It could have stood to cut five or six entries, starting with “Memphis.” That would have left “Fuckin’ Up the Disco,” an homage to his own “Let the Groove Get In,” as the album’s opening track — a starting point that motions towards what does work about the album versus the places in which it completely falls flat.

It’s another daring swerve, but while she often arrives at genuine moments of beauty, the end result is uneven.

2093 takes enough daring leaps out of typical Yeat territory to warrant repeat listens, but Yeat’s ambition ends up being the album’s undoing. At 78 minutes, 2093 ends up feeling monotonous, even as Yeat’s exploration into new sounds and cadences yields occasionally interesting results.

Vultures is a serviceable record. The production, in typical post-My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy fashion, is sparse. While it won’t be confused for a masterpiece, it shows that West is still good at being a producer. He puts Ty Dolla Sign in position to sound as bubbly as he’s been since the Obama era.

Dolly’s warmth, up-for-anything spirit, and common touch bring almost everything she does endearingly down to earth, and at 77, she’s able to hold her own and work well with every heavy hitter who rolls through. .... The new material struggles to get noticed amid all of the classic-rock fireworks. It also might’ve been nice if more songs had been culled from her own story.

As a representative of a modern production-by-committee rap album in 2023, Set It Off achieves a modest goal of being erratic yet diverting.

Drake meanders through yet another collection of superlong streaming bait. For All the Dogs may have its sparks. But too often, he settles for subliminal bars aimed at rivals like Kanye West and Pusha T, keeping it “gangsta” by putting down women and, of course, filling up the piggy bank.

Do You Sleep at Night offers little in terms of actual ingenuity. Instead, it presents a smattering of existing tropes thrown at the wall with little in terms of depth.

The reality is that while Scott is a masterful curator, he’s just an OK rapper. Those two realities are discordant for too many moments on Utopia.

Almost every track finds Post in some tortured posture like this, singing cheerily into a bottle he’s doomed to finish. They’re largely fine songs, and clever, but lighter than Post seems to want them to be.

Is it too much? Reader, it’s way too much. But it’s hard to say it doesn’t work when “too much” was clearly the point. It’s less “a swing and a miss” than “a swing that rips open a hole in the time-space continuum.”

Such moments excepted ["Oh U Went" and "Wit the Racks"], the content of Business Is Business feels bland, especially for an expectations-thwarting artist like Thug.

Of course, even the weaker songs have their dance-floor potential. Petras is, above all else, a pure fan of pop music and the feeling it exudes. But in chasing her new status as the type of pop star who has Top 40 potential, she abandoned the freakishly forward-thinking personality that built her a base to begin with. Here, the beast has been tamed.

Ideally, Durk would have cut five or so songs and tightened Almost Healed into a clearer portrait of his struggle to leave his pistol-scarred past behind. Instead, he offers his fans a buffet of listening options, some better than others.

Give her credit for trying to turn her growing pains into prickly, sometimes enjoyable art, even if the Pieces don’t always match the overall effort.

Across 19 tracks, the metamorphosis isn’t exactly comprehensive: about a third of the songs here sound submerged in the fog of his early records, and another third are too sketch-like to land as well as the best songs do.

It is another Don Toliver album, recommended if you like the other Don Toliver albums. The opener sets the temperature, and it is perfectly temperate, full of springy trap drums, pointillist guitars, and a whole host of Dons Toliver, alternately spectral and keening, dissolving in and out of focus. ... At this point, it’s worth considering his superficiality more of a feature than a bug.

This megadose of Wallen doesn’t only ensure that One Thing at a Time will be lodged at the top of the charts for a while — alongside Dangerous, which is currently at Number Five on the Billboard 200 — it also reveals his preferred musical and lyrical tropes, as well as his fondness for simple, slippery vocal melodies that easily stick in listeners’ brains.

He sticks to the persona he established with his 2016 mixtape The Artist, evoking a young man whose rap life affords him every desire, yet still gets rattled when a relationship goes sideways, or when opps cross him in the streets. These are themes he mines over and over, deploying melodious hooks and diaristic lyrics to keep them fresh. The result is an hour-plus album with few surprises.

On the frisky and more limber Act 1. ... Working with an assortment of collaborators, including producer and songwriter Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic, members of the soul-revivalist band the Dap-Kings, and nimble modern producers like Tone and Some Randoms, Legend sets his smooth, elastic voice to the most seductive and slinkiest grooves of his career. ... On Act 2, Legend succumbs to his usual supper-club decorum.

Only Built for Infinity Links find Quavo and Takeoff more than capable of conjuring the old Migos magic by themselves. It’s a patchy collection that seems to go on a bit too long despite a 59-minute running time.

Listening to Khaled’s albums is like searching for blessings amidst the chaff, and the signal-to-noise ratio is generally low. But God Did isn’t as torturously bad as, say, 2019’s Father of Asahd.

Swift came out of the gate sounding bright-eyed but remarkably seasoned. [December 5, 2012]

At 30 tracks and classified as his fourth album, The Last Slimeto feels like an overstuffed, overlong and sometimes-compelling compact disc from the No Limit years.

At times, 2000 strains under its ambition. It’s unclear whether Bada$$ wants to build an Important Album or simply release something commensurate with his growing celebrity.

If only the lyrics were as articulate as the melodies and playing. [Jul - Aug 22, p.120]

On the occasions when his slinky guitar takes center stage — like on melancholy instrumental renditions of the Pet Sounds tracks “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” and “Caroline, No,” or the first half of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” — the results are predictably serviceable. But Depp’s pro forma, double-tracked vocals provide scant additional justification for the project’s existence; and in a few unfortunate cases (like when he attempts a soul croon on Smokey Robinson’s “Ooo Baby Baby”) you won’t be able to find the skip button fast enough.

This fire hose of arch-pop cleverness will overload even the sharpest mind. [Jul - Aug 2022, p.120]