Sasha and Digweed appear to be suggesting that, along with setting an NYC club aflame, they can also bore you to tears in your living room.

A casual, slightly-weirder-than-usual release with one very good R&B song (that's reportedly been kicking around in his vault for a while), stranded in the album's penultimate slot.

Dangerous Dreams is plagued by a pervasive feeling of been there/done that, and the album ultimately sounds like the same two or three tracks on repeat.

There’s no emotional throughline on The Black Album, no grand statement that continues from one track to the next. The songs never blur together, but they also don’t tell a story as the sum of their parts. A sense of tonal whiplash ensues, and the album’s highlights are best enjoyed in isolation.

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

Defiantly sappy, Silence Is Easy survives mostly on Walsh's oddly graceful singing. Unfortunately, the music on the whole is prosaic, even boring at times.

Too much of it is an ill-advised cultural safari that’s too weird to fly but too monied to fail. But where it succeeds, Reincarnated forces you to forget the principal ridiculousness of the enterprise, and that is no small feat.

Slim still loves blabbing repetition and dropping yapping vocal samples into the gobs of the dull, and this helps make Palookaville less a reformation than merely his latest and quite bland big beat manifesto.

Where Deacon infuses his day-glo riots with brainy intent, EAR PWR recycle the worst tendencies of electroclash: the lackluster rapping and willful inanity. It's frustrating because there's ample evidence that EAR PWR aren't compensating for being shitty at music, they're just dumbing down.

Kanye’s tenth album arrives barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.

Try as he may, Tomlinson has not quite progressed from featured voice to solo artist. For all the major changes in his life, his music seems to be stuck in place. You can take the boy out of the boyband, but not the boyband out of the boy.

Listening to Matinée straight through is exhausting, like being trapped in the kitchen at a college party while someone with curiously wide eyes Explains It All to you.

It’s pointedly brief--11 songs, 39 minutes and with a scope every bit as limited.

For all that the band straddles the worlds of dance and guitars, the arrangements on Battle Lines are incredibly tame, as if the duo mistakenly joined the blandest of electronics with the politest of indie rock.

It was a mistake for VHS or Beta to subjugate their dance beat into a perfunctory structure for the guitars to smash against; the riffs sound like they're there for their own sake, biding their time and waiting for a moment of catchiness that never really arrives.

Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. It’s like you drank a bunch of cough syrup and went to Live Aid: The Vatican.

At its best, its songs are serviceable bangers to nod off in the club to; at its worst, it’s a collection of strange admissions that, thanks to Nav’s affinity for taking himself too seriously, come off cringe-worthy.

Crafting art-house meanderings that rock turns out to be the easy part. It's sticking the landing that's hard, and no matter how much D. Rider twists, turns and tumbles in midair, they're just not there yet.

Neither off-putting nor engaging, Client's debut occupies a rather uninteresting place in electropop's soft middle.

It all sounds so serious without any real reason for it.

For 28 tracks Van discusses hidden cabals of dangerous media types so frequently that it verges on a convoluted concept record.

It's awkward to witness such a gloriously thuggish monster vainly attempt the rope-a-dope.

New Glow may be Matt & Kim’s most polished album, but their songwriting has never been more amateurish.

There is an uncanny, even hollow air to the album. It can feel a bit like watching a Super Bowl commercial: the budget is all there on the screen, the lighting and set dressing and sound design just so, but you can’t shake the nagging sense that there is no center, just a clot of references without a referent.

It's all pretty silly stuff, but if nothing else, it manages to establish Flickerstick as a frontrunner for the Varsity Blues II soundtrack.

'Relator' aside, there's little about this duo's chemistry that lives up to Matt and Kim, let alone Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.

Everything I Thought It Was brims with a misplaced confidence that can only be described as Timberlakean, laboring for such a long, long runtime under the misapprehension that a risk-averse mop bucket of last decade’s trending sounds is gonna hit through the sheer force of its performer’s waning charisma.

To say that the album is over-produced is an understatement; you could bounce a quarter off of most of these songs.