Penny has garage-rock form, but Too True is a light-footed, echo-heavy pop makeover with a 1980s gloss, frothy but forthright.

Slipstream is welcome, despite large portions of it sounding generic to the point of self-parody: funky, strolling, sunny California blues-rock with lashings of soul.

Its main virtue: brevity. Most songs are sub-2 minutes, and the entire album is over in 20.

Sadly, they simultaneously fail to disguise a whole bucketload of ponderous, self-indulgent navel-gazing from the same source.

Wrecking Ball is as surgical as a ball of pig-iron on a swinging chain.

Throwaways (“Jewels n’ Drugs”) and power-ballad (“DOPE”) digressions weigh heavy on the pacing, but the arch “Mary Jane Holland” and “Swine” occupy livelier turf.

After a four-year hiatus, Shakira’s 10th album is full of raggae-tinged, bouncy melodies and absurd, occasionally quite poetic lyrics.

Although it is both loud and quiet, it neither rocks nor swings.

“Bitter Virtue” pursues a familiar James theme--condemnation of repressive moralities--but elsewhere, things are more ineffectual.

Electra Heart is too professional to be truly terrible, but it's never clever enough to be more than merely toytown.

She's good when not covering Mary Margaret O'Hara. But you'll need to hear through the still-life mannerisms to get to the good stuff.

Moon is bookended by the structurally perfect melodies of "I Heard the Owl Call My Name" and "Heart of the Woods"--but what’s in-between is often too airy-fairy to really grab.

High on saccharine and low on fidelity, LATBOTS has one foot in the recent 8-bit scene, the other in Merritt's own back catalogue.

A barrel of laughs it ain't. Over sparse, semi-orchestral backing, Gahan tackles the big ones.

The songs? Melodically flat, feel-driven jive from the hip.

It is mainly charming.

It sounds like a Sabbath album, from the tortuous lyrics to the eight-minute track lengths. But something about it feels wrong.

It sometimes meanders like a wasted hipster at an Animal Collective after-show. Yet it preserves enough presence of mind to yield gems such as the sing-song "Alien Days" or the deliquescent "Mystery Disease."

There's no "Chasing Pavements"-style killer, but she has murdered the Cure's "Lovesong" using Heart FM-friendly jazz-lite as her weapon.

The Atlanta singer delivers soulful, socially conscious meditations.

It's exquisite, of course, but dull.

The small print is that Travis are still doing what Travis have always done.

Well, they were demos once; and here they are, in all their functional glory.

This critic cannot in all honesty say, with a clear conscience, that their second album is absolutely terrible. Because it plain isn't.

It's mostly a thing of pleasing lonesome grooves--but there are moments where it sounds like the Mahavishnu Orchestra tuning up.

It's seldom terrible. And seldom does much to persuade you that it wouldn't be a better idea to cut out the middle man and listen to Gillespie's old LPs instead.

Those moments [where it's stirring, sentimental, and altogether too safe] aside, there's plenty more that is beautiful, forgettable and primed to aid a little light Sunday-afternoon catharsis.

Overlong at 19 tracks, it has its moments.