Since half of experiencing Tangerine Reef comes from experiencing the visuals it accompanies, it’s hard for me to really vibe with this album as a complete thing. Really it feels less than that, like a side table, a bed frame, or a pierced hole in an ear with no earring in it.

Drake offers little here that does not retread the sonic and narrative territory of his previous work.

Everything about Everything is Love feels superficial, from the artists’ constant pronouncement of their love for each other to their engagement with topics like fashion, art, watches (this gets its own category), social issues, how great their friends are, sports, and, indeed, their own lives. The most boring aspect of the album is its centerpiece: the couple’s obsession with their wealth.

Colors dispels a greater notion of contemporary selfhood with its sheer tastelessness. It holds status as the most truly perplexing move from the artist to date. Unfortunately, the result of that move is borderline unlistenable.

Younger Now is a hookless, joyless, profitable success.

The shallow cynicism and apathy that animates so many of its songs are under-interrogated by its writers, instead finding form as a pessimist’s non-committal, inconclusive pouting.

The only thing Arcade Fire’s Everything Now is about is Arcade Fire, which is its most pernicious and pathetic quality. Arcade Fire are no longer Orpheus and Eurydice, lovers doomed to tragedy; now they are Narcissus, the Greek hunter who lost the will to live after staring at his own reflection in a pond for too long. They ask their listeners to participate in this cynicism as they grasp so falsely at explanations for why “we” are like this.

With two exceptions (Desiigner and, uh, Damon Albarn), the [guest artists] completely fail to elevate the tracks in any way, an unfortunate consequence of needing to feature Charli XCX on your album because she’s good and popular as hell rather than because you and Charli XCX have made any particularly interesting music together.

The release’s awkward format and patronizing presentation are among the least of its poor qualities: Even for the heads, Kaleidoscope offers very little not already heard elsewhere. ... In addition to the previously mentioned Chainsmokers pair-up, there is the very ungainly Big Sean feature “Miracles (Something Special),” which, wearing more than a few embarrassing, auto-generated reverential name-drops.

Climate Change is an album about nothing. It hears nothing, speaks nothing, and sees nothing. It could be about partying, but even that subject is given such perfunctory treatment that what’s left hardly rewards participation.

In some ways, it is as an exercise in stripping away everything that makes The Flaming Lips such a truly special group, leaving only that which serves as decorative tinsel to their music, hanging limp and lifelessly in the air.

Musically, there are too many things going on and too few things going on. Every track sounds more or less the same, and every track sounds like a poor heyday tribute.

Birds’s stripped-down approach bares an utter lack of finesse behind a microphone.

Schmilco is missing the same spark that drove Schmilsson. Where Nilsson was relentless in pursuit of something other than settling down, Tweedy has gone the other way.

Katy B’s stultifying lyrics, paired with an EMI-sponsored coterie of established DJs, producers, and vocalists, surgically selected as if delegates of their respective niches, evince only the sound of the culture industry at work.

The other 14 contributions barely stand apart from one another, a rushed bile of the same sounds being used over and over again by unidentifiable producers, with only Bonobo delivering a track whose atmosphere extends beyond that of gimmicky tie-in music territory.

Many of This Unruly Mess I’ve Made’s flaws could’ve very well been forgotten, or at least temporarily swept under the rug, had the actual music been good.

Every aspect of the album sounds like the full-length equivalent of a Spotify Chill Out playlist: flat, disposable, inoffensive (though “technically-sound”) 2010s muzak.

Lantern comes off like Birchard wallowing in an uncharacteristic and blissful tedium.

Minus a few semi-refreshing exceptions that see Brian Wilson team up with old bandmate Jardine--is more or less artistically bankrupt, failing as it largely does to communicate or emotionalize anything of Wilson’s concrete being or of the 21st century in which he now finds himself.

Sometimes Avi Buffalo’s entrance into the gauntlet of the undisguised voice leads to a pretty song or two, maybe a moment of blissful pop; but more often than not, the songs whimper without much intelligible emotion.

Forgettable melodies and arrangements abound on the mid-tempo tracks that comprise the bulk of Moonshine.

The only crime Lazaretto commits that wasn’t already covered by his misogynistic solo debut, Blunderbuss, is being really boring.

Food is another sad testament to how the squares have won and how we’re all likely to capitulate at one point or another to the dictates of the majority.

All of this is borderline insulting to its target audience, myself included. For a moment in “Brand New,” Williams lets us see his hand, and it subtly reveals how incredibly marketed and capital-centric this album is.

So, largely unimaginative arrangements, flat delivery, a surfeit of vague ecological metaphors that wash like spray on the rocks (you can have that one for free, Mr. Hansen), and a lack of any sense of connection, of need, of reality.

It’s “Lost Boys and Girls Club,” “Cult of Love,” and “Trouble Is My Name” (“Trouble is my name/ Is it your name too?”), endless clichés in songwriting, narrative, subject, and sound.

Sometimes, like on the outstanding "Wrecking Ball," the emotion calcifies into catchy, mature hooks, propelled forth by Cyrus' oft-underestimated vocal heft. Then again, the breakup also produced "FU," a dismally adolescent electro-soul duet with French Montana.