Their third album, Californian Soil, is so “current,” filled with so many of-the-moment trends, that it winds up feeling anonymous.

While Swift did an admirable job of re-recording Fearless, tweaking the production in subtle ways that give the album a slightly different texture (note how much more prominently the banjo figures in the mix of “Love Story”), the songs themselves are largely unchanged. ... The album’s bonus tracks—all written during the original Fearless sessions—don’t move the needle much in terms of the project’s overall quality. They all showcase Swift’s preternatural gifts for song structure and melody, but again, the lyrics are a mixed bag

With the band’s musicianship in peak form, it’s Caleb’s songwriting that limits the album’s impact. Marriage and fatherhood have expanded his inner monologue beyond fratboy misogyny and rock-star posturing. But he still doesn’t have much of interest to say.

When You Found Me is what happens when a talented songwriter and a skilled band shoots for the hills and misfires.

The singer’s m.o. has long been to cram each project with every creative idea he has—an approach that, though effective during the Pumpkins’s heyday, now largely results in diminishing returns. It would be time better spent fleshing out songs that are too often merely shadows of ideas.

Cyrus’s habit of enlisting high-profile artists from the upper echelon of a given genre continues here with appearances by Jett, Billy Idol, and Stevie Nicks, who all adequately do their thing. As usual, though, Cyrus is most indelible when her own voice takes center stage and the music mingles with and amplifies her messages of self-empowerment and emotional culpability. If nothing else, Plastic Hearts gives her license to unapologetically rock out.

For better or worse, Be’s sights are trained on BTS fans, meaning the album is too insular for broader appeal.

The album balances these syrupy moments with a batch of harder-edged tracks that showcase Stapleton’s biting electric guitar riffing but don’t do much to elevate his lyrics. Predictably, he just shifts his focus from love and tenderness to mild hedonism.

Given the dearth of uptempo tracks on Grande’s last album, the microhouse “Motive,” featuring Doja Cat, and the breathless, disco-inflected “Love Language” are a welcome change of pace. Too many of the songs on Positions, however, rely on the same midtempo trap-pop that populated Grande’s previous two efforts, particularly Thank U, Next. What once seemed refreshing in its minimalism is quickly starting to feel insubstantial.

Featuring Ty Dolla $ign has the air of a haphazard playlist. Griffin is still a formidable center of gravity for a small army of eager collaborators, but the final product wants for some necessary fine-tuning.

Their work manages to feel simultaneously overproduced and under-thought.

While Serpentine Prison may invoke familiar accusations of dullness, it’s refreshing to hear Berninger’s disaffected songwriting style take on a more grown-up perspective.

Crammed chockfull of crowd-pleasing EDM pyrotechnics and cheeky one-liners, The Album is undeniably a product of a well-oiled, state-of-the-art pop machine, but it feels stuck looking back to tried and true trends in both K-pop and Western pop music.

“Here We Go Around Again,” an unreleased song from Mariah’s demo tape, and “Can You Hear Me,” a Whitney-esque piano ballad from the Emotions sessions, find her in fine voice but offer little insight into Mariah the burgeoning artist. By contrast, a live rendition of the jazz standard “Lullaby of Birdland,” recorded during her 2014 tour, allows Mariah to fully exploit the imperfections of her voice, lending the performance a lived-in authenticity often missing from the earlier tracks.

While Stevens often reaches great heights on The Ascension, he almost as often seems to get lost in his big ideas.

Orca may be enjoyable in the moment, but it doesn’t have staying power.

Rather than build on any of the sounds she experimented with in the past, Perry seems content to stay in her lane when, at this point, she has nothing to lose.

The result is an album that appears caught between modes, playfully riding cascading synths even as it lyrically subsumes itself in dourness.

“Confessional Boxing” offers mostly surface-level hints at the dark times of the past, as the song growls but doesn’t ever bite. Miller fares better when he’s in pure storytelling mode on the after-hours waltz “Belmont Hotel,” on which the titular hotel becomes a metaphor for romantic renewal.

Dreamland’s best moments are propelled by slick drum machines and Bayley’s confidence as a frontman. His turn inward isn’t without humor and insight, but writing about other people on past albums provided a more enveloping experience, fleshing out imagined places and people with an intrigue that’s missing here.

On the whole, in broadening his music’s scope, those responsible for piecing together Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon have lost sight of the local specificity, quirky charisma, and energy that made a name for Pop Smoke in the first place.

While it’s culled from a mélange of styles and influences, Planet’s Mad manages to stand on its own for its sonic depth and detail. And even if the album’s themes aren’t fully articulated, Baauer’s use of bass, constantly elongating and amplifying, succeeds to evoking a sense of doom.

Whether muddling the creation of the universe with both love and fame (“Sine from Above”) or teasing the theory of the world as a simulation (“Enigma”), these songs only scratch the surface of deeper ideas before falling back on the most basic of pop clichés.

At this point in his own career, Danzig may still be able to approximate Elvis’s vocal range, but he fails to invest these songs with a unique vision.

There are worse purveyors of bro-country spiced up with hip-hop (here’s looking at you, Florida Georgia Line), and Hunt has an ear for melody, but his reliance on lyrical clichés and hit-you-over-the-head genre fusion makes Southside worth little more than a shrug.

Pearl Jam has been locked in cruise control since the late ‘90s, and their latest, Gigaton, is largely more of the same.

There’s a weightlessness to it that seems to signify the slipping of a long-held burden from Bieber’s shoulders. His most personal offering to date, the album feels like a reflection of actual experience as opposed to a projection of a fantasy.

Rare continually teases intriguing forays into leftfield pop, but so many of the album’s experiments come off as just that, without ever crystallizing with memorable hooks.

Beck’s 2006 album The Information is a better example of his unrivaled funhouse approach to style and tone: By blending techno, folk, punk, hip-hop, Krautrock, blues, ambient, and groove-oriented rock, that album is by turns strange, aggressive, hilarious, disturbing, eerie, and fun, all while expressing wry dismay over our current cyber-Armageddon. In comparison, and for all its apparent now-ness, Hyperspace feels inconsequential and incomplete.

In terms of both its length and themes, the 20-track Courage can feel exhausting, alternating between platitudes about grief and self-empowerment that, with only a few exceptions, make what should feel cathartic sound empty and even anonymous.

While the latter half of Wildcard constitutes a bit of a shuffled deck of genres, there’s enough of a kick to the album as a whole to warrant its title, and Lambert certainly has the chops to sell it.

There are flashes of genius throughout, moments that insinuate where Kanye could go next with his music. In a sense, the album’s modest pleasures play to its (intended) message, which is supposed to be one of human fallibility and the prospect of improving oneself. But Kanye is eventually going to have to confront the serious limitations that his faith is putting on the range of his art’s expression.

Disappointingly one-note.

Leaving Meaning is a piece of blood-spattered Americana, a haunted-house version of the fabled American dream. But while Gira is a clever musician, that doesn’t make the world he’s created here a pleasant one to visit.

Its highs—vintage Crazy Horse guitar workouts, a small handful of charmingly intimate ballads—are intermittently marred by the same sort of problems that have characterized Young’s recent solo work. This includes particularly tuneless vocals and a tendency toward clunky, Facebook uncle-level environmentalist and political ranting.

DSVII is an undeniably florid soundscape of ‘80s pop culture touchstones. But hearing Gonzalez flesh these castoffs out into full songs through the lens of video game music feels like little more than an amusing experiment.

Sadly, there’s nothing on Fear Inoculum as immediately accessible or anthemic as past Tool glories like “Sober” or “The Pot,” but what is here will reward repeated spins, even if listeners initially find themselves waiting for those mammoth riffs to show up, a la “7empest,” or for Maynard to finally kick into high gear, as in the rousing refrain of “Descending.”

Too often, Beneath the Eyrie sounds like other artists, which is especially disappointing for a group like the Pixies, who have always been more trendsetters than followers.

The Center Won’t Hold clocks in at just over a 30 minutes and lacks a certain spark—a song with the barn-burning intensity of “Entertain” or the heartrending emotion of “One More Hour.” In many places, these songs feel derivative in a way that the band’s music never has before.

Though the better part of Para Mi was ostensibly written with romantic interests in mind, the songs, so anchored to fixed experiences, have come to represent universal lessons learned. They’re still rough around the edges—many lack dynamism, fading in and out of monochrome synth passages—but the impression that Cuco put all of himself into the music remains.

The fireside warmth that made songs like “Dirty Paws” and “Human” feel so intimate has dissipated in favor of squeaky-clean production, leaving the album feeling generic and non-specific.

With so many flat, unoriginal riffs and unmemorable choruses, there’s just not enough meat here to reward that approach, and despite its unrelenting volume, An Obelisk just feels empty without the wide-ranging dynamics and ambitious arrangements that have, until now, defined Titus Andronicus’s music.

Erotic Reruns is a collection of ultimately benign love songs, as the eroticism proposed by the album’s title is glaringly absent across 29 scant minutes.

The EP’s dubious employment of hip-hop tropes and graphic sexual metaphors reaches its nadir on ballroom-inspired “Cattitude,” part boast track and part ode to Miley’s female prowess.

Certainly, the shift from the humanity and warmth of blues-rock to the synthetic robotics of electronic music is intentional, but the album ends too abruptly for one to clearly discern the full extent of its significance.

Pink’s eighth album, Hurts 2B Human, finds the singer peddling the same boilerplate pop-rock songs about self-empowerment and existential angst that have defined her career for almost 20 years.

Unfortunately, the album only contains about an EP’s worth of solid material, with the rest of the running time devoted to a tedious children’s fairytale. ... [But the full] songs sound like the basis of a proper follow-up to Yoshimi even more than the zany At War with the Mystics, did.

For a burgeoning artist still establishing his signature style, Khalid settles into a surprising complacency here, failing to experiment with the template of his debut.

This album lacks the stitched-together quality of FLOTUS, that certain emphasis on atmosphere, texture, and the unexpected, rather than structure and melody, that makes that album alternately impenetrable and transcendent.

Canterbury Girls still succeeds at being Lily & Madeleine’s most personal and cohesive work to date, but the siblings too often seem as if they’re reluctant to let loose and lean into the music.

Unfortunately, neither Why You So Crazy’s eclecticism nor its polish can make up for its lack of memorable songs. For all their stylistic diversity, most of the tracks here ride a single musical hook.

If Fool doesn’t quite measure up to Jackson’s sterling early work, it’s still more concise and punchy than 2015’s Fast Forward and less self-consciously arty than his late-‘80s and ‘90s work.

The album’s title represents the remarkable possibility of finding freedom from the outside world by letting loose on the dance floor and experiencing liberation in a crowd of strangers. Bear certainly takes the album there at several points, but in the limited scope and cerebral slant of these too-brief songs, he loses that outer peace.

Across 27 tracks, he tries on so many guises--melancholic balladeer, unabashed chart-chaser, avant-pop visionary--that he fails to ever separate himself from his peers, rendering Icarus Falls a forgettable, albeit expertly produced, travelogue of R&B trends.

As revived as the classic Pumpkins sound is on Shiny and Oh So Bright, though, the album can’t quite shake the sense of superfluity endemic to reunion projects: There isn’t anything here that the band hasn’t already done before--and better.

There’s undoubtedly a strong 10-song album lodged at the core of A Star Is Born, but unlike the film, wherein an outsized sense of sentimentality is rendered affecting by the more grounded performances, there’s not nearly enough substance here to justify all the bombast.

This affinity for aimless trains of thought applies to the whole of Bottle It In, an album where Vile is quick to conjure up a bevy of interesting images or ideas but struggles to find a compelling way to contain them.

Faithful to a fault, the tracklist sticks safely to ABBA’s most well-known hits, among them “SOS,” “Mamma Mia,” and, of course, the title track. There are scant re-imaginings here, and no obscure disco gems.

Raise Vibration's more serious shortcoming is its lyrics, which stumble whenever they reach for grand proclamations on the state of the world.

While the loping acoustic guitar figure that drives “Happy With You” isn't nearly as compositionally compelling, it's one of the only other songs here in which it sounds like McCartney is actually singing about something real. ... There are a few other tonally comparable songs on the 16-track Egypt Station, but the rest are largely bogged down in some eye-rolling cliché of one kind or another.

This contrast, however, between bouncy or turbulent beats and contemplative or cosmic ambience, which recurs throughout Monsters Exist, is so dissonant that it effectively gets in the way of the album making a cohesive statement.

More complex ruminations are few and far between, with Tatum too often getting bogged down in generic binaries, from the fire and rain dichotomy on “Canyon on Fire” to a fickle romantic partner always “pulling me close” and “pushing me back” on “Oscillation.” Delivered with Tatum's vocals so prominent in the mix, these trite lyrical moments blemish Indigo's otherwise pristine musicality.

At 16 tracks, Woman Worldwide at times feels like an inexplicable rehash of existing material--a time-filler while Justice plots their next studio reinvention.

Minaj is obviously capable of backing up all the posturing. ... But Queen also finds Minaj falling back on some frustratingly familiar shortcomings. The album loses its momentum whenever it aims for the pop charts.

The rigid codes of masculinity governing hardcore rap, though, keep YG's lyrics from showing as much range as Mustard's beats.

Sculptor's Achilles' heel lies in its skeletal song structures, which feel too flimsy next to the enormity of the album's message of eschewing complacency.

77:78 sees Fletcher and Parkin opting to merely dip their toes into such heterogeneity, yielding music with a far narrower scope and failing to break fresh ground.

Welch widens the song's [Hunger's] scope from a specific personal battle with an eating disorder to a broader emphasis on universal craving for love and acceptance, but trite statements about the destructive nature of fame and drugs are emblematic of the album's overall tendency to retreat into sweeping, generalized sentiments. Welch strikes a more effective balance between the personal and the universal on “Big God.”

Chromeo's formula is well-suited to producing unpretentious, likeable pop-funk; it's just too bad that it's never felt more like a formula than ever before.

“Accelerate” never takes off like one might expect, content to bustle along on a perpetually shifting beat, rumbling electro bassline, and skittering trap effects, fading out while the singer sensually vamps over a minimal backing track. Unfortunately, the rest of Liberation plays it frustratingly safe, with smooth, competent R&B like “Deserve” and “Pipe.”

At times, it's as if Smith's sheer vocal talent becomes a crutch that restrains her from treading into riskier musical terrain. A large part of the singer's allure derives from her vocal prowess, but she sacrifices invention here, letting the album fizzle out too quietly. Smith is at her best when she reinterprets classic R&B sounds and experiments with the color of her voice.

So Sad So Sexy is a sleek, homogenous pop-oriented album that feels both conceptually half-formed and technically fussed-over.

Ye‘s emotional claustrophobia is at times effective: As a chronicle of living with mental illness, this is Kanye’s most unsparing work to date. ... But Ye just feels unfinished, as if he wanted to avoid another debacle like the rollout of the also-unfinished The Life of Pablo and turned in a rough draft to make deadline. Unlike Pusha’s Daytona, which is all muscle and sinew, Ye feels like a mix of the weakest moments from The Life of Pablo.

The singer-songwriter is more sympathetic when tackling his struggles with mental health. Indeed, God's Favorite Customer hits its stride with its most emotionally naked pair of songs.

The handful of songs produced by the band themselves—“My Enemy,” the brooding new wave track “God's Plan,” and the gentle ballad “Really Gone”—stand out in their deviation from the glossy, monolithic tracks helmed by producer Greg Kurstin.

The album falters when Bridges strays from his retro-soul wheelhouse.

Though much of the rest of Caer is mopey and monochromatic, these songs ["Too Many Colors" and "Little Woman"] suggest new possibilities for Twin Shadow's next phase.

With the exception of “Famous Tracheotomies,” Sheff often struggles to find compelling metaphors on this album.

While there's certainly no shortage of sonic experimentation woven into this relatively more adventurous album, the British singer-songwriter struggles to find an effective balance between the added electronic accoutrements and the minimalist core that informs his solo work.

While Evil Spirits isn't a late-career masterpiece, Visconti's production chops have at least ensured a warm and rich listening experience.

Pensive stabs of orchestration add tension to the title track, on which Everett can only muster generic musings on the need to break oneself apart in order to be rebuilt into something new. ... A number of brief, half-formed interludes make the album feel more fragmented than connected.

A stultifying two discs of competent but generic Christian platitudes.

The album is admirable and at times rewarding for its sense of experimentation, but only for those willing to meet it on its own terms.

A postmodern assault of freaked-out sonic ataxia, it's messy, wildly uneven, and at times even close to unlistenable, but its sheer audacity makes it utterly intriguing.

While none of it is of the caliber of the music he released in his lifetime, the album includes material from some of the last studio sessions by the Experience and the earliest by Hendrix's final outfit, Band of Gypsys, offering a glimpse at a transitional phase in his work.

The eight-minute, two-part “Rusalka, Rusalka/Wild Rushes” stands in stark contrast to the rest of the album in almost every way. ... By comparison, the rest of I'll Be Your Girl feels painfully half-baked.

While American Utopia isn't as vital a statement as it wants to be, it's the sound of one of pop music's most idiosyncratic voices continuing to follow his wayward muse.

Onion mostly attempts to wring earnest feeling from platitudes.

When Seger sticks to growling out his lyrics over jagged riffs and a relentless beat, as he does on the driving “Runaway Train” and the synth-driven “The Highway,” he proves that craft can be rewarding in its own right, and that he still excels at creating emotional investment in something as tried and true as barreling, locomotive rock.

The majority of the highlights on Man of the Woods, from the faux-Stevie Wonder groove of “Higher, Higher” to the smooth dance-floor glide of “Breeze Off the Pond,” could have appeared on any Timberlake album, give or take a few pointedly rural references to roadside billboards and canoes. The songs that hew more closely to the Americana vibe, meanwhile, are mostly embarrassing.

Eminem can still dazzle with his wordplay--“Adversity, if at first you don't succeed/Put your temper to more use/'Cause being broke's a poor excuse” is an early highlight on “Believe”--yet his delivery, listless torrents of language, makes him seem noncommittal to the songs he's performing. He's not quite on autopilot throughout, but he does sound distracted. Eminem is more engaged on Revival when his focus turns to his family.

It's disappointing to hear one of the all-time great vocalists turn in such mundane performances.

Sia too often sounds like she's singing with a mouthful of Christmas candy.

Too often, though, Morrissey sticks with sturdy, stomping rock, its workmanlike construction bogged down by turgid lyrics.

Seven years after their debut, they remain both confined and defined by their early novelty as the twee pop group with the loud guitars.

Listening to Red Pill Blues makes one yearn for an era when there at least seemed to be more room for genuinely ambitious, artful Top 40 pop. In other words, I'll take the blue pill.

These songs are littered with allusions to Price's difficult past as a broke, troubled magnet of misfortune with a late-blooming career, but they're by and large so vague that they don't have much of an emotional impact.

His oddball pop-culture references and fondness for clichés can be charming amid wailing electric guitars, but taking center stage, they too often fall flat.