The Life of Pablo was chaotic, insecure, yet often brilliant. Ye is more chaotic, less secure, with enough sporadic flashes of brilliance to make you hungry for much, much more. It could have been worse.

Where his debut album that followed, Nine Track Mind, stumbled in its efforts to give him an identity in a sea of bright-eyed male pop stars, Voicenotes feels like a step, at the very least, in the right direction.

It's mood music (bad-mood music, to be exact) and, despite coming from a band called the Body, it's largely formless; much of the time the songs just seem to end.

The meandering LP can't bear the weight of the man at the piano's indulgences.

It's expertly-crafted and likable, but rarely as gripping as its models.

The 18 tracks of Beerbongs become an ouroboros of new-money narcissism: Post's obsession with flexing, partying, and banging groupies feeds a growing paranoia that the people around him only like him for exactly those attributes. And it is no small irony that the album's most convincing moments occur when he drops the cool rapper pretense and gets all lonesome cowboy.

With Sting's familiar bass sound driving most tracks, and Shaggy's production partner Sting International (no relation) providing bounce and clarity, 44/876 contains much of the sizzle of classic reggae or dancehall, though a little more substance would've been welcome too.

Vocally, Tinashe is probably more musically adept than half of the artists she emulates. But she won't truly carve out her own space until she figures out who she is.

The best moments on Revamp, featuring big names from pop, rock and R&B, are those least faithful to the originals. ... Less successful are efforts of John's glam-pop heirs, like Lady Gaga, who tries and fails to match the master's rococo ebullience.

His music and his style are both impeccably tailored. Those perfect lines can be more admirable than breathtaking, though, and they're remarkably easy to glide right past.

The Decemberists do a very particular thing – darkly ornate, literary-minded, self-consciously verbose Anglophile prog-folk-rock--exceedingly well, so well that you can't blame 'em for wanting to do something else. They do just that on I'll Be Your Girl, at least in parts, the upshot being, well, a re-affirmation of that particular thing they do exceedingly well.

He aspires to be more than the face of so-called "mumble rap." Yet Lil Boat 2's best moments are when he reverts to the familiar.

Tough but warm, Temet contains the handclaps, female vocal responders, and grain-mortar and goatskin tindé percussion of Tuareg music, but with gnarlier guitars and no ululating exclamations.

Although Both Sides of the Sky--the third volume in a vault clearing that began in 2010 with Valleys of Neptune (close to a must hear) and continued with 2013's People, Hell and Angels (a little less close)--repeats songs and fragments found in more fully developed versions elsewhere, it still offers plenty of thrills, as, time and again, Hendrix pushes solos along the knife-edge that separates this world from another.

Rateliff can be guilty of overwriting, as in the jumble of raging-wildfire images that drag down "Still Out There Running." His husky voice can lack the suppleness of classic soul singers; when he taps into his inner Sam Cooke on the dusky "Babe I Know," he sounds more fatigued than uplifted. Yet even when he overshoots, Rateliff's restless throwback sound feels like it's moving toward real revelations.

This album is Carrabba's rather reasonable pop petition to be dealt back into a game he started.

The first half engages with songs like "Count to Five" and its strutting tone that hearkens to turn-of-the-Eighties boogie-style jazz-funk. But [Blood's] second half doesn't falter as much as it fades. Tracks like "Blood Knows" and "Stay Safe" sound baroque and formless despite the band's gentle yet swinging touches.

Culture II ultimately feels less like a celebratory howl from the mountaintop than a transitional inventory dump. With its easily-trimmable 24 tracks, Culture II appears to be tailored to finesse chart rules, which count 1,500 individual song streams toward one full album sale.

The album is less a reboot than a re-affirmation of their ability to fuse over-the-top oversharing and Queen-ly operatic stomp with an elastic vision of pop.

There are a few whiffs, like the foul "She's a Hot One" ("She might be a mess, but she's a hot one"), but Bryan truly excels when he's all nostalgic for the uncomplicated ease of a summer fling in "Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset" or subtly acknowledging the beauty of all types of love in the gently uplifting "Most People Are Good."

Like much of Tove Lo's work, it's admirably uncensored, but may leave you craving a shower, however close to home it lands.

At 76, Crosby sounds more than comfortable alongside his producer/co-writer son James Raymond and a trio of sympathetic studio musicians who evoke Mitchell's singular sound with echoes of Wayne Shorter from saxophonist Steve Tavaglione and Jaco Pastorius from fretless bassist Mai Agan.

Butch Walker's post-postmodern production sometimes overwhelms the songs, but its best moments--"Weekend Woman" could be Weezer's "Good Vibrations" with is everything-but-the-sink hooks and a catchy, Lady Gaga–like bridge--gamely make up for the places where Pacific Daydream sounds like Weezer by Numbers.

Trauma's chilled-out middle sags, but "Revenge," her bad-romance duet with Eminem, is an early shot of energy; Max Martin and Shellback's homage to Dr. Dre's skip-step beats may be too on the nose, but Em's rhymes nicely recall a time when even lunatics rode bright hooks.

That old black magic often sounds forced, but he makes up for it with a few more melancholy tracks.

The LP gets bogged down in chilled-out trap pop (see the Lil Wayne-​assisted "Lonely"). But slow jams like "Concentrate" perfectly balance the downtempo and the energetic.

Partying tunes like the funky "Firebreather" sometimes feel like not much more than a rich white guy bragging. But Macklemore's trademark awkward humanity comes through on "Good Old Days," a reflection on aging (with Kesha), and "Church," a thank-you letter to making it that's warm, vivid, earnest and earned.

12 hardrocking lefty diatribes against government conspiracies ("Drones – they got ya tapped, they got ya phone," Chuck D raps in "Take Me Higher"), civil injustice ("We fuckin' matter," he declares on "Who Owns Who") and, in the case of B-Real's rhymes, restrictive weed laws ("Legalize Me").