But aside from transposing the keys--a measure most likely taken to suit a limited vocal range--these songs take few liberties.

It's a much lesser record than "The E.N.D.," and yet it isn't boring, even when the echoes of old songs are more than echoes.

It's rigorously written, but Duffy sounds uncertain, spotlighting the particulars of her voice: the many crannies, the narrow backbone, the decay at the edges, the tentativeness she feels when it's unclear just how much room she has to maneuver.

None of these guests feel out of place here, but not because of the potency of Diddy's vision. Rather, it's because they have made records like these elsewhere, giving Last Train to Paris a secondhand feel.

Ms. Hilson's own records aren't tipping toward bona fide dance music as much as Rihanna's, and don't yet have their audience-strafing sweep. But a few songs here are good enough to stop the overthinking comparisons

Every gesture feels like flagging down a passing ship from a barren island. Every emotion registers on the Richter scale. This can be wickedly effective, as many a successful British rock band will attest. And periodically on this album, the stars and planets do align.

Lorraine is evenly split between mercilessly detailed songs like these and frustratingly blank ones ("Sweet Disposition," "Rocket Science"), which feel like hollow templates designed to be inhabited by other, less imaginative singers. On those songs Ms. McKenna sounds complacent; discomfort suits her better.

Her uneven but warmly satisfying new album, Silver Pony, attempts the best of both worlds.

Lasers is a chaotic album full of gummy rhymes that look better on the page than they sound to the ear, delivered with a tone of tragic bombast.

Where the spirit-void blankness of R.E.M. once felt intuitive and intentional, it now feels accidental. Most of this record's musical temperament seems reheated or purchased.

Like most tribute albums, Johnny Boy Would Love This is mixed, with a few misfires, like Snow Patrol's overblown "May You Never." But Mr. Martyn's pensive, moody spirit comes through, and the tribute should send listeners back to his own 1973 masterpiece, "Solid Air."

It's a spare and occasionally stiff album that has more to do with, say, the Indigo Girls than the 1960s bands the Bangles grew up worshiping.

The energy of this album sometimes outpaces the singer, who's best when he's deliberate, and whose voice isn't as robust as it could be on these songs.

The sound is brand-name familiar but all too settled; the songs place their hard-rock hooks neatly but without the original band's startling ups and downs.

Her singing is collected and on pitch, whether she's working with a whispery hush or a lemon-tart croon.

All in all it's a step forward for Young Jeezy, even if everyone around him is walking much faster.

Mr. McGraw has never sounded this casual. It doesn't suit him.

[A] comfortable, small and sometimes vague album.

It's got plenty of ups and downs.

Few songs on "Blunderbuss" truly knock the wind out of you, as the White Stripes could - even with riffs that were fragmentary, simple or borrowed. This is a songwriter's record, and a kind of orchestrator's record; there's also a new overall vehemence in the lyrics, hammering on dishonesty, jealousy, immorality.

[The album] seems to prefer operating under a steady churn of gloom. But there's real muscle here, both in the singing, which is rendered wide and fat, an ooze of its own; and also in the guitar playing, which is hefty and dark.

He doesn't sound like he's trying to chase after Nashville's contemporary norm, which is admirable. But his confidence often scans as complacency.

What's intended to be raw can sound smug. In "Dirt" the Thing pushes past the tenderness that lives in that song to get to aggressive, stylized and finally anonymous squalling. Its loud catharsis rolls over her quieter one, and it's not the only time that happens on this record.

It's when he deviates from the plastic norm that he actually sounds most awkward.

The partnership [Afro-Euro balance] is more complicated and less satisfying.

This is an art-school record; Ms. Levi's work resists easy pleasure and traditional beauty.... [yet] her songs hook you.

The album's unity of mood becomes a haze over the course of its nearly two-hour running time.

Charmer, her eighth studio album, represents a sunny turn for her, at least in relative terms.

"Wide River to Cross," by Buddy and Julie Miller is a contemporary outlier on an album crowded with relics, and its beautiful realization invites the question of what other sort of album Ms. Krall and Mr. Burnett might have made without any point to prove.

Even at his most powerful, singing hard in his nasal voice--it's got impact but not much traction.

As she watches love drift into and, more often, out of reach, the songs find themselves dissolving too.

The album wears thin in totality, but has isolated moments: entrances and releases and dropouts.

All together, it's just another round of throwing ideas at the wall. Everything sticks, more or less. But for how long?

Why is her big-voiced delivery so similar and balanced in nearly every song? Why are there no sharp intakes of breath, stutters, meaningful cracks or strange textures, like the battling squeaks that made "Love," one of her early singles, so good?

For someone so relaxed, he certainly sounds at odds with much of this album; even the warm, enveloping production, primarily by ID Labs, doesn't loosen up his stiff flow at all.

Mr. Lovano is taking a step back from the material of jazz and looking at its motivating forces; implicitly, he’s asking why we make it in the first place. As long as the question lingers in your head, the album works. When the music slackens, and the tension dissipates, the question goes away.

The electronics are there, however, and they lift the album’s better songs out of the sad-sack zone.

The songs on Re-Mit, his 30th studio album with his band the Fall, resemble a row of unevenly smashed windows, or patches of broken concrete in a street--unsightly ruptures within a familiar context, potentially more shapely and interesting the closer you look, but perhaps not.

This is a clangorous album in every way, full of brick-dense synths and abusive drums, and it often succeeds by blind force. But elsewhere the duo--Nathaniel Motte and Sean Foreman--are much slier and much more successful.

The record is awkward and seriously pretentious at times, but you can’t miss the heat of its ambition.

Though Timbaland’s productions always hold some sly surprises, “Magna Carta ... Holy Grail” comes across largely as a transitional album, as if Jay-Z has tired of pop but hasn’t found a reliable alternative.

Her fifth, is one of the most convincing R&B albums of the year, even if it does a very thin job of being convincing about Ciara herself.

The end-zone dance that is “Bugatti” is far more in keeping with hip-hop’s prevailing mood, and half of this album tries to match it but falls short. But most of the rest of Trials & Tribulations is far darker and more reflective.

A few times on the competent but wearisome Crash My Party he sounds dutifully twangy, but those moments are exceptions.

All together, that makes Hall of Fame beautiful more often than it’s interesting, because Big Sean’s ear is working smarter than his mouth.

The album has stability, consistency. But too much of it.

It’s possible to like this record in theory while imagining one that’s 50 percent more enjoyable.

The best of them--mostly the resigned or farseeing songs, the songs that have no hero and no story--rise above the odds. But a large portion of the record feels, let’s say, official.

Throughout the album, Mr. Blacc sings with the kind of earthy vitality that many studied neo-soul singers don’t have the voice to match. But too often, the production--most of it by DJ Khalil--is so thoroughly retro that Mr. Blacc only reminds a listener of whom he’s emulating.

Student’s complete commitment to character and form compensate slightly for the unrelenting weirdness of this project.

In some tracks Corazón feels like a committee crossover project.... But Corazón also finds vibrant international connections.

Xscape does polish up these old songs, even if it wipes away some of Jackson’s ideas, like the big-band tango Jackson invoked on the demo of “Blue Gangsta.” And Jackson’s voice--deliberately pushed up front in the mixes--is more vivid, and less processed-sounding, than it was on his later albums.... Yet it’s clear why Jackson shelved the songs on Xscape. They’re near misses, either not quite as striking as what he released or lesser examples of ideas he exploited better elsewhere.

These songs don’t have a great dynamic range, or produce very surprising events. They float past you, often made of three or four chords and a trickling, curious beat.

The music on Get Hurt is broader and more muscular. It feels like music made from the outside in, not the other way.

There are 17 songs here, and after a while, they feel short on basic songwriting surprises: Built on narrow foundations, high on crude intuition, they keep running into walls.

While the production details of each track are full of lessons in musicianly ingenuity, only “Breakdown” has a melody that lingers. The others are overshadowed by Prince’s back catalog.

What constrains PlectrumElectrum is its rigorous, deliberately retro back-to-basics mandate. Prince at his best doesn’t just collect and recreate genres; he smashes them together.

Florida Georgia Line is a literal breeze, with songs that land like feathers. Anything Goes doesn’t pack quite the raw shock of that duo’s 2012 debut album, “Here’s to the Good Times.”

The Pinkprint is her third studio album, and like the first two it’s full of compromises and half-successes.

Every song aims for the monumental, a strategy that’s competitive for radio play but wearying over the course of a whole album.

Sometimes the lyrics don’t match the energy of the music here, especially Jack Fowler’s guitar. They tend toward the blandly inspirational, with a handful of notable exceptions.

At 10 songs that span barely 30 minutes, this album is so terse it makes Nas’s “Illmatic” seem like “Infinite Jest.” And often it can feel as if Earl Sweatshirt is rapping his dense syllabic tumbles with his back facing the microphone, which is perplexing, since few rappers love the sound of sticky syllables as much as he does.

On No Pier Pressure, they [Wilson and co-producer Joe Thomas] juggle past and present in strangely proportioned ways.

Dark Red, his sometimes emphatic, sometimes meandering second full-length album, has moments that underscore just how much Shlohmo--real name Henry Laufer--has evolved.

For every song that issues a challenge, there are two that play nice.

It means well and conjures fellow feeling and makes you think the long thoughts. But it is a trudge, and strangely ponderous in its smallness.

Heard one song at a time, Wilder Mind builds convincing dramas. But Mumford & Sons’ greatest skill--their strategic crescendos--starts to feel like a formula over the course of the album.

Some of the strongest songs on this up-and-down album sound like lost 1998 Stretch and Bobbito freestyles.

Emotion is full of pure cotton candy--delicious, distractingly sweet and filling, with a mildly suspicious aftertaste.... [The album is] full of excellent songs that seem to give up about two-thirds of the way through.

While he’s well served by the rugged immediacy of the mix--make no mistake, it’s an improvement--his songwriting lags noticeably behind his musical prowess. And he sings much of the album on falsetto, a thin part of his vocal range.

The successes tend to be love songs.... But those songs arrive late in the album; first come oddities and overreaches.

The number and potency of these guests sometimes make Cass County sound like a tribute album to someone not yet gone. They also take away from Mr. Henley, now 68, whose voice has decayed nicely, though it now lacks the wise punch it had on “The End of the Innocence,” his excellent 1989 album.

The bigger change is in the songs, which no longer promise that rock brashness can overpower adversity.... It’s a daring, deliberate shift for Cage the Elephant. But in its single-mindedness, the album sacrifices the wildly seesawing balance between life force and mortality that gave the band its verve.

This is a record that never stops threatening to be dull--in the way that Miley Cyrus’s record of mind-blurt autonomy from this year was dull--but rarely is, except when others try to streamline a lumpy aesthetic.

Throughout this album, Mr. Malik opts for a low-octane approach, with varying success.

"The Colour in Anything" grows self-pitying, almost maudlin, in ways Mr. Blake has managed to avoid in the past simply by using more elusive lyrical metaphors. It is also unreasonably long: a little over an hour and a quarter.

It’s an experimental record that often sounds like a meditative one, or vice versa, and it often seems better on paper than through the speakers.

There are a few too many moments--starting with “Mercy,” the opening track--when Mr. Cobb seems fixated on the idea of Ms. Bishop as a new Dusty Springfield. The ghost of “Dusty in Memphis” hovers over much of the album, and while there are worse problems to have, it runs the risk of putting Ms. Bishop in the same corner where a Leon Bridges passes as an acceptable stand-in for Sam Cooke.

On this pleasantly familiar if not especially imaginative new album, the band’s subject matter verges on the bittersweet, or just outright bitter, but still they grin. ... The album is overlong, and full of songs that have achieved their purpose by the halfway mark.

For this album, she made musical choices that hold back the songs.

When this album whispers, as it does on large swaths of the second half, it neuters Ms. Lambert’s gifts. Even with a voice as signature as hers, there’s little to elevate songs like “Good Ol’ Days” or “Dear Old Sun.”

Jubilant but spotty.

She’s still a strong singer, especially on “Told You So,” but some of her essential grit is lost to the machines.

The [title] song finds a breezy balance between earnestness and exhilaration. Elsewhere, that balance falters, and Everything Now becomes a slighter album than its predecessors.

Revival is probably the best of his recent albums, but like much of his post-peak output, it is a mix of the entrancing and the mystifying, full of impressive rapping that’s also disorienting.

KOD, his fifth album, has the feel of a casual placeholder between bigger ideas--it has neither the grim purpose or intense emotional acuity of his 2016 LP “4 Your Eyez Only,” nor the cohesion of the prior one, “2014 Forest Hills Drive,” the record that set the terms for his new direction.

Excess was always a part of his proposition, but this album drags and seeps, with long stretches of shrug in between moments of invention.

What’s most notable is how relatively natural and at ease Bhad Bhabie, the nonprofessional of the pair, sounds as compared with Ms. Cyrus. ... On the entertaining if erratic 15, Bhad Bhabie raps like someone who is learning to rap in real time, which to be fair, she is. ... Even though she deviates from her trash-talk flow on a couple of occasions--the faux-Young Thug melodies of “Trust Me” and “No More Love”--Bhad Bhabie otherwise has a honed sense of self-presentation.

Millennials could use a band that can play instruments in real time, that exults in musical possibilities, that wants to make both a ruckus and a difference. On its debut album, Greta Van Fleet isn’t that band.

Refreshingly, Christmas Is Here! is the least antic of its holiday albums, with a patient “Where Are You Christmas?” and non-asphyxiating moments of expanding the holiday canon, including a cover of the Neighbourhood’s “Sweater Weather.” ... It’s jolting when more lustrous, nuanced singers arrive for duets--Maren Morris on “When You Believe” and, most strikingly, Kelly Clarkson, warm and robust on “Grown-Up Christmas List.” But they are a temporary dam: The Casio-preset vocals are an unstoppable torrent, and these eerie, plastic songs may well make Pentatonix the Mannheim Steamroller of the 2030s, the 2050s, maybe even the 2110s.

Listening to the album as a whole, there are diminishing returns from the certainty that a new gimmick is coming every eight bars. Pop songs live by their hooks; it’s no wonder that Merton’s debut album piles them on, eager to please. But for the follow-up, suspense and spontaneity--even if it’s an illusion--would go a long way.

No one is quite as adept amid a range of styles as Sheeran. ... But right near the top of this album, he stretches too thin. On “South of the Border,” which features Camila Cabello and Cardi B, Sheeran dips into a little Spanish, as has become de rigueur, and leans into the tired trope that going “south of the border” is where real freedom reigns. ... But even though this record presents countless opportunities for Sheeran to fumble, there is something to be said for his choice to release it at all.

Affable but slightly numbing. ... But by and large, these are polite songs, and familiar, too. Balvin is a sweetly elegiac singer — see especially “Azul,” where he stretches out soft vowels like taffy — but his rapping is largely blank.

“Folklore” songs fall into roughly two camps — excellent Swift-penned songs that are sturdy enough to bear the production, and others that end up obscured by murk.

“Smile” doesn’t have much of an agenda beyond a general feeling of uplift, and it has a lightness that makes it a better and more nimble record than its predecessor. All I’m asking of a Katy Perry song is for it to make me feel marginally happier than I did three and a half minutes prior. There are a handful of songs on “Smile” that do the trick. Though the singles have flopped, “Smile” provides an excuse to revisit them — most are better than they got credit for.

Clark and her co-producer, Jack Antonoff, have clearly had fun with the creation of this finely tuned alternate universe, but at a point, its many detailed references start to feel like clutter, preventing the songs from moving too freely in their own ways.

It demonstrates how sonically rigorous even the most casual, tossed-off Drake songs are. But its storytelling doesn’t always hold up to strict scrutiny. ... “Certified Lover Boy” is his least musically imaginative album, the one where he pushes himself the least in terms of method and pattern.

It is an album that aims to repel, or if not quite that, then at least is at peace with alienating some of its audience. ... [The album] often feels insular, lyrically and musically. “Mr. Morale” is probably Lamar’s least tonally consistent work. ... Rangy and structurally erratic, full of mid-song beat switches, sorrowful piano and a few moments of dead air.