It may actually be best to just pretend that H.N.I.C. 3 ends after the 10th song, because up to that point it's a pretty good, if slightly uninspiring, mixtape.

The effort and energy are there but the soul is missing.

The Lips’ Fwends are so intent on tripping up the songs’ rhythmic momentum and weirding up the basic melodies with hammy vocals that they ultimately reinforce their sturdiness. They’re trashing all the furniture in the house, but not bulldozing any walls to open up new vantages.

His belief in his own profundity is kind of endearing as Manchester Orchestra's driving force. It's hard to imagine something like the title track, which uses infidelity as a jumping-off point to question the entire basis of human existence, even standing a chance without it.

With its variations in mood, tone, and personnel, Basses Loaded plays more like compilation of B-sides culled from multiple recording sessions spanning several years.

Having seemingly mastered all modes of excess, you'd think The 2nd Law would be Muse's unimpeachable triumph. It's not, and the problem isn't that Muse have gone too far... they haven't gone far enough.

The most disappointing aspect of Go Fly a Kite is that it sounds so satisfied, almost smug, in its complacency.

The evolving identities of Lee Ranaldo might be a valiant pursuit, but they have made for a problematic tone on Last Night on Earth.

As much work as Sweet clearly put into this disc, hearing him glide instead of soar makes it all sound too easy, which sadly makes it that much easier to forget.

It shows how Ruess might succeed on his own as a good-hearted Midwestern boy--not quite a star, but someone capable of appreciating their light.

It is not, strictly speaking, a good record—Eminem hasn’t made one of those in a decade—but it boasts enough technical command and generates just enough arresting ideas to hold your attention.

Instead of trying to rage against the machine, they're appealing to its intellectual nature. Unfortunately, this nuance is steamrolled by the group's need for fan-friendly riffage.

Slaughterhouse­'s biggest weakness is what brought us here in the first place--for a record that's supposed to be so lyrically godbody that aspiring rapsters will retreat to a lifetime of Auto-Tune in fear, the lyrics display no real wit or inspirational spark.

On her fifth solo release, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, she may be maturing, or more vulnerable, or more vulnerable to her maturity. But regardless, the sheen gets slicker and her music gets duller as the time passes.

It's well-recorded, well-mixed, well-performed-- hell, it's even well-packaged-- but it has little spark and a bad habit of insisting on five-minute songs.

Foreign Landscapes enters a deadly boring lull before its second half and never recovers. The result has the energy of a cup of tea slowly going tepid in the Sunday afternoon sun.

Logic’s lyrical prowess continues to get in his way on songs like “The Return,” which sounds like a motivational song made for a late night Nike ad.

Head Above Water marks a new chapter in the singer’s lengthy body of work; it’s a shame that Lavigne thinks her high notes are all she has to give.

The truth is, if Head Carrier had arrived as the umpteenth Frank Black solo album, little about it would seem amiss. But coming from a band whose legacy was built on shock-and-awe transgression, Head Carrier feels overly pleasant and pedestrian.

More than many of Snoop's recent efforts, Doggumentary has something of a sonic identity.

The most enjoyable moments feel like controlled chaos. Redd’s songs used to be looser and more free-flowing. He does at least sound more composed. That’s to his credit as a person but it’s not to his advantage as an artist.

It is a work that shows a band still struggling to come to terms with itself, discovering on record the music it wants to make, and settling for a safe middle ground in the end.

It's hard not to think that Jackson would have made a better case for this music if he'd put together one blinding disc of stomping giants and polyrhythmic oddities, rather than padding things out with so many wannabes and never-could-bes.

When it comes down to it, there's a very poorly kept secret about this band that will likely determine what you think of Dark On Fire: some of these lyrics are just borderline retarded, combining rhyme-first, ask-questions-never couplets with more arson imagery than a Thursday album.

His second album, Weird!, feels like an ode to his audience of self-identified misfits, but it isn’t as boundary-pushing as his look—and too often, it’s a shallow imitation of more popular songs you’re already tired of. Pop-punk isn’t dead, but Yungblud’s charm gets buried.

The parts of Shiver that strain to be fun and fresh can’t seem to break orbit from the grandiose mass of Sigur Rós, and the album leaves a sense of oppressive profundity in its bulky wake.

The earnest California takes plenty of time to sprawl out, from wound-licking power ballads (“Home Is Such a Lonely Place,” “Hey I’m Sorry”) to high-shine navel-gazings that hew closely to past hits.

The real problem with Volcano, though, is not only the fact that they aren't really doing anything inventive with their music, but that the music itself is utterly forgettable.

Most sad sack numbers here wallow in a shallow sense of self-pity.

On No Mercy, he sounds absolutely sapped of energy. And that's rough; nobody plays the ferocious livewire better.

Problem is, where Elf Power previously made every extra instrument sound like an essential part of their songs, here, these things just sound like last-minute additions aimed at making one song sound remotely different from the next.

If you can look past these cringe-inducing moments, The Good Feeling Music occasionally lives up to its title.

Despite the drama in the music, there's no sense of real people in these songs, not as artists in the here and now and not as subjects in the there and then.

While it's hard to fault a band for branching out beyond their established template, the tidy electronic textures of Fantasy don't begin to match the mysterious depths of Lightning Dust's best work.

To its credit, {Awayland} rarely comes across as false, but O'Brien's affinity for cleverness over clarity ensures it rarely comes across in any real way.

Little of Kintsugi gives the impression that Gibbard’s motivation to reboot Death Cab is matched by legitimate inspiration.

Who knows whether or not the Felice Brothers--brothers Ian, Simone, and James, plus a friend called Christmas--are actually, consciously trying to come as close as possible to replicating Dylan an/or the Band on their self-titled latest. Regardless, the point is, whether they intended to or not, they've come eerily, awkwardly, creepily close to capturing that familiar mix of mood, mystery, atmosphere, and aesthetic.

While the classical arrangements mark a new style for Daft Punk, it's hardly revelatory in the sphere of movie scores at large.

Slum Village has little to say lyrically.

On Gold Medal, even when they fail, it seems as if that failure is a result of The Donnas trying to carve their own identity rather than just being a cute cover band that ran out of ideas.

The subject matter here is repetitive, pseudo-intellectual pandering runs rampant, pointless skits and mid-song dialogue sessions interrupt the flow, and most importantly, wasted beats fall at the hands of Slug's newfound penchant for verse-long tracks and poorly realized singsong bridges.

It feels neither like redemption nor realization; rather, it's just a reminder that--for the past 45 minutes--you've been sitting alone in a room with stable gases. Nothing has changed.

Fate still manages to be a master class in illusory "good" songwriting. The bulk of it is so fenced into classicist templates-- chamber-y pop meets maximum R&B with the occasional smidge of "tasteful" gospel/parlour games ("Hang On") that, even when merely competent, it can still win over those unimpressed with all that punk and hip-hop riff raff of the past three decades.

Outside is a fine but ultimately feckless return to form, an attempt to rebuild The Loon's simple charms.

As generous as Guilt Mirrors might seem, it puts an oppressive onus on the listener to find it.

Made of Bricks too often tries to smooth over the emotional cracks, breaks and fissures that happen to be Kate Nash's distinguishing hallmark. Without them, she may as well be any other London newcomer in a bright dress and matching trainers.

The Post-Nothing cuts fare best; they had fewer moving parts and thus didn’t suffer from being played sloppily or off-key.

At this point it's hard not to feel like the Trailer Trash Tracys who sounded pretty vital in 2009 have been left behind by a whole slew of bands that followed their starting gun and reached the finishing line quicker, and better.

Doughty is better off when laid bare or with a group of musicians that push him in new directions, rather than ones who simply back him.

Overall, there's a strong sense of exploration on Sawdust; if the Killers don't seem to have much intuitive understanding of balance and songcraft, the overproduction at least suggests a strong musical curiosity underlying their obvious career ambitions.

With The Secret Migration, the band completely deserts the peculiarities that distinguished them from both peers and progeny in favor of a dull collection of pastoral fantasias that frequently wander dangerously close to adult contemporary.

Their personality-bereft voices take on a chameleonic quality in which, when surrounded by the accompanying music, they eventually become nothing at all.

For all of its coos about love and devotion, it's the album equivalent of a faked orgasm-- a collection of torch songs with no fire.

15 only offers glimpses of the real Bregoli, while the Bhad Bhabie on display is one-dimensional, painfully predictable, and derivative of what a rapper is expected to be like.

Diplo is surprisingly low on innovation, adventure, and emotion. It feels less like a triumphal homecoming and more like another tourist trap. Lately, no matter where Diplo goes, it feels like he’s visiting.

This Is Alphabeat feels labored, sacrificing identity in its endless eagerness to please.

Stocked with leftovers and ornery jabs at the status quo.

With their frantic, rushed rhymes, and beats which are a bit too eager to please, the Kidz may be popular. But if they want to any cred they're going to have to learn to be themselves.

When I take The Loud Wars as a justifiably forgotten but enjoyable enough record from a bygone era, I'm soothed; it's a little better than, oh, Fake French or something, and I'm sure as hell not going to dig around to find that one with this thing floating around.

At its best, the casual atmosphere makes for one of Kozelek’s loosest, lightest collections to date: something to throw on when you don’t have the emotional capacity for his more distinctive albums.

That's the trouble with Sunlight on the Moon; things are just fine, but 12 albums in, just fine's not quite fine enough.

A little bit of retrospective absurdity goes a long way--if only the rest of Internationally Unknown wasn’t so pale and redundant.

Their mistake is in forcing too many ideas into every possible second.

One of Excuses for Travelers' greatest weaknesses is that the album is too uniformly boring to be affecting in the least.

These are longstanding punk tropes boiled down and Vig-ed up, removed of their typical dirt sheen and bolstered by a couple extra guitar tracks.

It’s hard to believe that the bulk of the project was inspired by anything that Hampton said. Instead, it exploits his image to peddle liberation-lite Billboard hits over anything remotely revolutionary. It’s not all terrible. The most memorable track, out of a whopping 22, comes from relative unknown Nardo Wick.

While Demolition forgoes the overproduction and even much of the shameless rock-god posturing that plagued Gold, Adams hasn't yet found his way out of his songwriting rut.

When you're operating within a strict template, you have to find some distinctive way to fill it out--a felicitous phrasing here, an unexpected chord change there. Without those elements, there's little on Sun Structures to remind you that you are, in fact, listening to a new band called Temples.

For some reason—fear of boring his fans, obedience to the preferences of the streaming services, a career focused on club bangers—Malone won’t let these songs breathe. The result is an album that’s overstuffed and undercooked.

Those who are coming into Transfixiation blind might just hear a notable band boasting a currently rare commitment to an '80s kind of noise-rock rather than the '90s iterations of shoegaze, goth, or industrial that’s more prominent in 2015. Then again, APTBS’ progress as a band only serves to expose the underlying one-dimensionality of their actual songwriting.

[The] Fratellis aren't so much the sound of young Britain as the sound of dad's old record collection.

The perfectly pleasant Rat Farm [feels] strangely wanting.

A slight and unwaveringly safe 30 minutes, it goes down easier than anything the band has ever done, while making less of an impression.

The irony is that Phrazes for the Young is so smoothed over--nearly all of Casablancas' trademark vocal roughness is airbrushed into oblivion--it instantly sounds like a plexiglass-covered museum piece.

There’s much to admire about When Saints Go Machine’s effort to move their synth-powered pop music away from the dancefloor into more cerebral realms. But like the band name itself, their attempts at cleverness can come off sounding clunky.

On several songs, Johansson gets lost in Sitek's swelling production, which may suggest a weak interpreter or a dearth of vocal personality but adds to the album's pervading dreaminess.

Living Thing sounds like a noble but flawed attempt by Peter Bjorn and John to test the fortitude of their songwriting using the most barren and broken of arrangements. But more often that not, it sounds like they settled on the drum-machine presets first, with the lyrics and melodies thrown on top as afterthoughts.

At just less than 30 minutes, Highway Hypnosis is in fact her longest record, and it feels longer still.

Entire swaths of music are cut from Persson’s cloth; she is a known quantity. For better or worse, this lets Persson get away with an album like Animal Heart, one that isn’t much of a statement.

Ultra Mono charges into the discourse like a hobbyist at a rally. It’s not listening, just shouting. Not radical but restless. Not bad, just unnecessary.

With all the work to try and incorporate these far-afield guest vocalists aside, it's worth noting that the production itself is more reliant on them than ever. Underneath them, the music is often flat and unadventurous, tasteful where it could stand to be raucous and rigid where it needs to be limber.

For an album called The Time Is Now, David spends too much of his time looking like he's trying to catch up.

For Now I am Winter is competent, reasonably varied, and efficiently rousing.

Sacred Hearts Club splits the difference between the bookending acts on that Grammys tribute: Maroon 5 and the Beach Boys.

With a more imaginative compiler--and fewer Big Names whose fame peaked years ago-- Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited could have turned out so much different.

Too mushy and indistinguishable to wallop you in the gut and too cheesy to be taken seriously, the album feels, at its worst, like a series of power ballads with the choruses ripped out.

Ultimately, the trip they're taking us on isn't into America, but into the past, and they show too much reverence for their forebears.

These songs introduce nothing new to T.I.’s story or sound, but they’re exactly what you’d expect to find 13 tracks deep into a curated rap playlist on a streaming service.

For 28 tracks Van discusses hidden cabals of dangerous media types so frequently that it verges on a convoluted concept record.

Like a Mojave Desert mirage shimmering tantalizingly before disappearing, Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future is ultimately left little more than a string of sweet nothings, there for your fleeting pleasure. It's a pop tease.

Tove Lo herself often sounds lethargic while singing these songs. She is contending with far more serious subject matter here than on, say, Sunshine Kitty; she is not enjoying herself. She is less daring, less awake, less alive to the pleasures of sex and love than she ever has been.

The resulting project is dimmed down and diluted.

The big, inescapable problem with O is that, aside from being derivative, Rice's songwriting is also unbearably repetitive-- he stubbornly relies upon time-tested singer/songwriter formulas (quiet acoustic strumming and sober, wavering vocals), and repeats them almost exactly the same way, every time.

Fragrant World is curiously thin.

The bulk of Neon Icon resists coherence or purpose.

Now, by denigrating this Ya-Ya's reissue as a commodity and by questioning the album's canonization in general, I don't mean to imply this set doesn't cook. Even if it's not larded with 20-minute workouts, Ya-Ya's is manna for guitar freaks, thanks to the fiery interplay between the immortal Keith Richards and inarguably the greatest lead guitarist the Stones ever boasted, Mick Taylor.

There are good ideas somewhere inside The Air Conditioned Nightmare, and anyone determined enough to look might get something out of them. Lyrics ranging from naively clichéd to slyly astute.

Like a lot of free internet mixtapes, The Narcissist II is compelling but ultimately shallow, and shallow is a fault, even if that's what Blunt was aiming for.