The good news is that they're too skilled, experienced, and important to make a record that's just a mess, and for a while there's nothing so terrible about this one.

That the Watson Twins blend seamlessly into these backdrops, however, is far from a compliment. Of course it's lovely to an extent when the girls harmonize, but neither owns a voice strong enough to convey much besides a languid aridity.

Vroom Vroom is pointedly uncommercial and abrasive.

The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2 is not only superfluous, it actually erases some of the gains made by its predecessor as it plays into the worst trappings of self-indulgence.

War Stories is the most unadventurous, most typically rock UNKLE release to date.

The noxious muck on evidence here obscures most of what made his past music so singular.

Its only commitment is to a subtle antagonism, and it ignores pretty much any worthwhile development in pop, rock, electronic, or hip-hop music since the turn of the century.

Affectionate but misguided tribute that’s nowhere close to satisfying.

On Yungblud, Harrison leans almost exclusively into saccharine pop-rock, making this his most monotonous and least distinctive record.

Unfortunately a whole album of similarly DJ-pitched material, all the quote-unquote pop frills shaved off, wouldn't have allowed blog readers to devote the few days their attenuated attentions can muster for He Was King's singles, before the next this-is-kind-of-okay-I-guess electro-pop album arrives to distract them.

The music is more unmemorable than bad, though occasionally Gonzalez's inexperience, which seems to limit what Trapanese can do as well, shows.

The Saga Continues is full of competent if forgettable rapping straight out of the Wu-Tang manuscripts, and each Wu rapper does a serviceable job mustering up shades of their primes, in function. The verses don’t do what they used to, but at a distance they move in the same ways.

My biggest gripe about Lovage is that it finds a number of clearly talented artists constructing the same song continually without variation.

After a few tracks, it becomes increasingly more difficult to ignore the pathetic lyrics and boring flows-- even the production seems redundant, bland, and horribly imitative and regressive.

Plays Music offers up breezy, instrumental jazz-rock that seems to be little more than the reheated leftovers of Tortoise's TNT, The Sea and Cake's The Fawn, Dave Pajo's Aerial M debut, and occasionally, Gastr del Sol's Camofleur.

BRMC is a big, dumb band who writes big, dumb songs.

The King & I is simultaneously too stingy and too indiscriminate with its star attraction, denying fans new verses yet projecting his hologram raps over every song until the reflexive thrill of hearing one of rap’s greatest voices is extinguished.

Concocting the world's finest excrement-related rhymes, Rebirth is most definitely a flop, terribly unsexy, and contains surprisingly few shit jokes.

A charitable perspective might see the band's embrace of pub rock as a conscious rejection of political correctness in the form of so-called good taste; the reality is that it seems like a last-ditch attempt to aestheticize a sublime lack of inspiration.

Despite his chart success with Drake, many of 2 Chainz' pop maneuvers feel tone-deaf.

On disc, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl is a bland, bluesy celebration you can afford to miss.

The music is pretty but still--without many shifts in color or tone, they sit there like flat, two-dimensional objects.

A letdown after Fables; whether haughty, homesick, or ha-ha, on the way toward frankness, the album gets bogged down in simplicity.

Since Bohemian Rhapsody is a soundtrack targeted at a wide audience, not an archival release suited for collectors, not all of the Live Aid performance is here; “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “We Will Rock You” are missing. The omissions underscore how superfluous Bohemian Rhapsody is.

It's not the music that sinks Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, it's those lyrics: well-intentioned, certainly, but as deep as the bowl on a one-hitter.

Sadly, they seem content for the kind of mediocrity that designates you as the headliner Firefly and Bonnaroo call when someone else isn’t available.

All of Black Cascade pounds away with a similar notion for four tracks and 50 minutes, offering four black metal tides that occasionally shift into some texturally bankrupt, wintry drone.

Whatever pleasure can be generated from Bellamy’s admirable melodic sense and overblown hooks is negated by Muse’s insistence that they’re profound rather than fun.