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.

Gunn himself has a sharp, high-pitched voice and breaks verses down into micro-fragments; he’s not as lyrically deft as some of his thug rap peers, but he’s punchy and effective.

Cackling, croaking, and cracking up through vocal processors, he sounds like he’s having a blast. And you will too, even if you don’t remember any of it by morning--which also seems perfectly in the spirit of thin

The most visceral tune may be the agoraphobia slam of "Black Paint," but the most interesting development is album's closer "Disappointed," which sounds like the hocketing of Dirty Projectors interpreted by a hardcore band.

It's all piss and vinegar and posturing.

Singing, rapping and spoken-word float through these tracks, as do soulful improvs from Adjuah, Glasper and others, but what lingers is the overall aura: a no-seams-showing blend of jazz, R&B and hip-hop, with a spontaneous "3 a.m. in the studio" feel.

A sprawling, eclectic set that ranges from the slightly tepid to the truly transcendent.

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.

That's not to say there aren't glorious passages on Head Over Heels. Listen to the long, climbing curve in the second round of backing vocals during the chorus of "Right Back Home to You;" the shimmering, too-brief melodic interlude in "Count Me Out," which is so rich it could serve as the basis for another song entirely; or the groove on "Slumming It," which is an impeccable riff on Chemise's "She Can't Love You." But these moments are fleeting, and there aren't enough of them to make you fall head over heels for this album.

Though nowhere near as incisive, infectious or rewarding as their best work, Kids See Ghosts is still an important step forward into an era of big moods and short attention spans.

On her fourth LP, So Sad So Sexy, she embraces slickly produced pop with open arms, and she's lost some of her character.

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.

Where his debut album that followed, Nine Track Mind, stumbled in its efforts to give him an identity in a sea of bright-eyed male pop stars, Voicenotes feels like a step, at the very least, in the right direction.

It's mood music (bad-mood music, to be exact) and, despite coming from a band called the Body, it's largely formless; much of the time the songs just seem to end.

The meandering LP can't bear the weight of the man at the piano's indulgences.

It's expertly-crafted and likable, but rarely as gripping as its models.

The 18 tracks of Beerbongs become an ouroboros of new-money narcissism: Post's obsession with flexing, partying, and banging groupies feeds a growing paranoia that the people around him only like him for exactly those attributes. And it is no small irony that the album's most convincing moments occur when he drops the cool rapper pretense and gets all lonesome cowboy.

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.

Vocally, Tinashe is probably more musically adept than half of the artists she emulates. But she won't truly carve out her own space until she figures out who she is.

The best moments on Revamp, featuring big names from pop, rock and R&B, are those least faithful to the originals. ... Less successful are efforts of John's glam-pop heirs, like Lady Gaga, who tries and fails to match the master's rococo ebullience.

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.

The Decemberists do a very particular thing – darkly ornate, literary-minded, self-consciously verbose Anglophile prog-folk-rock--exceedingly well, so well that you can't blame 'em for wanting to do something else. They do just that on I'll Be Your Girl, at least in parts, the upshot being, well, a re-affirmation of that particular thing they do exceedingly well.

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.

Tough but warm, Temet contains the handclaps, female vocal responders, and grain-mortar and goatskin tindé percussion of Tuareg music, but with gnarlier guitars and no ululating exclamations.

Although Both Sides of the Sky--the third volume in a vault clearing that began in 2010 with Valleys of Neptune (close to a must hear) and continued with 2013's People, Hell and Angels (a little less close)--repeats songs and fragments found in more fully developed versions elsewhere, it still offers plenty of thrills, as, time and again, Hendrix pushes solos along the knife-edge that separates this world from another.

Rateliff can be guilty of overwriting, as in the jumble of raging-wildfire images that drag down "Still Out There Running." His husky voice can lack the suppleness of classic soul singers; when he taps into his inner Sam Cooke on the dusky "Babe I Know," he sounds more fatigued than uplifted. Yet even when he overshoots, Rateliff's restless throwback sound feels like it's moving toward real revelations.

This album is Carrabba's rather reasonable pop petition to be dealt back into a game he started.

The first half engages with songs like "Count to Five" and its strutting tone that hearkens to turn-of-the-Eighties boogie-style jazz-funk. But [Blood's] second half doesn't falter as much as it fades. Tracks like "Blood Knows" and "Stay Safe" sound baroque and formless despite the band's gentle yet swinging touches.

Culture II ultimately feels less like a celebratory howl from the mountaintop than a transitional inventory dump. With its easily-trimmable 24 tracks, Culture II appears to be tailored to finesse chart rules, which count 1,500 individual song streams toward one full album sale.

The album is less a reboot than a re-affirmation of their ability to fuse over-the-top oversharing and Queen-ly operatic stomp with an elastic vision of pop.

There are a few whiffs, like the foul "She's a Hot One" ("She might be a mess, but she's a hot one"), but Bryan truly excels when he's all nostalgic for the uncomplicated ease of a summer fling in "Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset" or subtly acknowledging the beauty of all types of love in the gently uplifting "Most People Are Good."

Like much of Tove Lo's work, it's admirably uncensored, but may leave you craving a shower, however close to home it lands.

At 76, Crosby sounds more than comfortable alongside his producer/co-writer son James Raymond and a trio of sympathetic studio musicians who evoke Mitchell's singular sound with echoes of Wayne Shorter from saxophonist Steve Tavaglione and Jaco Pastorius from fretless bassist Mai Agan.

Butch Walker's post-postmodern production sometimes overwhelms the songs, but its best moments--"Weekend Woman" could be Weezer's "Good Vibrations" with is everything-but-the-sink hooks and a catchy, Lady Gaga–like bridge--gamely make up for the places where Pacific Daydream sounds like Weezer by Numbers.

Trauma's chilled-out middle sags, but "Revenge," her bad-romance duet with Eminem, is an early shot of energy; Max Martin and Shellback's homage to Dr. Dre's skip-step beats may be too on the nose, but Em's rhymes nicely recall a time when even lunatics rode bright hooks.

That old black magic often sounds forced, but he makes up for it with a few more melancholy tracks.

The LP gets bogged down in chilled-out trap pop (see the Lil Wayne-​assisted "Lonely"). But slow jams like "Concentrate" perfectly balance the downtempo and the energetic.

Partying tunes like the funky "Firebreather" sometimes feel like not much more than a rich white guy bragging. But Macklemore's trademark awkward humanity comes through on "Good Old Days," a reflection on aging (with Kesha), and "Church," a thank-you letter to making it that's warm, vivid, earnest and earned.

12 hardrocking lefty diatribes against government conspiracies ("Drones – they got ya tapped, they got ya phone," Chuck D raps in "Take Me Higher"), civil injustice ("We fuckin' matter," he declares on "Who Owns Who") and, in the case of B-Real's rhymes, restrictive weed laws ("Legalize Me").

His umpteenth solo set is a well-timed all-star candygram.

While a few tracks do sound like retreads of their familiar monolithic grooves, songs like "Come On" are intensely contemporary, tweaking LC's sound with the inhuman ADD sound-warping of modern dubstep.

On an LP of quiet activism and love songs, Johnson reboots the Zen-master delivery and swaying-palm-tree melodic sense that made his Curious George soundtrack LP a Number One hit. It's no less inviting, especially with a frozen cocktail.

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."

This career-spanning live album seems more about sonic detail than onstage alchemy.

Their [producers Mattman & Robin's] spacious productions are an odd fit for Dan Reynolds' tortured dude-isms.

Interspersed, however, with Campbell's finest performances are several moments that fall short on a record that occasionally feels like a forced final effort. ... Ultimately, though, it's Campbell's voice, still nimble and newly haunting in its frailty, that makes Adiós a worthy conclusion from the legendary singer.

Throughout, Perry is less like the so-unusual, candy-coated Cyndi Lauper of "Teenage Dream," and is more an anonymous disco crooner, a breathy moderator leading us through passionate but muted songs of longing and empowerment.

Chuck Berry's first album since 1979 is a classic as he always made them, with knockoffs of his own inventions, blues filler, even a live goof delivered with one of those raised-eyebrow vocals. All of rock & roll would have crawled on its hands and knees to St. Louis to record with Berry, yet Chuck makes do with a gleeful bar-band stomp.

They bounce between genres with screwball zeal, but the anti-concept loopiness can be weird fun.

At times their idea-heavy songs can feel weighed down by cleverness (the Primus-y "Deadcrush"). But Alt-J can create a dark beauty that's like moonlight on an English moor.

Per usual, there's filler, none too embarrassing--Paisley's pro enough that even his apparent phone-ins are well-crafted. But over 16 tracks, you can't help but wish that one of country's greatest would shoot consistently higher than easy chuckles and sentimental homilies.

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.

Inconsistency is like a muse here, but he seems to work best with Seventies peers like Joe Walsh, Daryl Hall and Donald Fagen, whose smooth Donald Trump parody "Tin Foil Hat" is a timely highlight.

DeMarco's weed-y lazy-day croon can be a little too tongue-in-cheek. He's best when he's more earnest, both lyrically and melodically.

She aims directly at the torn-and-frayed guitar groove of her Nineties records, but with flourishes of her recent detours into Memphis soul and Nashville country.

Riddled with resentment and lyrics that land with a self-serious thud, Memories is a stunningly drab record. For the most part songs plod along at a strenuously mid-tempo pace, and are mostly lacking in any sonic detail that would reward closer listening.

The guy who promises to "pull a little hair/smack a little oooh" on "Educate Ya" may not always be as charming as his one-world groove, but he knows how to host a party.

Musically, he's drifting through a mid-career malaise. The beats he uses are the same worn poles of yacht-rap luxury and trap bangers that he's relied on since his 2010 watermark Teflon Don. Lyrically, he's still capable of speaking truth to power with remarkable clarity.

At the top of their game, Little Big Town are taking an unlikely path: respectable, mid-career album artist.

Future improves upon his 2016 output. Although the 17-track, hour-long affair lasts way too long, Future sounds fully engaged.

"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.

More often than not, however, he gets swallowed by the larger-than-life brands and presences of those he surrounds himself with, like Eminem who steals Sean's thunder with the quality, agility and fire of his guest verse on "No Favors."

Aside from a lousy plot, Oczy Mlody's only other failing is it's a slow build. The first half is sparse, uninviting and even a little drab.

Things work better when they balance the impulse to hulk things up with their natural traditionalist intimacy.

There's not an "Ohio" in the bunch but Young's grizzled jeremiads can be endearing.

Despite an overlong hour-plus runtime and surplus of filler, Starboy does have highlights. ... But for longtime fans that believe the Weeknd is one of the major R&B artists of the decade, Starboy will ultimately seem like a disappointment.

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

While his funk game is strong and swagger is stronger, Bruno's acclaimed hook-writing (which has garnered four Number Ones for himself and tons of co-writes on other chart-toppers) has seemingly taken a backseat.

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.

Producer Markus Dravs (Coldplay, Mumford & Sons) does an admirable job of translating Followill's signature slurred delivery and the band's muscular jangle into thicker arrangements, though the result can feel generic.

The reissue is loaded with worthy extras. ... There will never again be a rock bomb quite like Be Here Now, and as such its memory should be honored.

Until the band fully embraces their ping-pong guitars and surly one-liners ("I wish I saw myself the way you see me now"), Grouplove will likely remain a singles band rather than the new-R.E.M. their ambition hints at.

Banks' list of grievances can get wearying, but the music's dour detail is alluring too.

The follow-up is looser and less burdened by the past.

Through arrangements elegant to a fault, his mercurial tenor, more supple and restrained, remains a marvel.

Miller's grown-ass beats clash with his juvenile boasts, so he often ends up sounding like a well-meaning kid who can't stop putting his kicks up on the fancy furniture.

The band can feel hampered by its populist ambition, though, which means the best stuff here moves toward the intimate.

Maya Arulpragasam's radical patter is sounding a bit ho-hum ("Borders: what's up with that?" she wonders on her fifth album). But M.I.A.'s skill as a buoyant beat-rider remains intact (the glassily thumping "Visa" turns border crossing into a party), and there are moments on AIM where the political and personal blur evocatively.

Generally tasteful and acoustic, Dolly Parton's 43rd studio album is most effective at its most effortless, as when she breezes with contented charm through the title track's celebration of uncomplicated love. But the legend stumbles when she tries too hard to be cute.

Lead singer Jaren Johnston is a top Nashville writer, but he’s a bit too enamored of good-ol'-boy clichés. Luckily, he's an excellent singer.

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

A chance to eavesdrop on a troubled performer pulling himself together for a final sprint at artistry. A second disc of outtakes--featuring muttered wisecracks, false starts, and a couple promising alternate arrangements--adds background atmosphere but is mostly of historical interest.

Though Gadhia hasn't shed all his Chris Martin influence, he's developed an edge of paranoid menace reminiscent of Muse's Matt Bellamy. It's a sound that comes from both everywhere and nowhere.

Stretching beyond SremmLife, their party-starting choruses are squeaked, squawked and shouted; mellower stuff can get a Makonnen-esque broken falsetto ("Swang"); "By Chance" succeeds with a haughty Dana Dane accent.

Their latest morphs between latter-day Grateful Dead and P-Funk, longer on vibes than songs but confirming their spot on the jam-band top tier.

The most surprising thing about the record is just how blatantly a group that once skewered conformity in songs like "Suburban Home" brashly embraces nostalgia.

As with every Khaled LP, the end result is a blast in small doses but a little bludgeoning taken as a whole.

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

["Pull It" is] the high point of Loud Hailer (an English colloquialism for megaphone), and its wordlessness is a plus; other songs decry war, apathy, greed, crass media, evil politicians, empty fame and other ills with less art than righteous heart.

While their long, drawn-out, circling dark clouds remain potent, ultimately The Glowing Man is the weakest of the three powerful epics they've released since 2012. It can be muted and jammy, the build-ups are not as dramatic and it brings little in new ideas for Gira's dead-eyed yowl.

It's a self-titled affair but it lacks the calling cards that originally made them interesting.

On his third LP (and first minus additional songwriters), 22-year-old U.K. roots revivalist Jake Bugg mixes Americana and British folk as skillfully as ever. ... He's less successful updating his sound.

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.

The songs here don't quite hit the same level of high-gloss overdrive they managed last time out, a problem for a band that prizes songwriting over the kind of vocal gymnastics that can turn a so-so synth-pop tune into an uncorked geyser of catharsis (elsewhere the wan piano ballad "100x" shows their limitations as confessional quiet stormers).

At 67 minutes, this record could have probably used a bit more editing, but Rest in Chaos is definitive proof that Hard Working Americans is no half-baked side project. Instead, the group continues to be a fascinating roots-rock collaboration.

The second Fifth Harmony LP isn't a massive step forward, but with a constant bombardment of hooks, high energy and incredible harmony there's not much time to catch your breath to compare.

It can be tempting to hear Shelton's new breakup songs--the bitterly comic "She's Got a Way with Words," the coolly regretful "Bet You Still Think About Me"--as targeted toward Lambert, or to imagine Stefani as the someone new he flirts with tipsily on the first single, "Came Here to Forget." Shelton's warmly confident delivery makes those romantic twists and turns sound both lived in but universal.

The rest of Keith Urban's tenth studio album isn't quite that audaciously pop [as "Sun Don't Let Me Down"], but it does commit to modern rhythms throughout, with Urban's virtuoso picking on six-string banjo (or "ganjo") locking in with steady basslines and ticking drum tracks to fuse the rootsy precision of bluegrass with the uplifting persistence of EDM.