She stops trying to keep up with the Halseys and happily defaults to the fizzy bombast that is her stadium-size safety zone. [Aug 2020, p.72]

Full of shiny seventies pop rock simulations, but you would be much better off putting on an old Todd Rundgren or Raspberries record. [Aug 2020, p.73]

It's kind of like a psychedelic Randy Newman. [Aug 2020, p.73]

Modern electric blues as Prince and George Clinton would have it. [Aug 2020, p.73]

Examines small-town origins, fatherhood, and matter of the heart with extra earnestness but few surprises. [Aug 2020, p.73]

For all of its melancholy, Such Pretty Forks feels personal but never profound. [May 2020, p.89]

The 12 tracks on Gaslighter fall into easy, radio-friendly categories: empowerment anthem, cheeky ukulele kiss-off, minimalist protest song. Coupled with a long-overdue drop of the “Dixie” from their name, the arrangement dissolves most of the group’s lingering connections to their street-corner bluegrass origins.

As with Wainwright’s best works, it’s musical theater without the theater (remember, he once interpolated the theme from Phantom of the Opera on Release the Stars’ “Between My Legs”) and it comes with all of the good and bad that comes with stage drama.

Pop-punk trio deliver glittery hooks and raw feminine energy. [Jul 2020, p.87]

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

Teyana Taylor is a good singer, capable of shifting between a soft lilt on “Lowkey” and a strident punch on “We Got Love.” But she tends to sound like others, particularly Brandy. She hasn’t quite absorbed her influences into a vocal presence all her own.

Decently fun results. [Jun 2020, p.71]

Much of Lamb of God contains the sort of piledriving guitar riffs and Olympic-medal-worthy drumming the band has perfected over the last 20 years, making it easy for their less political fans to get in on the fun. That said, the group sounds best when they take musical risks.

Playful spirit is in short supply on a record where club beats, acoustic strumming, and parched guitar lines usually get siphoned into unobtrusively earnest background pop. [Jun 2020, p.71]

There are toe-tapping moments, but the best song is a Roxy Music cover. [Jun 2020, p.71]

This album takes a different, more meandering approach compared to Brief Inquiry, and that may be its greatest weakness: Notes on a Conditional Form is simply too long. ... Still, where Notes works, the 1975 prove themselves to be surprisingly efficient craftsmen, even as they sound ridiculous.

Not his most satisfying concept, but he can do more in 72 seconds that most artists can in four minutes. [May 2020, p.89]

Can be madcap and zany, darkly hilarious, and just plain weird. [May 2020, p.89]

The project, a grab bag of new songs, leaks, and material previously teased on Instagram Live, is often bittersweet and deeply contemplative, even by Drake’s standards.

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.

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

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

Sweet, solid collection about fatherhood and quitting cigarettes, sounding like the National. [Apr 2020, p.87]

Settles on muscular, tasteful adult pop that's often autobiographical. [Mar 2020, p.91]

My Turn succeeds as a showcase of Lil Baby’s talent, but it still feels flat on due to its excessive length, the fact that every song is almost exactly three minutes, and the way it recycles 808 patterns and harmonic structures.

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.

Miss Anthropocene is no doubt a work of ambition, and Boucher’s aims at bringing further awareness to the climate crisis are noble. ... Yet what the album actually has to say about climate change is often lost under the admittedly beautiful, meticulously composed wreckage. By the album’s end, Boucher has abandoned the muddled villainous pretext in favor of her own utopian fantasies.

The 16 songs on Changes focus almost exclusively on the logistics of having sex when you are both hot, young, and working in fields that require a lot of time apart. The concept itself is kind of funny, but the execution is often unimaginative and cliché, especially given how earnestly Bieber delivers every line, no matter how ridiculous.

In the end, what could be an album of well-earned indulgence ends up being as much about reaching outward than burrowing inward, rendering deep personal suffering with a humane light touch. And It’s Still Alright the heartening sound of music pulling him through his pain, and, hopefully, past it into something like solace.

A sophisticated, personal set. [Jan 2020, p.84]

It’s hard for a band like STP to change and grow, especially after the losses of two iconic frontmen, so perhaps Perdida will function more like a steppingstone to something greater. But for now, they sound like half the band they used to be.

There are moments of pop bliss on the Petties' latest to rival their Eighties hits. [Feb 2020, p.85]

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

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

Musically, he gestures towards the current hip-hop world a little more intentionally than his hermetic-sounding albums have tended to in the recent past. ... In a new lyrical wrinkle, Em steps into the role of political commentator and protest voice, with mixed results.

His once-golden voice is gravelly and weathered, but the genius still flashes. [Jan 2020, p.84]

Their 10th album sounds as though they had been sitting on it since [1994]. [Jan 2020, p.84]

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.

They’re trapped in the dusk on most of the album, and it’s the few beacons of light here, when they sound like they’re all having fun, that cut through the darkness and make for great Pixies songs.

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 special-guests duets record is a famously fraught exercise, one that’s almost predestined to be bogged down by its own attention-grabbing premise. Threads hardly escapes that predicament, but it’s filled with enough solid songcraft to make one hope that Crow isn’t, in fact, truly done with record making for good.

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.

He is a genuinely engaging artist who raps with impressive intensity and clarity, if not nuance. He confronts his incurable sadness head-on, and it’s easy to identify with his mental health struggles. But for an album about depression, The Search contains a noticeable lack of tension and interior texture.

Most of his 10th album, Port of Miami 2, is Ross exactly as you know and love him: the obscene boasts, the window-cracking bass, the speedboat cool, the various spins on raps-to-riches success.

The Big Day contains about as much tonal variation as a leather-bound wedding photo album. Chance is more interested in celebrating the miracle of love than examining love’s warts, or the labor required to build and sustain a lasting marriage.

The Lost Tapes II, is a grab bag of loose tracks from this era, four very different album sessions, and naturally it’s a messy display of the many sides of Nas – storyteller, street life narrator, conscious MC, rap showboat, true-school historian, emo diarist – at both his most essential and least essential.

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.

One of the greatest rhythm sections to ever rub-a-dub on planet Earth, Sly and Robbie’s client roster has included Dylan, Madonna, Serge Gainsbourg, and No Doubt. But the team’s best jams are the most deeply rooted in the Jamaican music they helped invent — at the core of Peter Tosh’s band; with the Compass Point All-Stars; and on their own Taxi Records sessions, source of some of the reggae canon’s mightiest sides. Their ur-grooves justify from the get-go Red Gold Green & Blue, a set of blues, r&b and soul covers of the sort that might otherwise land like pro-forma, unessential nostalgia.

Sheeran’s unobtrusively sweet voice easily slips between genres, but he struggles to connect with many of his A-list guest artists, deepening the album’s isolated mood.

Case Study has gorgeous moments, but it lacks the overall clarity and focus of Freudian.

With 7, instead of blurring the country and rap lines further, he takes the well-trod path to the rock and rap border. Like country-rap, rap-rock is a genre we’ve endured for a long time, maybe too long. Lil Nas X’s version is much more nuanced, if a tad straight-laced.

Rise shows where the band’s three stars’ personalities unite in a Venn diagram and work together well. It’s just that these Vampires sound best when they’re sharing the same blood source.

Madame X is so admirably bizarre, all you can do is stand back and watch the girl go.

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.

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.

Regardless of how you view the album Kind Heaven, it’s best digested in microdoses.

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.

As quality control at Khaled HQ dips slightly yet noticeably, it might be time for him to receive more undeserved blame than undeserved credit. ... With no commercially undeniable moments like the Rihanna showcase “Wild Thoughts” (from Khaled’s Grateful), Father of Asahd grooves along like an adequate 54-minute stretch of hip-hop/R&B radio (with no commercials, at least).

In a vaguely concept-album move, the pacing of Hurts 2B Human is telling. Pink sings “I abhor reality” on the sugary dance song “Can We Pretend” featuring Cash Cash. But when she digs into what’s getting her down, it’s the most brazen and heartbroken she’s ever sounded.

This is one of BTS’ droopier releases.

While the songs aren’t top-shelf Sia, for a session that comes across more like an arcade game than a coherent album, that’s fine.

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.”

The LP isn’t overly burdened by the bold-faced guest spots you’d expect on a follow-up by an artist coming off a Top 10 debut. Instead, it gets tripped up by a different sophomore pitfall: Now that he isn’t an underdog, Khalid lapses into a little too much new-star introspection, exploring an ivory-tower aloneness that can recall the Weeknd’s goth-‘n’-B.

Eighties pop shine cut with pedal steel/fiddle poetry, Texas swing, cantina blues and achingly-crooned nostalgia that generally doesn’t feel hard sell, even when things gets treacly. Which of course, they do.

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

Even if he primarily composed on pan flute, it’d still be what it is--another edition of their signature precise, poker-faced California pop-rock. ... Though this time out the sense of irony is somewhat less blanched and the music a great deal more fun.

Wasteland, Baby! has enough encouraging displays of maturation to feel like a transitional moment for Hozier. At its best, the album carves out a space for the singer to work out his creative tensions as he finds new ways to make his straight folk influences more accessible without losing anything along the way.

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.

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.

His blend of garish Day-Glo net art and brawling homage to the glory years of DMX and Onyx may be a commercially effective millennial update of Rotten Apple thug rap. But aesthetically, his distinct lack of lyrical talent and annoyingly hyperactive presence often undermines the whole thing.

There are plenty of moments where Oxnard clicks, like the chugging, bum-rush rhythm “Who R U?” ... Still, there are missed opportunities.

On an album with 14 songs, there’s certainly some filler (see the sleepy “When You Leave”), but for the most part, Knopfler’s blues-roots blend, infused here with a fresh dose of jazz and funk) remains sturdy.

The Mums were much more likable back when they were pretending to be coal miners who churned their own butter. Compared to this stuff, that was a decent look.

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.

Save the few fire-breathing dragon moments of Lollapalooza-era churn, it’s the Smashing Pumpkins in name only, and that ice cream truck has long left the gas station.

Most of Simulation Theory could be about our surveillance state and/or a relationship. The blurring results in clunkiness.

His lyrics have always run the risk of feeling overthought, and Pieces of a Man is no exception; for all his talent, Mick sometimes verges into dorm-room thoughts (“cottonmouth get you soon enough/wake up and realize the moon is us”) and cringeworthy high musings (“Fuck is woke if you conscious but still in the bed”). But his heart is in the right place, and his elevated lyrical aspirations steer him right more often than not.

Suncity covers some of the same ground as American Teen, but with less exuberance. These tracks tend to sound similar: Somber, swelling melodies, often laid out with a few piano chords or a simple guitar lick; lyrics that hint at various forms of angst but remain vague enough to be all-encompassing; a reassuringly steady mid-tempo beat.

Us struggles to consistently reach the vertiginous heights of “When I’m With Him” or Me, but at the album’s best, Rodriguez’s revealing narratives of fractured relationships and lonely adolescence strike somewhere deep, to the point that, if you listen close enough, her warm, whispery voice almost begins to sound like your own.

Things don’t always gel--Marcus Mumford and Miguel turn in half-baked Zooropa moves on “Find Another Way,” and “Where It’s At Ain’t What It Is,” with fellow guitar master Gary Clark Jr. and producer Nico Stadi, feels like too many cooks in the kitchen. But when Atlas Underground works, it upgrades the RATM game plan with motivational anthems for a newly-fucked world order.

There’s an element of the ridiculous in this. But there’s also a charm to their guileless, retro-fetishist conviction. And dudes have chops.

The Anteroom sometimes creeps and lurches like an old car stuck in rush-hour traffic.

If the arrangements sometimes sound automated, Mai is adept enough as a singer to enliven them.

It ultimately sounds like a radio stuck between two stations, a bit like the Hold Steady with laryngitis. Luckily there are enough musical diversions to keep it interesting.

Logic rhymes in exciting ways, but the meanings can be a little strained.

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.

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

This is a missed opportunity--there aren’t many artists out there right now hurling out James Brown-like screams over dissonant, programmed beats--and it’s indicative of the overall timidity at work on Young Sick Camellia.

What makes Raise Vibration more than just Professor Kravitz orating about the world’s ills is how he never forsakes catchy melodies for seriousness. His language is cutting (“It’s enough, and we all are just getting fucked” he sings on the latter track) but he presents it in a sweet, catchy way that’s easy to digest.

MNEK is a strong singer capable of bracing jumps into his falsetto register. But he seems to have been so immersed in writing for others that he’s lost his own voice.

The coldness of the instrumentals is compounded by the duo’s vocal delivery.

At its best, In the Blue Light amounts to a dream set list for devoted PaulHeads who wish he’d do entire shows of rarities and not bother with oft-played hits like “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Graceland” and “Late in the Evening.”

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.

Big Red Machine sounds like Bon Iver and The National freestyling with friends, drinks and vape pens.

“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.

BEASTMODE 2 sounds like a Dirty South mixtape, and you can virtually imagine the duo grinding in an Atlanta studio somewhere at 4 a.m. after the strip clubs have closed. But like so many mixtapes from trap’s golden era, all the songs tend to run together into an amiably hardscrabble blur.