Even as she and her producers flaunt their layered vocals and whiz-bang sound effects, there are already so many of Sia’s midtempo victim-to-victory anthems around that they offer diminishing returns, particularly when listened to as an album.

On Keep On Loving You, her spotty 25th studio album, her voice still has that slightly nasal quality that makes it sound always on the edge of a harangue, even though she rarely bares her fangs anymore.

While diversity is Lil Wayne's strength, it's a lack of commitment of a different sort that hamstrings this album. Too often Lil Wayne lapses into predictable flow structures, quick ideas paired with built-in rejoinders.

But all that queenliness, and the sameness of the tempo, start to wear you down. It's not until the 10th track, "Put It in a Love Song," that the record starts to bristle with a less regal impulse: flirting.

There isn’t a flicker of musical edge on this album, only a belief in the crowdsourcing of ideas. Where Halsey sets herself apart is in her subject matter and manner of delivery.

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.

Keyshia Cole tries for a slow burn but rarely ignites on her fourth album, Calling All Hearts.

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.

There are moments on the album with too many bland and anonymous pop chord progressions...Yet here and there the idiosyncratic, headstrong musician emerges. [17 Oct 2005]

Individually, the songs are catchy, but as they pile up over the length of the album, it's impossible not to wonder whether the singer's endless complaints didn't drive everyone away. [8 Nov 2004]

Just Like You is a workmanlike pop album with shrewdly punky touches, like a ready-made outfit from the mall chain Hot Topic. It flatters Ms. Iraheta as a singer but too often suggests other empowered female stars, like Pink or Brandi Carlile or Kelly Clarkson.

It’s a lackluster album, floated by two or three strong singles.

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

There's something rather unambitious about this set.

Two Lanes is an album that’s all compromise and almost no courage, a coloring book that hasn’t been filled in. He is a star resting on what look like laurels but are actually fallacies.

That Mr. Owen rarely sounds out of place is a testament to his mutable, honeyed voice, but also to his fundamental blankness, meaning he rises and falls with the mode he chooses to adopt. And when he chooses poorly, it stings.

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.

The best songs on “Hero” were disarmingly detailed, and sometimes funny. “Girl,” however, tips away from those strengths in favor of self-help bromides broad enough to exclude no one.

It sounds so good; really, it sounds better than it is.

When the Game isn't rapping about other rappers--which is rare--he is sometimes rapping like other rappers.

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

This is music that tries to be over-the-top and uncool: too hard, sometimes. But more often the songs are too contagious and exuberant to dislike.

As an album “The Best Damn Thing” is too relentless to be heard end to end. Its songs are expected to bring occasional jolts to a playlist. [16 Apr 2007]

“Songs of Surrender” is the weightier project. Like all of U2’s albums, it’s anything but casual; the songs have been minutely reconsidered. ... But for most of “Songs of Surrender,” less is simply less. What comes across throughout the 40 songs is not intimacy, but distance: the inescapable fact that these songs are being rethought and revived years later, not created anew. Wild original impulses have been replaced by latter-day self-consciousness.

The old Cat Stevens, who pondered earthly loves and sorrows and spiritual yearning, has been replaced by a songwriter who finds all his answers in faith. [13 Nov 2006]

Claustrophobic with multitracked vocals and baroque effects, the album lacks the wiry catchiness of hits like “Banquet.” [5 Feb 2007]

Ms. Hilson is clobbered on all sides by ornate production.

Yet while the album includes its share of blandly pleasant songs--the kind that could position Ms. Avi as a less arty Feist--there are also glints of melancholy clarity that promise more.