Uniformly and unashamedly sentimental, Born Again leaves too little to remember her by.

There is very little happening within his verses right now, and even as he’s pivoted toward the personal, he’s still doing impressions, sonically and stylistically.

Please Be Honest certainly has its charms. But for the first time in Pollard’s career, Guided by Voices isn’t the main event--which, for the band’s legions of fans, is surely a loss.

In other words, it’s strong and considered enough to mean big things to more people than just Pierce. Even the best Drums albums surround a few highlights with filler, though, and Brutalism falls even harder into this pattern.

So while Delìrivm Cordìa is filled with great blocks of sound, it too often loses sight of direction.

Hazed Dream has some heady moments--the languid guitar intro to "Incense Head" and the head-nodding chords of "Mexican Wedding"--but the songs are just too mellow, understated, and lyrically anonymous to move the needle much.

[An] album that, like its predecessors, is as accomplished as it is stunted, waddling wadlessly towards its intentional exile on Cute Island.

The sounds he pursues here as Blood Orange might be more hip than his work as Lightspeed Champion, but the end results are less satisfying.

Kinski have the potential, the skill, the other requisite intangibles to be awe-inspiring, but somehow they keep shooting left of the mark.

If all of this sounds more geared toward Eno completists and poetry fans than the general listener, that's about right.

Totems Flare regains a measure of hospitality from its predecessor, but it brings only one new idea to the table-- Clark's singing, which is only partially effective.

Stefani’s focus on the good times alternates with songs where she expresses cartoonish anger by awkwardly rapping and shouting non-sequiturs (“Naughty,” “Red Flag”), and neither mode plays to her strengths as a songwriter and signature vocalist. Her best songs are the ones in which she is audibly upset.

Hello Happiness is a messy, overproduced, anonymous set of hotel-lobby beats that makes woeful use of one of the greatest voices of all time. ... There’s a moment when Hello Happiness works. On the sensual and affirming closing track, “Ladylike,” Chaka Khan finally breaks free of vocal effects.

Obviously, a host of issues--from downtime to headlines--compelled Walla to make this record, and his effort shows. What's missing is a compelling reason to listen.

Surfing troublingly ends with three plodding failures (including the seven-minute "Sayulita") that feel at odds with the record's fuck-all spirit.

Van Weezer’s two-handed tapping revels in its hamminess. And for all its pyrotechnic guitars and arena stomp, Van Weezer never actually roars all that hard.

Guests reinforces its inessential nature by presenting, for the most part, a one-dimensional rendering of DOOM as a lyricist.

There are building blocks for something fantastic in most of these pieces, but only in two of them have they been used to make more than the sum of their parts.

Sure, Alexander is an unsteady and uncertain release, but it's also a trial run by someone who has already made it.

For Smith's first four albums, Outside Society is an abridgement that doesn't really do her justice.

The Kooks take elements from their up-and-coming peers and a name from Hunky Dory, achieving an adolescent universality that's at once their strongest pitch and greatest failing.

Brass is certainly an easier record to wrap your mind around than Flux Outside. But, with one too many good-not-great melodies and that nagging sense that these guys are holding something back, it's also a whole lot less likely to get itself lodged in your skull.

Too many of these songs are just bluster in search of a purpose. Casualties of the duo’s noncommittal approach, they fall into a thankless gray area, too tinkered-over to function as punk, yet too haphazard to be great pop.

Even when Beer herself sounds lovely, her explorations of vulnerability and self-definition tangle in stiff, obvious metaphors. The writing relies on flimsy framing devices, shoehorning a delicate narrative about hiding and healing into simplistic slogans.

Rather than delving further into experimentation or exploring their strengths, Tool have made an...A Perfect Circle record.

There's potential in The Visitor's mix of electro, new wave, and pop, but it's obscuring or distorting Aguayo's personality, which is the engine that has driven his songs for so long.

Despite capable guest vocalists, including Robyn herself, it's generally devoted to glossy, bittersweet electronic drifts that are too slow, too long, or too bland to hold interest for 60 minutes, though often unobjectionable in smaller servings.

UR FUN—a confection, a distraction, a collection of competent and sparkling pop songs—doesn’t open itself to the world as it stands in this moment.