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.

The detached, semi-ironic delivery doesn't play well with the perky club beats.

The seven songs on In Motion #1 were commissioned as alternate scores to seven short avant-garde films, and without those inspirations unspooling in front of the listener, there's a strange incompleteness to most of them.

Drowners can’t inspire too much ill will or really any kind of strong reaction and that’s fair enough: it doesn’t deal in hot, dirty sex or catastrophic breakups, mostly drunken hookups and easy letdowns.

Smile asks less of us. The confessions on this album feel like calculated dodges, every tepid disclosure immediately followed by triumph. ... Despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing proven chart-topping formulas.

Scenic Drive feels like a detour because it is: Khalid announced his next studio album, Everything Is Changing, last summer. For now, though, he seems content to take a step back, sounding like he’s singing and shrugging at the same time.

It sounds good--Brown's detached, wispy/gritty voice is pleasing as ever, and I like a pop string arrangement as much as the next guy--but it doesn't add up to much in the end.

Even when Turnover try spicing things up with congas, a violin, and a couple of ill-fitting saxophone features, Altogether tastes incredibly vanilla, like a playlist of department store slow jams.

I’ve Tortured You never lets up on its fist-in-the-air rock eruptions. No small acoustic numbers punctuate the record; there is no time to regroup. Even within songs, Heroux and Zambri follow safe, predictable progressions.

Indicud has the sheen of a cinematic blockbuster.... Unfortunately, it also has no substance.

You get the sense they're shooting for something epic, something that would sound just as big as the pop bangers on radio, but the results are goofy.

It’s got the feel of a bootleg--the recording is at times horribly thin, and the occasional snatches of audience chatter make it sound like the work of someone staggering drunkenly through the crowd with a barely concealed mic.

A good 80% of You and I, the latest album of the lot, consists of covers, many already released in some format.... The new material includes a version of "Grace" that is basically a fully formed demo, while "Dream of You and I" is barely even that; the title is literal, Buckley thinking aloud about a dream he had about a band’s "space jam," which inspired him to write what’d eventually become "You and I."

A YG album should have a higher success rate, which just isn’t the case on I Got Issues. It’s frustrating because the worthwhile moments are obvious.

On a purely sonic level, TIM is an easy listen to a fault, but taking in this final artistic statement is more difficult when focusing on the lyrics. ... The effect of these [guest] contributors effectively recasting his personal sentiments over once-unfinished music is haunting in all the wrong ways.

Beyond a few other fleeting moments of experimentalism on ERYS—the second half of “K,” when the buzzing of an electric razor slowly morphs into a heaving trap beat, or “Fire Dept,” a decent ode to the fast and distorted energy of SoCal punk—it’s mostly a slog, the sound of an artist with a blurry vision and too many resources at his disposal.

For much of the record, Nas sounds like he’s trying too hard.

Free Spirit isn’t the coming of age album Khalid intended it to be, though in his nascent adulthood he has mastered something. Unfortunately, it’s the art of being innocuous.

50's new album is a blatant rehash--a bottom-line sequel that insults the same audience it mindlessly panders to.

I've rooted for these guys because they nearly achieve that fine mix between tackiness and genius perfected by bands like T. Rex and the Darkness. Unfortunately, I can only give them points for effort.

I Love You, Dude doesn't shake off the confines of genre to reveal a shiny new pop act underneath. Nor does it meaningfully improve on Digitalism's previous formulas.

On Put the Shine On, when they rap lines about familial abandonment in an aloof, sing-songy chirp, the effect of both their words and the way they choose to deliver them gets muddied. The pain behind the words is real, but its rendering starts to feel like a bit.

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

This album drops four consecutive hard rock stinkbombs to kick things off... Senor Smoke's saddest aspect, however, is its yearning for another dance-floor single.

The kind of music that Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, La-La and Po might enjoy kicking back to after a hard day's romping with bunny rabbits.

There are a couple of good performances here and there, but no choice cuts, just songs left on the cutting room floor during sessions for recent solo albums and filler tracks from lower-ranking artists on the QC roster. The longer the comp goes on, the more obvious it becomes that nothing is happening.

Every synth setting and drum sound and vocal technique on I Think We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat is a pastiche of a sort of thing you've heard before.

If you liked the new Oasis and U2 records, never bought "Turn on the Bright Lights," and tend to ignore clumsy lyrics, you might enjoy raising your beer to this album just fine.