It's a decent album with good intentions.

This is a mostly meandering, unfocused collection of half-finished sketches.

The album plays like a diluted version of Twin Shadow, with discernible traces of everyone from neo-R&B singer Miguel to power-pop sister act Haim.

The music does its best to couch Smith’s melodramatic overreach in swoonily supple adult pop, but only on “Like I Can”--a grand, reach-for-the-sky imprecation focused more on his rival’s shortcomings than on what he himself brings to the table--does it have enough conviction to counter what he is singing.

50 really needed to make an essential record to regain relevancy. Being merely good at this point isn’t enough.

The problem is that he shows no growth--besides realizing, along with his producers, that if you throw every hook known to man into the pop ocean, you are bound to catch something.

We’d let the silly lyrics and robotic tempos of Sean Kingston’s sophomore album slide if it were mid-July and we were in the mood for Euro-disco/reggae mash-ups, and straight-up electro-pop. But in autumn we can’t abide clumsily constructed sentiments.

Alphabutt doesn't do Dawson many favors by putting her twee infantility into its proper context.

The only time the Neighbourhood really comes to life here is on the disc’s final track, refreshingly summery toe-tapper “Stuck With You.” That track aside, this release will do little to convince critics that the Neighbourhood is anything more than Maroon 5’s monochromatic photo negative, and about as intriguing as that descriptor suggests.

Undoubtedly one of the strangest albums in recent memory.

Road is a similarly one-dimensional variation on the singer's Grumpy Uncle Neil mode. A semi-concept album revolving around eco-cars and the failing economy, it. . . You've already walked away, haven't you?

On his debut, Lewis is engaging and diverse, but he also fails to excite or provoke.

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.

Kelley and Hubbard are genial enough hosts but the preponderance of monochromatic, midtempo tracks--occasionally featuring awkward, rapid fire rap-sung interludes--blend into an indistinguishable blur that may be sufficient while the party lasts but aren’t as memorable after the buzz wears off.

There is, of course, beauty to be wrung from sadness, and Ghost Stories has several lovely passages of outright melancholy.... But it can get a bit dreary and a couple of dollops of other emotions--anger, for one--could’ve gone a ways toward varying the mood.

Even the club bangers ("Phresh Out the Runway" and "Numb," featuring Eminem) are heavy with bass that rumbles more in your chest instead of rattling your feet. Ballads work well for Rihanna, and this album has two of her finest.

On Sleep Through the Static, Johnson has returned to his five basic modes of shuffling and stargazing, all of which are plenty easy on the ears but somehow flabbier.

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.

Only a few tunes here--notably “Constantinople,” with brilliant Middle Eastern guitar by Sergeant--approach the energy of classic Echo tracks. Most are slow and labored with monotonously downbeat lyrics.

Mostly, though, Victorious simply colors within the lines drawn by others, scratching the itch of those already inclined to seek it out.

Unlike Nickelback, Daughtry offers recognizable human emotions, even if they are rendered clumsily.

Jackson's decision to recycle the nympho routine one more time is just boring.

LotusFlow3r is perhaps the most palatable of the three albums, a guitar-driven collection of rockers and slow jams. There's a lot to like here....Still, they can't save the album from its turkeys.

It sounds like every last detail was worked out through numbing compromise.

A lot of these songs will have people bouncing off club walls with the rhythmic shifts and frenzied beats that merge electro with crunk and house. But this adds up to nothing more than party music with a bit of attitude and sex-obsessed defiance.

Snoop Dogg returns on the resurrected Priority label, and the savvy businessman and MC has his ears attuned to the charts with few surprises and only momentary bursts of inspiration.

“Living With War,” his 2006 album about President George W. Bush, was a dud, and so is this new one.

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.