Grande may not have settled on a sound, but she's still an outsized, dangerous talent.

There's sax and doo-wop here, but Bemis is at his best yelling stuff like "I can't define myself through irony …and self-deprecation!" over taut punk pop.

Unfortunately, Haunted reverberates with tired samples, rehashed echo effects and beats so plodding they could stop a metronome.

Their second album will thrill fans who stopped clocking rap a decade ago and heads who never let go.

She often sounds invigorated as the record breezes through multiple styles of R&B as well as afropop, house, and funk. ... Unfortunately, her shapeshifting gets short-circuited by hamfisted writing, especially as the album’s space theme gets less playful and more literal.

Holy Fire is a collection of well-manicured tracks zoning out to a dazzling middle distance.

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

Miniatures of spaghetti-western spasm and speed-of-light viscera.

Even when he picks up the pace, he sounds a little weary.

Intimate strings, minimal drums and soft sighs caress meandering tunes that avoid hooks or obvious statements. But Sheik's delivery lacks the emotional depth of his U.K. models: Nick Drake, David Sylvian and the Blue Nile couldn't conceal their pain behind lush arrangements.

When he's undone, it's by tinkertoy production on tracks such as the insipid Mariah Carey Vehicle "U Make Me Wanna." [5 Aug 2004, p.106]

It's like the pop equivalent to the 692-page fantasy epic, only it makes less sense.

The Lips' spacious attack feels a little tired. [6 Apr 2006, p.64]

Though Gadhia hasn't shed all his Chris Martin influence, he's developed an edge of paranoid menace reminiscent of Muse's Matt Bellamy. It's a sound that comes from both everywhere and nowhere.

Yes, there are duds among these 36 tracks. But they pass the time.

The playing never stumbles, though the writing occasionally does.

Unfortunately, Blood Brothers don't actually make you scared, which any good noise band should.

Even without the ecstatic melodrama of Robyn's best work or the momentum of Röyksopp albums like 2009's Junior, this is a worthwhile peek into three great electro-pop minds.

Gives alt-rap humanism a good name. [28 Oct 2004, p.103]

Through it all, their creative partnership sounds stronger than ever.

Their third album continues in this mild fashion, and though always pleasant, it's often unmemorable.

The Brooklyn-based singer is an expert arranger and song craftsman, if only an adequate lyricist.

A mellow concoction of atmospheric textures, electronic samples and funk-lite beats.

A great style doesn't always equal a great album, and the world's illest flows can't rescue some of these dud beats.

These twelve songs are streamlined, uncluttered miniatures.

Brawling tunes steeped in vintage rock & roll, with Daltrey setting his maximum-R&B yowl on full bluster against Johnson's slashing attack.

Her good taste tethers her to the old homestead on her first album since 2002, taking off only once: on an unlikely cover of Iggy Pop's 'Success.'

This smart if self-conscious album makes it clear who the Lips would like to be, but it's hard to tell who they really are.

It's Wye Oak's arrangements--feedback blasts, tape-loop-like effects, violin and pedal steel sighs--that turn standard indie-rock ballads into unusually evocative mood music.

Their dark disco punk is as close to a New York sound as anything these days.

Davies’ tune sense is still relatively intact, and he turns out loose melodies amid nimble bar-band grooves. Unfortunately, Davies’ feistiness fades at times, and he lapses into blandness.

The music is beautiful and the vibe mellow, though Merchant gets Dixieland-brassy with Wynton Marsalis and tries some I-Threes-style reggae. But it’s like that My Morning Jacket song about the sexy librarian: You wish she’d let her hair down more.

His emotional delivery drives highlights like ''Millions'' and ''Drugstore Perfume.'' Elsewhere, though, the disc isn’t urgent enough to pack the same punch as Way's best work.

Frontman Stuart Murdoch entreats over a soul groove on B&S' eighth disc, which loads up on Sixties-pop goodies without diluting the group's willowy kink.

Minus usual vocal sidekicks Isobel Campbell and Greg Dulli (who appears briefly on the vintage drum-machine jam "St. Louis Elegy"), Lanegan's chafed baritone works best with bold backdrops.

It can verge on its own kind of formula, but high points are high.

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.

Mathambo is at best a serviceable singer-rapper, and the record is so all over the place, so mercurial from song to song and even bar to bar, a listener never gets a chance to settle in and grab hold.

Now solo, she's rocking the current micro-vogue for Eighties shoegaze pop: guitar-synth swirls, paper-thin New Wave bass surge, space-waif vocals like a spring breeze that barely billows your window curtains.

They are incapable of shaping a song, teasing out tension, friction or emotional swoop; they're happy to just play it.

The overall effect can be saccharine, but the Concretes' big orchestration and sweet fragility are a winning combo. [19 Aug 2004, p.122]

Yes, it's long on shtick ("Ladies and Gentlemen, emanating from the Secaucus Lounge at the fabulous Fandango hotel, the Bluenotes!" crows an emcee), and the mediocre songs haven't improved.... Most impressive is "Ordinary People," which reappeared in 2007 as the highlight of the latter-day outtake collection Chrome Dreams II; here it's a 12-minute working-class anthem with brass underscoring Young's soaring guitar rock instead of masking it.

The most surprising thing about the record is just how blatantly a group that once skewered conformity in songs like "Suburban Home" brashly embraces nostalgia.

You're advised to ignore the ridiculous plot particulars and concentrate on the album's modest pleasures: chiefly, Plan B's lovely, Smokey Robinson-style tenor and deft melodic touch.

This sprawling album [is] his most solid release since the original Documentary. It's nothing more or less than the complex story of a lifelong hip-hop fan who's happiest when he can see himself as part of the history he embraces so vocally.

Stretching beyond SremmLife, their party-starting choruses are squeaked, squawked and shouted; mellower stuff can get a Makonnen-esque broken falsetto ("Swang"); "By Chance" succeeds with a haughty Dana Dane accent.

Returning a decade later, they're still crushing violent, angular riffs (see the hellacious "Government Trash"), but they're also writing catchier songs that bring out conventional rock influences.

These saccharine tunes and too-cute melodies could desperately use some of the band's old abrasive edge.

More Adventurous sometimes gets too precious, but at its best it achieves a kind of cinematic grace.

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

Pleasant but uninspiring. [9 Mar 2006, p.90]

Vapor Trails is Rush's most focused effort in many years, thanks to a renewed emphasis on songwriting.

In the end, Diamandis can't quite shape Froot into a coherent vision.

Bachmann employs his band sparingly as he rambles on in his trademark croak and empties the ashtray of his brain.

Titles aren't exactly subtle ("Murderess," "Last Mistress"), even if the twin-guitar jams are opaque.

Despite opening big, bright and airtight, I Like It When You Sleep... gets boring-melty during dream-gaze reveries like "Please Be Naked" and "Lostmyhead." Even so, when they hit the right kind of moody sheen ("Somebody Else," "Loving Someone"), the 1975 are an enjoyable balance of desire and distraction.

Their third album deepens the rockist intentions with a track called "Heavy Metal" and a sound that's like Spoon or Fountains of Wayne dipped in distracted keyboard/noise-guitar ooze.

On The Double Cross--the title is a sly reference to their 20 year career--they play to their strengths with a succinct set of tunes that seamlessly blend the sensibilities of the band's four distinct songwriters.

The viscera isn't surprising. What may be is the empathy, wit and beauty on this focused LP.

Paul Smith's vocals are full of New Wave artifice, but he's also more earnest than many of his post-punk peers. [25 Aug 2005, p.100]

The more visceral appeal of Coming Apart--most notably Gordon’s vocals--is lost somewhat in this pivot to patient squall and ugly voids (the 10-minute “Change My Brain” sounds like she’s crooning to an industrial fan), but the duo are still exceptional at manipulating scuzz.

Gogol are best when Hütz lyrically nuances the roiling energy; on "My Gypsy Auto Pilot," he goes back to Ukraine to find that he's a stranger in his old hometown.

While Brown's easygoing, singing guitar is the clear star throughout the record, something feels off overall, since the renditions here rarely live up to the originals. [May 2021, p.75]

NakedSelf finds him returning to the slow-burn industrial grind of his best work.

Does This Look Infected? squeezes a dozen energetic songs into a half-hour, and each one is over before you can figure out why that chorus sounds familiar or where you've heard that riff before.

The London threesome behind X-Press 2 slaves to house's repetitious mechanics (check the ugly robot fart clouding "AC/DC") yet often transcends its self-imposed limitations through fastidious craft.

It's a fruitful partnership: Earle's hard-won earthiness acts as a counterweight to Baez's ethereal tendencies, and Day After Tomorrow leans toward tough-minded material with blues and Appalachian overtones.

MTMTMK dispels doubts, improving on the debut with bigger hooks.

Full of shiny seventies pop rock simulations, but you would be much better off putting on an old Todd Rundgren or Raspberries record. [Aug 2020, p.73]

Lauren Mayberry and her two beardo bandmates revisit the frosty New Wave of Yaz and early Depeche Mode while adding staccato, percussive glitches that echo but don't mimic the Eighties.

The writing is more a series of creepy pranks than a set of tunes, but Claypool, guitarist Larry LaLonde and drummer Jay Lane are a tight knottyrhythm team, and their propulsion under the comic vocals in "Tragedy's a'Comin' " and in the manic marching jam "Last Salmon Man" is no monkey business.

The Georgia collective's second album is pop at its most playful and the avant-garde at its cuddliest -- a four-act, twenty-seven-song fantasy trip in which structure and chaos keep leapfrogging each other.

There's a faint mustiness to some of the more upbeat arrangements, but on slow jams like the title track (a falsetto-streaked 1961 gem by the Jive Five) and Curtis Mayfield's "Gypsy Woman," Neville suspends time in vocal amber, a true soul master at work.

His official debut LP still sounds like it's stuck in the past, with solid production from old-school legend DJ Premier and his latter-day disciple Statik Selektah.

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.

Not his most satisfying concept, but he can do more in 72 seconds that most artists can in four minutes. [May 2020, p.89]

Unfortunately, Fear of the Dawn — the first of two records White will release this year — feels like a hodgepodge of good intentions and so-so execution.

Thoroughly enjoyable though it is, Phantom Punchalso feels a little lightweight.

At 67 minutes, this record could have probably used a bit more editing, but Rest in Chaos is definitive proof that Hard Working Americans is no half-baked side project. Instead, the group continues to be a fascinating roots-rock collaboration.

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

McRae’s debut doesn’t exactly make her stand out from the sea of algorithmic pop girls, but it definitely shows promise.

But whereas White relives rock history in fever dreams, Greenhornes singer-guitarist Craig Fox envisions the past through heavy eyelids. His rollicking punk tunes are coolly detached, and his psychedelic mudslides often laze in drooged-out repose.

Lif's flow... sounds more detached and ambivalent than ever.

Sometimes the humor verges on camp (the title track), or the poignance drowns in Barry Manilow-isms ("Still Fighting It"). But mostly, Folds' songcraft is a winning mixture of the plush and the prickly...

These collaborations jell because Richie's style is so expansive, musically and emotionally.

Her songs sound great but feel off, merely gesturing in the direction of emotions. In the end, she's so cool she'll frost up your earbuds.

Plucky, precious and sometimes cloying.

This sequel takes a similar approach [of 2007 LP Yes I'm a Witch], to mixed effect.

Common can be too, well, common: a nice guy, whose boasts and bromides are too predictable to really inspire.

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.

Decently fun results. [Jun 2020, p.71]

The stitching is tighter now, and drummer Bill Rieflin often holds things together too neatly. But when songs fray--see 'Harborcoat'-- it's the sound of imperfection perfected.

Evokes the singer-songwriter atmospherics of Carole King and Elton John. [24 Jun 2004, p.170]

The results are usually catchy and interesting.

For all the guest starpower, however, the results sound as anonymous as Doe's chosen name.

The [lineup] changes bolster the will to power in Lazzara's Cure-like croon.

The like-minded follow-up enlists Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann, who highlights the tingly interplay between acoustic and electronic instruments and the processed vocals, which generally sound like T-Pain tripping his balls off.

While the low-fi mix distracts and some tracks run long, you can hear the bona fides of a skilled singer-songwriter. McClure's cool charm makes these homespun songs feel like long-lost guitar-pop gems, newly discovered and barely dusted off.