To the credit of the Go-Go's, they don't forfeit any California sparkle with this slick and listenable reunion effort.

A beguiling, infuriating mess. [26 Jan 2006, p.55]

The transitions from fluttery Brazilian rhythms to R.E.M.-ish jangle can be jarring, but Haih is much better than it ought to be.

This album might not propel them to a higher level of fame than they've already reached; while it's solid front to back, there's nothing remotely as unstoppable as 2013's "Versace" or 2014's "Fight Night."

Has a mixed-bag feel.

On the frisky and more limber Act 1. ... Working with an assortment of collaborators, including producer and songwriter Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic, members of the soul-revivalist band the Dap-Kings, and nimble modern producers like Tone and Some Randoms, Legend sets his smooth, elastic voice to the most seductive and slinkiest grooves of his career. ... On Act 2, Legend succumbs to his usual supper-club decorum.

Evil Friends has a more colorful, toylike sound than 2011’s In the Mountain in the Cloud--an asset to pop-oriented tracks like “Creep in a T-Shirt” and “Purple Yellow Red and Blue” but a stumbling block to heavier ones like “Waves” and “Holy Roller (Hallelujah),” which come off like riots attempted from inside a snow globe.

Less blatantly melodic, peppy and cloying than their three albums on scene-making label Jade Tree.

For the most part, this is the balance of power and intimacy Cornell has always wanted his solo music to have.

Morrison’s latest is further proof that he’s still one of the most moving, unrivaled singers of his generation, but it’s hard not to wonder what would happen if he embraced his inner-mystic songwriting voice once more.

Here We Stand keeps up its predecessor's swagger, but the album's debts to glam and Brit-rock forbears (there's some Bowie and Clash here, too) give you a vague sense you've heard these songs before.

Jason Derulo jumps into every track with equal enthusiasm, his reassuring voice adapting easily to each new setting and providing continuity across the LP.

Unfortunately, most of the songs... are simply retreads of past works, with only the occasional fresh perception.

While Carlos Santana's guitar shines – Ernie Isley's, too – 76-year-old Ron is the lodestar, donning a falsetto smoking jacket for the Eddie Kendricks proto-disco "Body Talk."

Andy Stott cooks down the abstract beauty of his 2012 LP Luxury Problems to a new minimalism.

You’ll notice when the guitars escalate on 'You’re Too Hot,' when Harry sotto-voces her sexpot act on 'Dirty and Deep.' But you’ll really notice when a long diminuendo fourteen tracks in proves a bridge to the last three songs.

Future mostly sounds like a bunch of so-so Smashing Pumpkins songs, stripped of everything except Corgan's adenoidal vocals, and then set to a chorus of synths and electronic drumbeats.

It’s fair to say Louis can break free as well. That doesn’t happen enough on Walls.

The trio continues to build a career on the concept of a female take of "Licensed to Ill" ('The Three Amigas' is a near replica of 'Paul Revere'), but three albums in, the shtick wears thin.

The music, sadly, can be just as tough to follow.

Some sleepy stuff hurts his cause, but his best songs... combine vivid, polished tracks with solid tunes that pack a sneaky emotional weight.

Alive as You Are makes it a very different band, but not a worse one. The arrangements, as always, are totally immersive.

The 26-year-old goes all-in with the hipsters, swathing herself in melancholy synths. It's an awkward pivot.

He essays a few fashionably global-sounding electro-club tracks, including an Auto-Tuned one with T-Pain and Akon, and at least four numbers where he swipes guys' girlfriends. Keri Hilson and Kelly Rowland help him stretch out; Plies, Yo Gotti and T.I. add muscle

Memorable tunes seldom emerge from the murk.

Tyga's strength isn't in introspection, but curation.

Pusha is too reserved to pull off the revamped sound--he's more Raekwon than Rick Ross, better suited to quick-tongued storytelling than to bombast.

The results so far: mixed. I-Empire is full of big, faintly Eighties-sounding chiming choruses and arms-outstretched melodies, and DeLonge deploys the signposts of significance all over.

Its follow-up still trades in hard-driving anthems ('Use Me') and catchy hair-metal refrains (the title track), but frontman Austin Winkler is a bad representative for emotional frat dudes.

It's an almost perfectly consistent follow-up to the band's successful 1998 debut - perhaps a tad too consistent.

Songs From an American Movie sounds orchestral and homespun at once: Lustrous, fancy strings on one song give way to a slap-happy ukulele on the next. Yet it's too much of both and not enough of either.

He's gotten the Chicago basement vibe down exactly right... What's missing are songs -- instead, we get sketches, riffs and doodles.

As Drake and Kanye West have demonstrated, there's room in hip-hop for melancholic MCs who upend the self-congratulation that dominates the genre.

Imbruglia's delicate, sweet and well-behaved singing isn't the ideal vehicle for expressing angst, even if most of these minor-chord, gray-skies anthems seem to be yearning to do just that.

The album has some diverting moments.

The songs he has chosen--have been reinterpreted so many thousands of times, he'd have to reinvent them to get anyone to pay attention, and the only thing new that Seal brings to the party is a feeling of swank Euro-sophistication that saps the music of much of its emotional oomph.

As a stand-alone piece of music, its pacing tends to remain too static to uphold its heavy premise. The best songs arrive far too late, and early tracks like “How Many Times” and “Giant Baby” can be hard to distinguish from recent Coyne experiments like 2017’s Oczy Mlody.

Sugarland are ruthless in their desire to leave no radio-ready trick untried, but in the end it's too much machine, not enough heart.

Everyday Demons will satisfy metal fans who are in between favorite albums, but if your tastes don't run along the lines of The Simpsons' Otto the bus driver, you can take a pass.

The plaintive, direct singing mode is West’s best delivery vehicle across the album. The rapping is uniformly lackluster when not delivered by one of the brothers Thornton in their return as legendary rap duo Clipse.

There's little new here, and even less charm.

They still sound generic – a bar band in search of songs.

Most of Ultra Payload feels pretty random.

Rainier Fog, though, feels as though it’s stuck between gears. As usual, there are Cantrell’s gargantuan, 10-ton metal riffs and lyrics like “I’ll stay here and feed my pet black hole,” on the especially dreary “Drone,” but they linger too long in that zone.

His soft falsetto is sumptuous, but too many tracks veer into uncomfortable parody.

Funeral is wildly uneven, a landscape of pronounced highs and lows.

On Golden Lies, weighty midtempo rock hobbles the Pups' trademark blend of cow-punk, blues and hallucinatory instrumental rants.

Unfortunately, the music doesn’t do the lyrics any favors, a real surprise coming from an artists whose earlier LPs established her as one of indie-pop’s sharpest melodists.

Her musical instincts are off, and she steamrolls nearly every song with her bombastic blues growl.

An 82-minute combo plate of half-finished songs, choruses unmoored from verses, bursts of skyscraping beauty and long passages of sonic murk, all vaguely redolent of the Rolling Stones and Jesus Christ Superstar.

If it's vaguely hippie-ish and vaguely Californian, count on Ebert to work it into his solo debut: acid-folk reveries, Beck-ish busker rap, lyrics about Vietnam, sensitive maleness, Dylanisms, yodeling, calling women "mama," reggae, bongos.

It doesn't rock, but it waltzes, spinning a tale involving animated trees, demons and what may be peyote cactus tea.

Jessie's at her best when she's having fun. She just doesn't have enough of it here.

Most of the songs on J.Lo, for all their craftsmanship, are easy to trace to last year's hits. And while dance pop doesn't necessarily demand great singers, Lopez is just scraping by.

The problem is that he brings the same vague, feathery touch to everything he does.

Some of the modern EDM heaviness of Icona Pop and Sleigh Bells kicks in latently, but the 21-year-old's iciness ultimately fails to charm.

Their fifth album, inspired by the OD death of bassist Paul Gray, is quite the heavy-duty emotional enema.

Too often, Earth sounds like the Dandys have too many toys — or maybe too many ideas.

Only One Flo embraces the electro pulse of international clubland, with hedonistic lyrics to match. But although Ludacris and Gucci Mane inject momentary charisma, Flo Rida mostly flows as anonymously as any dance diva.

Released just nine months after Stay Dangerous, 4REAL 4REAL flies well below the lofty standard YG set with his first two albums and smells of his eagerness to get out of his label contract.

If not many riffs or choruses grope your hindquarters like their biggest hits did, the recurring Eighties Billy Idol pulse beneath still grinds tawdry enough for strip clubs.

Unfortunately, his own lyrics are best when they're intimate and pointed, which they rarely are here.

Pocket Symphony reverts to the textured beat-and-bass-line rifflets of Air ordinaire. [8 Mar 2007, p.82]

This may be the most lovingly detailed synth-pop album since the golden days of Yaz and Kim Carnes. Yet expert execution doesn't always signal a good idea.

Somebody get this man an editor.

The sentiments are so genuine and earnest, it's hard to fault Arie for this gauzy blend of New Age-y self-help babble and sunny, plucky folk. [10 Aug 2006, p.98]

Smith is incapable of writing five bad songs in a row; even hopeless records (1992's Wish) sport some saving grace ("Friday I'm in Love"). But he can write four bad songs in a row, and Cure albums tend to leak filler like an attic spilling insulation. The latest, Bloodflowers, is half dismissible droning, an unforgivable ratio considering it's only nine tracks long.

He takes on his indecisive twenties on "Rolling Stone" and "27," attempts a road epic on "Riding to New York," and, on "Scare Away the Dark," implores, "We want something real/Not just hashtags and Twitter." Impressively, he sings it like he thought of that cliché himself.

Yet they never come, and without the vivid talents of their heroes — Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, John Renbourn — Midlake's abstracted invocations of maidens, merchant ships and "ancient light" feel a bit bookish and distant.

He sticks to the persona he established with his 2016 mixtape The Artist, evoking a young man whose rap life affords him every desire, yet still gets rattled when a relationship goes sideways, or when opps cross him in the streets. These are themes he mines over and over, deploying melodious hooks and diaristic lyrics to keep them fresh. The result is an hour-plus album with few surprises.

This is unabashedly slick adult contemporary fare -- file between Eric Clapton's work with Babyface and the last Tina Turner album -- but Richie can still write and sing the hell out of a get-you-right-there-where-it-hurts ballad...

Every song on Mad Season is a production mini-epic.... Under the haywire production are crafty songs.... But when the crescendos surge and the keyboards chime, he starts to sound as unctuous as 1970s cheeseballs from Lobo to Jim Croce to the Guess Who's Burton Cummings. Songs that probably seemed vulnerable as demos have turned greedily narcissistic.

The result is an uneven record that leaves country’s most irreverent hitmakers sounding needlessly cautious.

The cuteness starts to wear thin pretty fast.

Atlanta MC Bobby Ray's debut album can be filed next to those by Wale and Kid Cudi: He's a left-of-center rap hero whose skills lag somewhere several miles south of his hipster bona fides.

“Mountain Child” is a catchy ode to trying to get in touch with your inner enfant sauvage, and the album’s closing confession, “It Probably Matters” is a poppy, jazzy number on which Banks reconciles his shitty attitude toward faithfulness, inner anger and his own lack of grace. He even sings a bit more on the latter cut. Unfortunately these moments come late on Maurader after so many lesser clones of the same old tricks.

Committed to romantic lyricism above all, Condon isn’t quite the tunesmith to fully justify this passion, compensating with melismatic slurs and a Gallic disdain for consonants. These tics don’t do much for lyrics he’s clearly been working on

Shelton is the paradigm of the modern Nashville pro.

Fans will find diamonds in the grimy rough, but for casual listeners, it might not be worth the search. [9 Feb 2006, p.66]

Telepathe could learn from the jump that TV on the Radio made between albums One and Two: more focus and more effort, please.

It makes for a great atmospheric record, no doubt, but not the indie-rock tour de force one would expect from these guys.

It's like the pop equivalent to the 692-page fantasy epic, only it makes less sense.

Finley Quaye's 1997 debut, Maverick a Strike, was such an ebullient blast of sunshine, such a signature reinvention of reggae, that it was well worth wondering if the young Scotsman was the next Bob Marley. Nearly four years in coming, Quaye's follow-up album, Vanguard, has enough distinctively soulful moments to leave the door open on that question, but also enough lightweight material to leave you wondering if Quaye isn't as much a novelty as a visionary.

As peers like Frank Ocean and Miguel boldly reimagine commercial R&B, this often feels less like vision than parsing market research.

Solange simply doesn't have the pipes to pull off her songs, and her attempts at "mystical" psychedelic-soul (the six-minute-plus opus 'Cosmic Journey') are embarrassing.

Feel That Fire has its fun moments ...But Bentley--a plain vocalist-- needs great tunes to hold your interest, and his songwriting slips here.

Chris Brown has made a bland, occasionally obnoxious, pro forma R&B album.

The oft clunky Translation doubles down for a full-length that deserved EP treatment at best.

The result is a set of prog-inspired balladry with less bounce than her last disc.

The production rarely approaches the wit or inventiveness that Elliott and Timbaland have established as their trademarks.

Producer Gil Norton smooths the foursome's edges while interjecting horror-comic backup yelps that marked his Pixies work decades ago; little else here would befuddle aging Cure or Weezer fans.

He seems a bit misguided in places, confusing the message and the medium as he enters these uncharted waters.

On the occasions when his slinky guitar takes center stage — like on melancholy instrumental renditions of the Pet Sounds tracks “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” and “Caroline, No,” or the first half of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” — the results are predictably serviceable. But Depp’s pro forma, double-tracked vocals provide scant additional justification for the project’s existence; and in a few unfortunate cases (like when he attempts a soul croon on Smokey Robinson’s “Ooo Baby Baby”) you won’t be able to find the skip button fast enough.

The songs are slower than a Warhol flick, and Tillman's quavering, dirgelike vocals become a navel-gazing bore.

Elect the Dead mostly sounds like a random smattering of ideas, many of them undercooked.

Dig Out Your Soul is an almost comically generic Oasis release, from its preponderance of plodding midtempo rockers ("Bag It Up," "Waiting for the Rapture") to the vaguely Indian raga-flavored psychedelic anthems ("To Be Where There's Life").

The warmth of "Sweater Weather" and the rest of the Neighbourhood's debut album is gone on Wiped Out!, replaced by a ponderous kind of cool.

Black Market Music loses its sparkle and its melodic sense whenever it grows a conscience.