There’s an identity crisis in the way the band veers radically from hard-edged rock to slick, superficial pop. There are too many lyrical cliches.

Grass Punks essentially consists of scaffolding for material to come later, which may be why Brosseau keeps the proceedings under a brisk half hour. Simplicity can be a virtue, but it’s not enough on its own.

Ink mostly relies on a nasal singsong flow that, too often, accidentally detours into monotony over slickly produced club beats borrowed from better sources.

Morello is all over this album with mixed results. There are some great songs here.

The rapper/musician born Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. tries to recapture the pop success of his debut with smartly conceived hooky songs while also churning out overly familiar trap-informed grooves.

With other contributions from folks like Bon Iver, Regina Spektor, Randy Newman, and Paul Simon, it’s an interesting, if uneven, experiment but Gabriel fans will likely find versions that scratch their itch.

This album is a wildly schizoid affair that ranges from open-throttle guitar rock to croakingly out-of-tune ballads and bizarre electronica.

Give Scholz credit for trying to plug the gap, though with up-and-down results. Boston diehards will be intrigued, but the overall album might not translate to the general public.

By its second track, “Down in the Dirt,” this album has already sunk into undifferentiated aural mud, with 19 more doses of thin drums, buried vocals, and shredding guitar to come.

The wildly popular quintet’s third studio album, is buffered to a flawless shine, but along the way they’ve bleached the music of nuance and texture.

Jonathan Meiburg’s weary, swooping baritone (he sings like a sentient cello) and the sighing cabin-folk that works so well for “A Wake for the Minotaur” (an original duet with tourmate Van Etten snuck in on a technicality) flattens out much of the album.

At times, the change is refreshing, yet too often he seems to think the world needs more songs evoking Train or Lifehouse.

She experiments at times with a more gravelly voice, suggesting a bid for more street appeal, but the overall effect is stiff and mechanical, minus the warmth for which she is known.

Most of this is too wan to give Blunt a career boost.

It is the Montreal rockers’ most hit-or-miss effort, at once arresting for its audacity and kaleidoscopic swirl of influences but often exhausting with songs that buckle under their own weight.

Despite some deft, defiant turns the set suffers from inconsistency.

If you’re a total Chilton completist, you might want this album, but it’s not for everyone.

While Closer to the Truth is smartly frontloaded with a heap of glossy South Beach bangers--including the fiery, heavenly heave of “Take It Like a Man,” the noir throb of “Dressed to Kill,” and “Red,” which hits you like a rum punch to the face--the second wind of her 26th album, presumably designed for the drive home from the club, seems to insist she’s more than a remix ingredient or Auto-tune fodder.

It’s the rare number not bracketed by abrasively chintzy guitar noise meant to read as “rawk,” shudder-inducing synths, and jarring percussive machinery.

Unfortunately, the set doesn’t quite command as a fully realized piece.

Occasionally the band’s vision pays off here.

Unfortunately, Tesfaye can veer toward the portentous with his youthful, conflicted lyrical vision, which often confuses sex with love.

Ultimately, though, the album is weighed down by verbose lyrics and excess ambition.

These new songs are so amiable that you wonder where they’re meant to take you. Often the breezy journey--while pleasant enough--leads to dead ends.

A few tunes here transcend their formulaic trappings, including the heartfelt “Dirt Road Diary” and the gauzy summer-at-the-beach memories of “Roller Coaster.” But the majority of the record is given over to Party games we’ve heard Bryan--and many others in contemporary country--play before.

The Brit funk-soul band’s first record in six years is a solid, if uneven, effort that marks a reunion with N’Dea Davenport.

Double entendres are commonplace in pop, but here he descends into wink-and-nod juvenilia.

Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros finds the band/collective in the less useful act of simply aping a style, in this case the electric praise music of feel-good Christian hippies.