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.

Isbell is obviously familiar with the music of the region, yet Something More Than Free sounds nondescript and--worse--placeless.

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.

In short, it's fun and functional, yet disposable.

They aren't inept, amateurish or even exactly boring, but their parlor music takes a slow and emotionally neutral path that almost fights against engagement.

Code Orange’s second album for Roadrunner, the exhausting and uneven Underneath, lands like a glib attempt to do just that while forsaking the idiosyncrasies that made them interesting.

There's a lot of remarkable music on Celebration--the work of an artist who's spent a quarter-century in a passionate body-lock with the question of what exactly makes pop music popular. She deserves a retrospective more interesting than this haphazard piece of contract-filling product.

Replace crackling vinyl and subwoofer bass with somber piano and mournful cello, and all you're left with is... well, a pretty goddamn miserable woman who happens to have a great voice.

At its best, 3.15.20 Trojan horses some of that terror into happy surroundings. ... Glover is not always successful at adding dimension to these songs.

While Rap-Metal 101 drums bang away in the background, the basslines are replaced by chugging guitar riffs reminiscent of your high school hardcore band. What remains, though, is the exceptional quality of Pharrell's voice, which, unlike the bass sound, doesn't lose its intensity due to repeated radio exposure.

Master and Everyone is a solid collection of rather thin songs that never quite sound intimate; songs that meant something profound to someone-- but always, it seems, someone else.

The band known for continually surprising listeners ultimately falls short, mostly hiding behind unexceptional, diluted alt-metal. Instead of letting this bold idea guide the way, it’s offered up as an apology affixed to the end of their least ambitious collection yet. Mastodon, once transgressive in its refusal to be put in a box, has shaved off its sharp edges and crawled inside.

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.

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.

Townes, though well intended, shows neither of these formidable artists in his best light.

My biggest complaint is that De-Loused in the Comatorium just isn't fun.

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.

The hybridization that made Tool so popular on the radio in the late ’90s has rusted: They are part stoner metal, part prog rock, part mainstream metal, all working in ignorance and opposition to each other. Things do come together a few times. The 15-minute closer “7empest” brings the biggest fireworks from Carey and Jones, the two undoubted stars of the album, adding alluring melody and texture to these bloated epics. But the highlight far and away is “Invincible.”

After an hour of getting your heartstrings tugged with such intense proficiency, You Are There starts to feel no less egregiously manipulative than hearing Celine belt out "My Heart Will Go On" for the thousandth time in a Vegas ballroom.

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

Not all of Diamond's new songs go awry. Most just go away, their melodies dissipating, their lyrics flimsy even through those tremendous pipes.

That mischief is largely missing from Origin: Orphan, and the lack of lyrical cleverness seems to have infected the music as well, making for a mostly cloudy listen from a formerly sunny-day band.

It's a shame that Falkous is playing to the cheap seats on The Plot Against Common Sense.

The lack of palplable passion on Nobody Wants to Be Here is, once again, somewhat disappointing and even more surprising.

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.

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

There is nothing on Lily-O to break the spell these musicians have too carefully cast. In other words, there is nothing to get Amidon out of his own head or out of our collective past.

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