This charming man's bowshots at English society can get repetitive. [Apr 2020, p.87]

Sweet, solid collection about fatherhood and quitting cigarettes, sounding like the National. [Apr 2020, p.87]

Settles on muscular, tasteful adult pop that's often autobiographical. [Mar 2020, p.91]

My Turn succeeds as a showcase of Lil Baby’s talent, but it still feels flat on due to its excessive length, the fact that every song is almost exactly three minutes, and the way it recycles 808 patterns and harmonic structures.

Unfortunately, the music doesn’t do the lyrics any favors, a real surprise coming from an artists whose earlier LPs established her as one of indie-pop’s sharpest melodists.

Miss Anthropocene is no doubt a work of ambition, and Boucher’s aims at bringing further awareness to the climate crisis are noble. ... Yet what the album actually has to say about climate change is often lost under the admittedly beautiful, meticulously composed wreckage. By the album’s end, Boucher has abandoned the muddled villainous pretext in favor of her own utopian fantasies.

The 16 songs on Changes focus almost exclusively on the logistics of having sex when you are both hot, young, and working in fields that require a lot of time apart. The concept itself is kind of funny, but the execution is often unimaginative and cliché, especially given how earnestly Bieber delivers every line, no matter how ridiculous.

In the end, what could be an album of well-earned indulgence ends up being as much about reaching outward than burrowing inward, rendering deep personal suffering with a humane light touch. And It’s Still Alright the heartening sound of music pulling him through his pain, and, hopefully, past it into something like solace.

A sophisticated, personal set. [Jan 2020, p.84]

It’s hard for a band like STP to change and grow, especially after the losses of two iconic frontmen, so perhaps Perdida will function more like a steppingstone to something greater. But for now, they sound like half the band they used to be.

There are moments of pop bliss on the Petties' latest to rival their Eighties hits. [Feb 2020, p.85]

Funeral is wildly uneven, a landscape of pronounced highs and lows.

It’s fair to say Louis can break free as well. That doesn’t happen enough on Walls.

Musically, he gestures towards the current hip-hop world a little more intentionally than his hermetic-sounding albums have tended to in the recent past. ... In a new lyrical wrinkle, Em steps into the role of political commentator and protest voice, with mixed results.

His once-golden voice is gravelly and weathered, but the genius still flashes. [Jan 2020, p.84]

Their 10th album sounds as though they had been sitting on it since [1994]. [Jan 2020, p.84]

The plaintive, direct singing mode is West’s best delivery vehicle across the album. The rapping is uniformly lackluster when not delivered by one of the brothers Thornton in their return as legendary rap duo Clipse.

They’re trapped in the dusk on most of the album, and it’s the few beacons of light here, when they sound like they’re all having fun, that cut through the darkness and make for great Pixies songs.

While the QC headliners spend much of Vol. 2 spinning their wheels, the undercards provide the more compelling draw and show occasional flashes of brilliance.

The special-guests duets record is a famously fraught exercise, one that’s almost predestined to be bogged down by its own attention-grabbing premise. Threads hardly escapes that predicament, but it’s filled with enough solid songcraft to make one hope that Crow isn’t, in fact, truly done with record making for good.

They rarely take these topics [mental health, relationships, addiction, and their faith in God] too far past surface level brushes, resulting in a lot of talking sad and saying nothing.

He is a genuinely engaging artist who raps with impressive intensity and clarity, if not nuance. He confronts his incurable sadness head-on, and it’s easy to identify with his mental health struggles. But for an album about depression, The Search contains a noticeable lack of tension and interior texture.

Most of his 10th album, Port of Miami 2, is Ross exactly as you know and love him: the obscene boasts, the window-cracking bass, the speedboat cool, the various spins on raps-to-riches success.

The Big Day contains about as much tonal variation as a leather-bound wedding photo album. Chance is more interested in celebrating the miracle of love than examining love’s warts, or the labor required to build and sustain a lasting marriage.

The Lost Tapes II, is a grab bag of loose tracks from this era, four very different album sessions, and naturally it’s a messy display of the many sides of Nas – storyteller, street life narrator, conscious MC, rap showboat, true-school historian, emo diarist – at both his most essential and least essential.

As a stand-alone piece of music, its pacing tends to remain too static to uphold its heavy premise. The best songs arrive far too late, and early tracks like “How Many Times” and “Giant Baby” can be hard to distinguish from recent Coyne experiments like 2017’s Oczy Mlody.

One of the greatest rhythm sections to ever rub-a-dub on planet Earth, Sly and Robbie’s client roster has included Dylan, Madonna, Serge Gainsbourg, and No Doubt. But the team’s best jams are the most deeply rooted in the Jamaican music they helped invent — at the core of Peter Tosh’s band; with the Compass Point All-Stars; and on their own Taxi Records sessions, source of some of the reggae canon’s mightiest sides. Their ur-grooves justify from the get-go Red Gold Green & Blue, a set of blues, r&b and soul covers of the sort that might otherwise land like pro-forma, unessential nostalgia.

Sheeran’s unobtrusively sweet voice easily slips between genres, but he struggles to connect with many of his A-list guest artists, deepening the album’s isolated mood.