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.

None of the actors have the vocal character of the late Dave Van Ronk, whose biography inspired the film and whose bluesy "Green, Green Rocky Road" caps this set, or of another folk singer--the young Bob Dylan--whose rarity "Farewell" signals a new era dawning in the film and on this collection.

The sound on Baptized somehow links U2 to Rascal Flatts, adding Springsteen stances in "Wild Heart." More unexpectedly, there's also a banjo shuffle.

Phil Collins has retired, but his legacy endures in the new Hunger Games soundtrack, which channels his recipe for Eighties melodrama: synth strings, croaked vocals, crashing drums.

They joyfully plunder rock riffs and hip-hop beats, but a logjam of lousy ballads suggests Bryan Adams embodies their ideal of maturity.

Everywhere, Tom Scholz fine-tunes the angelic-choir harmonies and aerosol-guitar crescendos until they're spotlessly, unmistakably Bostonlike. Some things never change--but remembering a sound isn't always enough.

While Snoop's voice is an easy match for the sound--both are low-key but hard-hitting--most of the tracks don't quite cohere.

Tracks with Future and 2 Chainz highlight his limitations on the mic, and without the Dr. Luke-assisted buoyancy of 2012's Strange Clouds, the album falls flat--moments of well-meaning ambition not withstanding.

As with EP 1, released last fall, this four-song set feels like a faint echo of the band's later albums, 1990's Bossanova and 1991's Trompe le Monde, lacking those records' frizzy menace, zany propulsion and memorable tunes.

American Idol's 12th victor deserves better than this much-delayed hodgepodge of styles and ideas.

Bentley can't quite get away from his inner bro.

We're introduced to a charming talkrapper named Euro and not much else beyond some diverse but mundane urban contemporary music dominated by familiar players.

There are a few surprises, like when the sappy "Friday Afternoon" busts a left into Black Sabbath, but for the most part it's formulaic all the way.

She dresses [her songs] up in the kind of shamelessly poppy hooks that make Top 40 programmers giggle in delight and "real hip-hop" heads shake theirs sadly. If this is the future, it's one strange place.

Outside of its strong singles ("Only That Real" and "What You 'Bout"), Sincerely fades into rap's existing trends instead of bucking them.

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.

Without new tricks, Die Antwoord risk coming across as no more than a panoply of gimmicky voices.

On Album Six they're back with a retro-neo-aggro sound that would've been too intense for modern-rock radio in 1999.

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

He's a consummate crowd-pleaser, but he's best when he gets weird.

It falters when the band indulges in out-of-nowhere rap verses or misplaced filtered vocals.

FaltyDL's signature clanky percussion and eerie vibe save tracks like "In the Shit" from becoming easy-listening, but it's not quite enough.

Chris Brown's sixth album is adventurous musically and a total mess lyrically.

Space Invader does have a carefree abandon that Kiss' 21st-century LPs have lacked. It also contains any number of lyrics cringe-worthy enough for his old band.

Marr’s singing is nice enough (check ''The Trap''). His most compelling voice, inevitably, remains his guitar.

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.

Their third album continues in this mild fashion, and though always pleasant, it's often unmemorable.

Even his big, guitar-driven songs owe as much to Nickelback as to Nashville – if the pedal steel on ''Two Night Town'' sounds forlorn, maybe that's because it’s competing for attention with gravelly alt-rock distortion.

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

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

Sure, these mirrored LPs--10 songs given lavish orchestral arrangements and also offered as solo performances on a bonus disc--might be stronger as one cherry-picked set of unrepeated songs. But it wouldn't be half as interesting.

Harris is updating his EDM template rather than coming close to reimagining it.

The Miami MC's seventh LP explodes with none of the ambition or scope of March's Mastermind--playing it safe, like a knockoff version of Jay Z's back-to-basics speed bump American Gangster, from 2007.

The songwriting remains basic, as always, and vocalist Sam Martin blandly belts "Lovers on the Sun" and the club hit "Dangerous." But the album sounds consistently great.

This is the sound of a team of great fighters competing in an uncomfortable new arena.

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

Like Dorian Gray with a blowout, nu-metal holdovers Papa Roach have made their latest album sound like an eerie time capsule from the early 2000s.

The icy synths of "Vortex" and "Fallen" evoke vintage Carpenter dread. But the prog-pomp of "Domain" and "Mystery" are the aural equivalent of too much CGI.

On his second major-label album, he has more artistic aspirations, though they're mostly flat Kanye retreads.

Ekko's debut solo LP similarly informs grand pop drama with indie idiosyncrasy – but never quite enough to distinguish it, his stirring tenor notwithstanding.

These saccharine tunes and too-cute melodies could desperately use some of the band's old abrasive edge.

[Singer Aaron Bruno's] ADD is still cooking on the band's latest album.

The ornate tracks are as wow-worthy as the guest list--so it's surprising how same-y the mood of wallowing grandeur can get.

The cuteness starts to wear thin pretty fast.

Standouts [are] "Where the Sky Hangs" and "My Brother Taught Me How to Swim." But much of the rest of Kindred is so relentlessly up, it starts to feel suffocating.

Beyond Cook's own uncannily elegiac "Beautiful," the songs are only as good as the concept, which wears thin fast.

The LP's gospel-flavored synth-pop is invitingly adventurous, but Williams can't hold the space like her touchstones here.

The results veer sharply between transcendent and tepid.

stirs up the same hey-whatever mix of reggae, hip-hop and punk that made Sublime shirtless charmers 20 years ago.... But without anything like Nowell's sarcastic slacker edge, Ramirez comes off as not much more than a good-natured party dude.

Maybe subtlety's not his thing, but Turner's got a goofy kind of grandeur.

Double Vision lacks focus, failing to establish a clear identity for Royce.

"Drunk Americans" is a charmingly awkward red-blue-state bear hug; the button-pushing title track rues godless youth who need a good whuppin'. Per usual, highlights put hard-earned truths before identity politics.

Ironically, the project's cheesiest song manages to be the most fun.

For all its prettiness, Liberman tends to fade into the background. Even Carlton's wistful vocals often disappear into the mix.

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.

The Leps seem uninterested on falling back on old glories, pushing their songwriting in frustratingly inventive and varied directions.

There's quality songcraft here, to be sure--see the title track, a convincing tale of a honky-tonk man led astray by music, which has more than a whiff of memoir. Otherwise, though, it's undistinguished radio fodder.

Ross' eighth album, though, raises doubts about how he'll fare in the era of the confessional, emotionally bare rap superstar. The man who once boasted 10-car garages and uncollected favors from dictators is now trafficking in the same honesty that made Future a critical smash and J. Cole a commercial one.

The band's stylized, minimal instrumentation can highlight the monotony of Tonra's gorgeous, but largely static, vocal phrasing, as on "Mothers," where she reflects glumly on dime-a-dozen signifiers like the feeling "when your face becomes a stranger's" and unspecified "chemical reactions."

Khalifa mostly circles the drain of clichés and love letters to his favorite activity: smoking weed. It’s only when he lets himself get a little weird, and flexes underused strengths like his singing voice, that his music is as fun as he wants it to be.

With a lineup this eclectic and a songbook as undervalued as Harrison's, a little more adventurousness would have gone a long way.

For the Star Wars generation, it can be hard to get beyond timid fanboy reverence.

Too many forced climaxes here lack the organic sense of drama the Mumfords summon at their best, and the pan-African elements aren’t integrated into the pop-rock song structures, so the lively polyrhythms and keening vocals merely decorate the swelling choruses rather than transforming them.

Too often Tyler keeps his swagger in check when he could be kicking up some down-home dust.

Like most DJ albums, unfortunately, Encore does little with its A-list guests.

Branching out, but not too far, Suffering is heavy enough to stand proudly in the Korn kanon, but not daring enough to be much else.

Too often here he squanders his effort trying to pump life into flat material.

"Pick Up the Phone" sounds like Imagine Dragons with rap verses. Instead, press play on the first eight or so tracks and hear a killer concept EP of hard beats and hard politics for hard times.

Zac Brown is laboring strenuously to ensure everyone that he still drinks cold beer on a Friday night, apologizing for a musical adventurousness that he'd be better off simply embracing.

His music and his style are both impeccably tailored. Those perfect lines can be more admirable than breathtaking, though, and they're remarkably easy to glide right past.

He aspires to be more than the face of so-called "mumble rap." Yet Lil Boat 2's best moments are when he reverts to the familiar.

With Sting's familiar bass sound driving most tracks, and Shaggy's production partner Sting International (no relation) providing bounce and clarity, 44/876 contains much of the sizzle of classic reggae or dancehall, though a little more substance would've been welcome too.

The Life of Pablo was chaotic, insecure, yet often brilliant. Ye is more chaotic, less secure, with enough sporadic flashes of brilliance to make you hungry for much, much more. It could have been worse.

Nasir is among the weakest Nas albums, but there’s nothing spectacular about its failure. It is, simply, the one thing Nas has avoided being all these years, through revolutionary highs and car-crash lows: dull.

For Lamp Lit Prose, Longstreth melds both strategies in a flood of ideas and magnificent vocal arrangements. The results are by turns dazzling and exhausting. Partly it’s is an issue of balance.

“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.

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.

Ultimately, Kamikaze’s length and curtailed guest list make it less grueling than Revival, but Eminem’s indignant grandstanding has no discernible relation to the rap world he complains about.

This music still tends to slip into the background, affable but never striking.

Kennedy and the Conspirators have made three previous records with him, so it feels like a band, but there’s something about it that lacks the bite of the music he’s made with GN’R. A lot of it has to do with the lyrics.

Unfortunately Imagine Dragons’ actual vision is one that is milquetoast, formulaic, nearly anonymous, free of any real lyrical insight. ... The one place where the Dragons themselves really shine is an outlier in their catalog: “Zero,” made for Ralph Breaks the Internet, is a giddy college rocker that does for the Cure, David Bowie and Jimmy Eat World what Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson did for Prince, Gap Band and Zapp.

The Lavigne heard at the beginning of the record is almost an entirely different person by the end; the hard part is figuring out which part you like more.

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

Bless ‘em for their ambition, and too bad it didn’t yield more than this muddled set.

The album’s feel and sound is resiliently explosive, especially on the three-song mini mega-mix of sorts that kicks things off. ... The rest of the album feels a little more perfunctory, never quite being of a piece a la their euphoric 2010 return-to-form Further, or offering uniquely memorable high-points a la Born in the Echoes’ “Tomorrow Never Knows”-tinged face-melter “I’ll See You There.”

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.

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.

She Is Coming is an unkempt little EP that tries to cram her wild oeuvre, from molly to Mark Ronson, into just six songs. That said, you can’t deny Cyrus remains a freak of pop nature.

For an artist whose music aimed for maximum accessibility, often to a fault, Avicii may well be remembered as an innovator. Sadly, this record feels like he was just getting started.

They rarely take these topics [mental health, relationships, addiction, and their faith in God] too far past surface level brushes, resulting in a lot of talking sad and saying nothing.

While the QC headliners spend much of Vol. 2 spinning their wheels, the undercards provide the more compelling draw and show occasional flashes of brilliance.

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.

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

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

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.

This charming man's bowshots at English society can get repetitive. [Apr 2020, p.87]

Their fourth record lacks the innocent fun of their first hits. [Apr 2020, p.87]

DaBaby’s greatest enemy on Blame It On Baby is his staggering prolific streak; the struggle to find something new means he’s fighting against his own current.