On Excuse My French, he's outshone and undervalued.

More Than Just a Dream steps backwards--where its predecessor was shockingly felt, this settles for something more distant, theatrical, grandiose.

Snoop's sing-song flow might seem ideal for pop-reggae, but he disappears into the background of his own album.

What aren't here are coherently shaped songs, or hooks, or riffs, or melodies that stick.

So much of Wolf is about distancing Tyler from the listener, whereas the vulnerability and melodic mirroring of "Answer," awash in sad organ glissando and two decades of unmet emotional need, is the album's truly shocking moment, in large part because it's so much better than everything else. From there it's another eight problematic songs until a pulse returns during Earl Sweatshirt's guest verse on "Rusty."

Rather than give us a full album of "The Strokes Misremember the '80s," the band falls back repeatedly on self-imitation.

You're better off soaking in the good choices here and resigning yourself to enduring the bad ones.

He seems plenty happy to hone coulda-been Nirvana licks to perfection on Afraid of Heights, which, despite being an album of all-new material, still feels like the Incesticide of his canon.

Real to Reel is otherwise lacking in the kind of tension that's required to produce an album that's more than the sum of its talented parts.

The aspirations here are lofty, as always, if less reflective than your average NIN lament; the songs swell, bobble, and even leak from the seams under the pressure.

The collision of rhetoric and intentions result in both colorless abstractions like piano ballad and first single "Where Are We Now," and grand melodrama like "You Feel So Lonely You Could Die."

So, no, Marr isn't exactly reinventing rock here--he already did that. The Messenger feels more like a tribute to his youth, to his home, and to all the musicians he's worked with over the past three decades.

How I Knew Her glides by in 40 minutes without making any kind of impression at all, other than giving you a vague desire to hit up Starbucks.

Racing through 11 disjointed songs in 30 minutes flat, Ra Ra Riot never give their material a chance to breathe. Instead, we're left with somewhat impressive ideas, squandered with impressive vigor.

When consumed passively, as ambient music, his conceptual flaws recede into the fuzz of his production, a raw mush of sound that provides an appropriate and occasionally great backdrop for refreshing your Tumblr dashboard, at least until it delivers a more engaging artist to look at.

All in all, this is a well-written, smartly paced, tightly played, thematically cohesive, musically tidy piece of work. It's just that quite a lot of Camper fans probably never considered those qualities to be particularly appealing virtues.

Return is neither a step up or down from 2010's wave-warping Causers of This or 2011's time-warping Underneath the Pine, yet it's not more of the same.

At just under a half-hour (a runtime probably inspired by the days when vinyl records could only contain about 40 minutes of music), Lysandre is a frustrating listen.

The music may be just as strong, tight, and impeccable--this is a band that's been going at it for more than a quarter of a century, after all--but there's a lightness missing here, a lack of passion.

This disconnect between Jesus Piece's gambit and its execution, between Game's intention and the raps served up by his guests, results in the headliner being reduced to a mere spectator on too much of his own album.

He's brilliant when juxtaposing rhythmic brutality against euphonious familiarity; but here, he seems exhausted by the former and ashamed of the latter.

Ultimately, Wild Water never hits as hard as its predecessor, and can't match it in terms of either focus or breadth.

Sadly, as Pit forges ahead in his campaign for world domination, his artistry is what's really being colonized.

Judging from the spirited but wildly inconsistent material on this trilogy's first two entries, a little quality control would've helped, perhaps funneling the best of the three albums into one solid offering.

MGK is a talented rapper, but here, on his major label album, he sounds hollow.

Overall, Dimension has some solid moments and no outright duds, but it works better as the basis for a playlist than as a start-to-finish album.

Despite plenty of practice as a contributor to Rick Ross' Maybach Music Group compilation series Self Made, Meek's label debut lacks viable singles.

It's pleasant, soothingly warm water, sure, but you probably won't want to soak for too long.