The Neighbourhood is as ponderous as any forgotten post-grunge also-ran record selling for one cent on Amazon.

Pulse and Quartet feel plucked from a vacuum, a place where flickers of dissonance yield to waves of redemptive harmony and where the chord always comes back to sparkle. In a world of increasing entropy, these are two too-tidy self-reflections, Reich on what made Reich great.

Yachty has definitely improved as a technician, making his raps more mobile and structurally sound, but most times the rhymes pass by as if on a conveyor belt. They seemingly have the same function, and the same constructions, and once they happen they’re forgotten almost instantly.

The impulse to luxuriate in despair, to find the lushness in it, rather than shut it down and shove it away. He does that well on Everything Was Beautiful, but he’s already done it better.

Despite his reputation as one of rock’s great thinkers, Byrne has never sounded more like a stoned teenager staring at the clouds and spit-balling deep thoughts about the universe. And yet despite its many misfires—including a truly unfortunate pun on the word “duty” in that dog song—American Utopia manages two unblemished triumphs in its final stretch.

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.

For all its promises of a leisurely, good time, A Productive Cough plays like a quarantine.

Time & Space is actually a punishingly familiar collision of yesteryear's crossover rock with textbook hardcore bluster.

Take the sophistication out of sophisti-pop, and Lo Moon is just another L.A. indie R&B act who tries to bring us a higher love but can’t take things much further beyond bed and bath.

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.

The spirit was willing, but the editorial hand, which could have redeemed the project by jettisoning the filler, was weak.

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.

The resulting sound feels new, to be sure, but mostly in the sense that it’s not fully ripe. Though challenging and, in its best moments, quite exciting, Music for the Long Emergency ultimately resembles a first draft. Its most compelling ideas are knotted up with its worst, and the whole thing could use a thorough edit.

With Crooked Shadows, Carrabba aims to bring together his competing production impulses. Unfortunately, the results are all over the place.

When Wallumrød emerges from the long shadows of her source material, elevate Go Dig My Grave beyond the beautifully rendered, if rather pointless, collection of covers it sometimes threatens to be.

On the whole, though, the women Craft expends so much breath obsessing over drift in and out of his songs like cardboard cutouts from a bygone era, there to be lusted after and then blamed when they don’t fit into his fantasy.

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

Blue Madonna’s main value over replacement synth-pop is his falsetto, capable of reaching a glam-rock frenzy but constrained in songs that never quite allow him to go there.

Between Two Shores was cobbled together out of songs left over from past sessions and home demos. This helps explain the album’s lack of focus. What’s missing is a singular idea for a listener to rest her headphones on. Instead, we get a hodgepodge of sentimental tunes that aren’t quite parallel, perpendicular, or adjacent to each other.

While they’re not radically altering their own musical DNA, they are still in their own way trying to figure out what they can and cannot do. While that probably sounds like a backhanded compliment for these rock‘n’roll veterans, it might actually be the secret to their longevity.

It’s full of capable floor-fillers, but it rarely offers listeners much they haven’t heard many times before.

There are no insights to be found here about prestige, depression, or dependency. The whole thing is unbelievably dour and boring.

While the long tracklist and equally protracted verses make for an exhausting listen, there are rewards for those that endure.

From the quality of the production, it seems that Metro knows he wasn’t going to get a progressive performance from Sean. Most of the beats on the album are standard fare with a few gems like “Reason,” which recalls Metro’s What a Time to Be Alive production “Jumpman,” and “Who’s Stopping Me” which samples from Brazilian artist Nazaré Pereira’s “Clarão De Lua,” something a little bit different from Metro’s typically modern approach.

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.

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.

Despite the blatant bid to sound modish and rejuvenated, U2 cannot help in certain respects but sound the same.

At times this sunny, heart-on-sleeve temperament seems harmless and even quite endearing. More often it simply grates: he’s too precious, too twee.

While there are some musical highlights--like the 8-bit ambience of the Ricky Eat Acid-produced title-track--the album is constantly in pursuit of a voice it never finds. Which highlight Smith’s writing, some of the worst in rap this year. His lyrics are crass and half-baked and insulting to one’s intelligence.

A few songs are some of Morrissey’s most engaging, exciting work of the 21st century. Other songs get your attention for the wrong reasons. ... His political musings all arrive with a crushing lack of subtlety or nuance.

Levine’s voice murmurs and glints in the corners of the arrangement, and the total effect is exactly as pleasingly immaculate and numbing as all soft rock should be.

The Thrill of It All even features a few songs that leave heartbreak in the rear-view mirror. They aren’t all successful, but they’re interesting experiments for someone whose bread and butter is romantic dissatisfaction.

Largely, Revelations leaves us waiting for the subtly brilliant moments its title suggests.

Corgan settles for an album that’s tastefully cordial but about as suspenseful as a round of bumper bowling. There are a few moments when everything clicks, when the passive pleasantness gives way to active pleasure, most of them involving a smartly deployed string quartet.

Pacific Daydream, in spite of its name, mostly just gives you a feeling of being nowhere.

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.

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.

Pinewood Smile has got more jokes than ever, and it’s the first time the Darkness don’t evoke 1974 or 1984 so much as 2003--and they’ve never sounded more dated.

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.

This valiant yet flawed endeavor feels more like a false start than a dead end, if the Blow keeps watering the ideas seeding the back half and stays away from karaoke.

The diluted authorship leaves him floundering amid songs that manage to be overly complex and fiercely indistinct at the same time.

Younger Now blends pop-rock and pablum country fare that is so restrained, so thinly produced, it seems like her lovably goofy personality was hobbled throughout the recording process.

Thrice Woven is WITTR deboned. As welcome as it is that they’ve dropped Celestite’s pseudo-kosmische schtick, they’ve come back with a facsimile of what once was.

The record is not wondrous, but it’s a light listen with a couple of good moments and a handful of clunkers. The weaker moments reveal his shortcomings as a rapper without being provocative or ponderous enough to provoke a firebomb, or even a raspberry, in response.

The problem is that the production on ununiform struggles to match the raw, naive ingenuity of Tricky’s early music, instead suggesting the rather basic electronic beats of 2014’s Adrian Thaws.

The band hasn’t done themselves any favors by sticking so closely to the sounds of their youth, either--not that they were ever going to top the pipe-bomb intensity of their earliest recordings, anyway.

Instead of dividing the album into a house-tempo disc and a downtempo disc, Coles alternates between the two modes. But after five or six tracks, the strategy becomes as predictable as her by-the-book chord progressions; the fast/slow/fast/slow sequencing kills any kind of momentum the album might otherwise have achieved.

Every song here sounds expensive, and would play exquisitely on enormous sound systems. But that imbalance, between the level of production and substance, means all the SFX and sonic wizardry of CCCLX can feel a little brainless.

It doesn’t help that their guest singers’ lyrics rarely scale heights comparable to the duo’s vertiginous waveforms.

Fifth Harmony isn’t offensively bad, in fact, it sits quite comfortably with many other acts dominating the charts at the moment. But it’s too safe, too by-the-numbers, too beige to stand up to even Fifth Harmony’s previous work, which carried more lyrical and musical heft.

Where A$AP Mob’s early releases were guided by a clear vision and unifying aesthetic, everyone here is content to follow rap’s reigning trends rather than lead them, a surprising capitulation from what was once New York’s most ambitious hip-hop crew.

Perhaps they’re too-smart-for-their own good, but in the moments they can get over themselves, Althaea, at least for a flash, can offer more than just a thrill.

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

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.

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

Kaleidoscope isn’t going to kickstart Coldplay’s critical reappraisal, nor does it deserve to. But it rewards those of us who’ve stuck around with a few songs that capture the band at its best.

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

For all the missteps, there are gratifying moments littered throughout. For the most part, the production, spearheaded by David “CDOC” Snyder, is patched together smartly and with regard to tradition.

Many of the songs on the second half slide into each other in a forgettable jumble, but Grateful’s best songs are here, too.

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

Algiers have produced a record that is timely and necessary but also scatterbrained and messy, one that is so over the top it becomes a political melodrama, undercutting the issues it seeks to amplify.

Adiós doesn't add much to Campbell’s legacy--the comeback records of recent years formed a fitting final act--but it’s a pleasant postscript, a wistful reminder of the joys a great musician once gave.

With Witness’ confounding combination of songwriting sloppiness and sleepiness, broad strokes are the really the best Perry can hope for these days.

It’s the slowest and least cluttered instrumentals that feel here the most effectively expansive, capturing the scope of the quartet’s chosen themes without collapsing beneath symbolism and meaning-making.

Asking his band to change course in a dramatic fashion after nearly three decades together might be too much. But allowing themselves to get away from the tried and true could give the Charlatans a nice creative jolt to keep them going for another 30 years.

RELAXER shows us what remains after those quirks are dialed back: some perfectly nice, perfectly blank lads who have no idea why they are standing in front of you and even less of an idea what to say.

The lyrical setbacks also help emphasize Dreamcar’s greatest strength: It’s a simple labor of love, as opposed to a grandiose spectacle, and in doing so, it sidesteps the usual supergroup cesspool.

You’re Welcome feels stale, dried of both new inspiration or improvisational allure.

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.

Shine isn’t dark. But it feels like an exercise in avoidance as if Wale took the advice to ease up too far.

Aside from its more sociopolitical shortcomings, Everybody refuses to stop and evaluate why it exists in the first place. A lot has been made of Logic’s technical skill, but it can’t really be considered proficiency if it isn’t efficient.

While in•ter a•li•a has plenty of motion and heat, it needs friction and resistance to light a spark.

BNQT (pronounced “banquet”) is not a push outside the comfort zone for those involved, but further indication of restlessness from a collection of indie rock lifers, each of whose primary acts made their dent in the blog-rock boom and find their relevance dimming. At that, the optimistically titled Volume 1 serves more to elaborate on its characters than it does to recapture past glory.

Look at the Powerful People begins with 54 of the most exciting seconds of music I’ve heard in 2017. And then they start talking.

Her voice and affectations are so guided by the heavy hands of Turner and Ford that Belladonna of Sadness is largely indistinguishable from their work: At best, Savior is a muse for her own introduction; at worst, she’s a conduit who’s yet to prove that she can hold her own with the company she keeps.

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

It’s progress, probably, that Mayer keeps the condescension to a dull sneer, but this also makes everything sound that much more anodyne.

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

They keep the music raw enough that it sounds almost-but-not-quite amateurish--again, following in the hardcore/early-thrash tradition--while Marrow’s willingness to indulge in comic absurdity with the lyrics makes Body Count’s preachiness more palatable.

Siberia faithfully captures the wistfulness of the pilgrim’s journey--but it also suggests that the ears may be fickle traveling companions.

It is an anodyne pop record for a post-EDM world, one where trap and trop-house mix with pale imitations of the Migos flow and Coldplay’s cornball sentimentality.

Diet Cig’s debut is almost entirely made of other people’s gestures hastily collected and cheaply executed.

Bringing it live is still crucial to metal success, and on that front they are ready to ascend to the next level. That doesn’t translate on Heartless, where too much space is squandered.

While it’s laudable that Jenkinson is always moving, never resting, Elektrac feels a bit of a sideshow: a flexing of technique with little to display but its own shiny spectacle.

Youngish American is a hapless vanity album, sad for all the wrong reasons, and all the more frustrating because it couches wokeness in songs about the extra advantages afforded to Tomson’s demographic.

They sound exhausted, right where we left them.

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.

Collaborations like this work best when there’s some meaningful contrast between the performers, though, and Joe and Remy Ma are too similar to establish any kind of yin/yang dynamic.

In his efforts to break out of one-hit-wonder-dom and demonstrate a wide range on his debut album The Chief, Jidenna sometimes comes off as shapeless.

Terrible Human Beings can still be cherry-picked for catchy singles bound for algorithmic playlists, but it’s impossible to overlook how much of the Orwells’ appeal is bundled into their persona as enfants terribles.

Lewis gives the briefest glimpse of a supremely raucous affair, then shunts you out of a side door, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Voyager’s attempts to pay homage to disco ancestors while paring his maximalism way back make it all feel like a dance night in an unfurnished room, all speakers and no lighting.

This agreeable sameness infects much of the score, turning the voices of two inimitable musicians into hack work for hire, churning out glossy tones for images of cheap thrill and intrigue.

At least half of The Blood Album’s songs feel virtually interchangeable and the other half sound like AFI wrote this stuff in the time it takes to play it.

These many mismatching, criss-crossing threads create an incredibly convoluted 77-minute slog that is as tough to listen to as it is to digest.

Musically, it is hardly satisfying, as the fleeting enjoyable moments are swallowed up by a great deal of frustrating mediocrity.

Even on some of the stronger tracks, Zimmerman seems to be going through the motions.

The Hamilton Mixtape has managed to drain away the edge and danger from a Broadway show, a curious inversion and just more proof that you can’t Xerox Miranda’s inimitable work.