beginning of a long, arduous journey of rediscovery and rebirth and other fun ponderous stuff, here's hoping the rest of the trip is more enjoyable than this initial misstep.