You can’t hear The Feeling in his voice, which is still one of the most infectiously beautiful in the industry, because as his faith has saved him from his pain, his production team has saved his voice from Justin. It makes for a series of unbeatable mainstream and crossover singles, and a desensitized, unnerving album.

As is, Teenage Emotions reads more like that freshman-year college paper you really wish you’d just deleted off your hard drive.

RJD2 is still in a class of his own, and The Colossus is charming enough. Krohn might have temporarily given up on expanding his stylistic horizons, but he sounds comfortable again, certainly a small step taken toward a more fortunate future.

Mistake may be a solid, somewhat complex electronic music release, but its nerdy precision has the tendency to render the melancholic, brooding melodies somewhat impotent.

Drift is a step up from Devil’s Music (2016), which attempted to recreate Leave Home’s career-making abrasion with little of its viscerality. On the other hand, with nearly every song on the album performed in a different style, Drift lacks the cohesion of The Men’s less acclaimed albums.

It continues to be true that instrumental synth of this caliber is a perfect backdrop, but today it gives the impression of digital trompe-l’œil, a backdrop devoid of foreground, a Real Hero as crash test dummy.

Schmaltziness is the only real pitfall here.

A real slog to get through.

The collages he’s created are undoubtedly lovely, but as they stand, the songs sound more like attractive opportunities for great musicality than confident realizations of it.

What’s important is confirming that you haven’t completely lost it, that you’ve still got the inspiration that made us listen in the first place--Donkey, however, is in danger of making us forget.

On most of Keep Your Dreams, Canyons are trying too hard to be everything all the time. It's obvious they have all the tools they'll need, but it'll be a little longer before they build something really worthwhile.

His songs are built around solid hooks and show enough dynamism to keep the listener from hitting the ‘next’ button, but when the album is through playing, there’s no pressing need to hit ‘play’ again.

This album is no disaster, no Moonbeams and Bluejeans, but the benign flatness here suggests the ineffable whatever that made The Fall fascinating has fallen away, and it looks very far gone.

As Damaged Bug, John Dwyer exposes new horror, though perhaps that’s not quite it. Perhaps horror is hyperbolic. Perhaps as Damaged Bug, Dwyer exposes anxiety as ambience. Inescapable static.

There's something inherently adolescent about an EP that veers sharply from genre to genre, each song an island, completely separate from those that precede and those that follow.

He has always played it warm and safe, but in this album, he is playing it warmer and safer than ever....Lukewarm this album is, indeed.

The listener is unfulfilled at the album's end. We learn nothing new about Sole, who's the only character on the album.... There's nothing to grip on to. All the lyrics are observations twisted into weak witticisms.

None of the other songs are as instantly arresting, aside from “Plenty of Girls in the Sea,” which proves to be just as fruitless and repetitive as the aforementioned single.

There’s enough pulling power to draw you in, just not enough to get you hooked.

During some of the more composed moments, the album manages to shine out in semi desolate wonder; but most of the time, Monsoon sounds too much like the Jonathan Richman two-piece band from There's Something About Mary to outrun the malaise of mediocrity that blankets it.

Contains a set of willingly - and often tedious - half-finished songs, forming a clumsy collage (cover art reference) that is actually more coherent and better enjoyed when contextualized within the band's 34-year trajectory.

It's end-of-summer music.

If anything, it's nothing: a dark, expensive, teenager programmed, radio-friendly, MTV-destined nothing.

While that combination [hip-hop beat, industrial trudge, start-stop synth] yields some moments of blissful jitteriness and pop rejiggering, Mr. Impossible never gets too far past being big, dumb, and unquantifiably creepy.

Rosie Thomas is just a little too ordinary.

Only about a third enjoyable.

On Neighborhood Watch, their delivery is stale and unimpressive, much like the overproduced Expansion Team.

While Mars Volta distinguished its high-volume concept and freak-out-the-neighbors formula with its apocalyptic wails and catastrophic soundscapes, Sparta has developed a middle-of-the-road rock entity, seldom swaying away from its new and unimproved sound structure.