"Mallet Quartet" and "Dance Patterns" feel inconsequential on their own and even more so when sharing CD space with WTC 9/11. But that's the way it goes with these extended works. A weak link doesn't always equal a weak release, but it still weakens it all the same.

What saves the album, and what could end up making the History of Apple Pie into something bigger further on down the road, is their attention to melody over atmosphere.

The result, then, frustratingly enough for fans who wanted something significant in the face of the Knife’s impending dissolution, is neither bad nor terribly essential; nice enough to have, but more a marker of where these still-vital artists were when it stopped being fun than anything more crucial.

The occasional strong melody and a handful of effective angry songs aren’t enough to make Everything Is a Mess work as a full album.

Despite being a concept album, The Stage doesn’t break much new ground for Avenged Sevenfold. They sound like the same band doing pretty much the same thing.

For all their experimentalism, Fly Pan Am are ultimately derivative in a way that doesn't bring much new to the palette. ... Somewhere, Fly Pan Am fans are doubtless thrilled the band got back together and picking up right where they left off. Everyone else would be better off going straight to the source.

While not every cut is a winner, Elliott does a fairly consistent job of gaining the listener's attention through her outrageous lyrics and performance style.

The Beta Band have reached out into traditional rock dynamics with mixed results.

The band seems to have lost the fire under its collective ass that propelled its previous records to greatness. Without it, they sound merely pleasant and adequate rather than intense and fiery as they have previously.

Once you've digested the uneasy listening of the technique itself, there's little in the way of emotional engagement to carry the album.

25 25 is too dated and monotonous in its aesthetic to captivate those on contemporary dancefloors or mainstage festival grounds—where today’s EDM thrives most profoundly—and its lack of modernity and failure to iterate on dormant genre conventions will leave the cutting-edge electro-savvy intelligentsia shrugging their shoulders.

A perfunctory listen yields little that stands out, offering none of the instant classics that the earlier albums earwormed into steady rotation.

To its credit it’s hard to pick anything truly negative about the album, but unfortunately often it’s hard to pick anything about in general to begin with.

As elegantly constructed as it may be, something's missing on Mr. Hollywood, Jr.

Wasted Years feels less like an event than an album it still discernibly trumps the alternatives.

This isn't to say Future Sequence is a bad album; at times it's as engrossing as their past material... Pretty awesome. But the feeling that's left by when minute 72 has run up is that of sonic overload.

While a lot of Feels Like Home misses the mark in this capacity, enough of it rings with the ole’ Sheryl Crow charm to make it a worthy entry into her repertoire and a notable foray into Country-pop music territory.

The thicker and slower arrangements, the ones that run with the originals' purposeful inertia, generally fare the best.

The album favors polished professionalism and sharp arrangements over risk-taking, so while there aren’t any duds, there aren’t any of the special moments that got Lindstrøm to this point in the first place.

When the Going Gets Dark seems stuck in a rut precisely because it is an album about being stuck in a rut.

Packaged altogether, though, DROKK becomes a towering work that's infuriatingly middling and restricted. Barrow and Salisbury both maintained an atmosphere they establish with the first song incredibly well and offer a few thrills along the way but ultimately DROKK doesn't stand as much more than a curiosity piece for completists.

Ten Thousand and One Injuries maintains a relatively tepid pace compared to their previous efforts, but Love is All haven’t exactly mellowed either.

Despite such strong highlights dropped in the album’s middle section (the acoustic guitar ballad “Shameless” easily vying for the album’s silver medal after the gold that is “Can’t Feel My Face”), Beauty ends up having a strange beast of a failing: none of the guest spots really add to the album’s overall vibe.

However a hard sell this album may be, though, it’s a satisfying trip down memory lane.

While the record isn’t quite as varied as switching from country to rock to classical to jazz, enough traits are buried in each song to make it interesting.

His smoke-scarred and whiskey-soothed voice sounds great, and the Strangers are in fine form, but the 11 songs that make up the 35-minute long Working in Tennessee lack the insights and urgency we hope for in a new Haggard collection.

It may sound cobbled together and unwieldy at times, but, then again, that's part of the magic of Zach Hill.

There’s an ambition to the sound of Fortuna that works, and it mirrors the confusion of the emotions nicely. It also signals an interesting shift for a band we’re just getting to know. But some of these songs try too hard to be the big, dramatic, hologram-on-the-wall Wizard when they sound just fine as the man behind the curtain.