Even longtime fans will have to wonder what the point is.

Even if her execution isn't up to her ambitions, Missundaztood is more fun than that god-awful "Lady Marmalade" remake.

Starsailor are the U.K. equivalent of the Goo Goo Dolls.... You may well like Love Is Here, but it could take a while before you admit it to yourself.

Spektor's cabaret shtick occasionally wears thin, but Kitsch's highlights... have an appealing honesty that can't be faked.

Sometimes the former Midtown singer's snark falls flat, as with the title 'Pete Wentz Is the Only Reason We're Famous' or the part where the singer brags about his ass. But Saporta does have some pop gifts, apparent on the disco 'Living in the Sky With Diamonds.'

The Detroit MC gets over on congeniality and crisp delivery, even when his lyrics are pro forma.

Dangerous is most affecting when Wallen’s husky, emotive voice does the heavy lifting. ... The flaws of Dangerous, apart from being 17 songs too long, is that Wallen does not always seem up to the heavy task of pumping fresh life into well-worn topics.

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.

The album sounds plenty sleazy but not always fully cooked.

The young Texas songwriter, who has proved his honky-tonk chops onstage, takes this opportunity to offer 11 expansive folk-pop songs that are closer in weary spirit to Paul Simon.

Fate feels less like a straight tribute to Dr. Dog's elders and more like a finely tuned collage.

The band is excellent, but Mandell's melodies sit uncomfortably amid the burly arrangements, and her lyrics, inflated to match the broad-shouldered music, lapse into poetastery.

Cake graduated from the same Nineties class of alt-rock oddballs that produced Beck and Weezer.

Their strummy singalongs make them kin to the Mumfords, their choral singing to neighbors Fleet Foxes.

If you're going to be literal and heartfelt, you'd better have something to say, and that's where the twenty-five-year-old rapper often falls short.

A work of engaging, pop-wise R&B.

At its best, King’s Disease is a slick Illmatic redux, a fresh portrait of Nas’ now-mythical hustler years that expands his Queensbridge universe with new characters and anecdotes and finds him in vintage form as a rapper and storyteller. At its worst, it is a misguided attempt to paper over abuse allegations and a stark showcase of his increasingly questionable politics when it comes to women. 26 years after Illmatic, Nas still has room to grow.

Their fifth album deals with the at-times-taboo-for-punk subject of romantic commitment.

If Singh's genial, lounge-y tunes don't always hit groove nirvana, his wandering heart is at least in the right place.

Indie rock's cult of schlubby singing doesn't always merge with the Chieftains' crystalline professionalism.

Slow, silky and menacing, with twists of eccentricity, his debut is a finely constructed mood piece.

Thirty-eight minutes of co-writes and covers feels slight for seven years' work.

Even the slowest stuff here is palatable. [19 Aug 2004, p.120]

Okemah replaces Farrar's indulgence with a gently rocking back-porch feel. [28 Jul 2005, p.82]

At times they try to get over with passion in place of proper tunes... but this is still a righteous, life-affirming ride.

There’s nothing as incendiary here as that year’s "Cop Killer," but Manslaughter does feature the band’s smartest musical leap in decades: evolving from its original sloppy mix of thrash and punk to lean, contemporary extreme metal.

A few songs have the old leather-jacket kick, but things get weirder as he explores alienation from a Lower East Side he once ruled.

The album does have its share of standout moments. ... But Don Toliver remains, perhaps intentionally, impenetrably enigmatic. In a culture replete with mysterious superstars, it makes Life of a Don ultimately a bit frustrating.

The mood may be dark, but the record is a model of musical egalitarianism.

Happiness sounds like a string of freaked-out AM hits.

Gonzalez hasn't done much to snazz up his sound for his second album, In Our Nature, another mellow folk record that, at its best, sidesteps coffee-shop commonplaces.

Isn't songful enough to recommend to anyone besides old fans and aspiring art rockers. [6 Apr 2006, p.69]

Just when it's all starting to sound like leftovers from The Bends, rock-god producer Rick Rubin steps in to gie the album some oomph. [24 Jul 2003, p.90]

His third and best record isn't that moment yet, but he's one step closer.

Yet they never come, and without the vivid talents of their heroes — Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, John Renbourn — Midlake's abstracted invocations of maidens, merchant ships and "ancient light" feel a bit bookish and distant.

When everything connects--like on the single "Centuries"--FOB are a glorious nexus of Seventies glitter rock, Eighties radio pop, Nineties R&B and Aughts electro stomp. But the LP still runs the risk of being too cutesy and referential.

[Oceania] is a good stand-alone record, a bong-prog take on the alt-rock grandeur of Gish and Siamese Dream.

The brood is most convincing on giddier kiss-offs like "Chainsaw" (rhymes with "such a shame y'all") and the Brad Paisley co-write "Forever Mine Nevermind."

The rest of Keith Urban's tenth studio album isn't quite that audaciously pop [as "Sun Don't Let Me Down"], but it does commit to modern rhythms throughout, with Urban's virtuoso picking on six-string banjo (or "ganjo") locking in with steady basslines and ticking drum tracks to fuse the rootsy precision of bluegrass with the uplifting persistence of EDM.

A surprising number of songs here just never take flight.

It took eight years, but this Sin City-born emo-glam squad finally made its Vegas Album.

Can evoke an Americana-tinged Warren Zevon, gruff but tender, with the best songs featuring Shelby Lynne's empathetic vocals. [Jul/Aug 2021, p.133]

Some songs explore emulsive alienation (see "In Absentia"), but TMV are at their best dabbling in shades of aggro.

Ultimately, The Resistance is a patchwork of expert cliches that leaves a listener wondering just what the point of Muse is.

End[s] up sounding timid and a little tedious.

It's too bad that vocalist Matt Bellamy doesn't bring as much ingenuity to his singing.

Like many veterans of the Nineties country boom, she has matured into a slick Seventies style of singer-songwriter soft rock, with average song length creeping up to the four-and-a-half-minute range.

Production by Dust Brother John King notwithstanding, it impacts just like any other Steve Earle record--lyrics first.

As art-rock abnegation, it's impressive. But when he teases flamboyance on the death disco "Morning Sickness," you long for a little more excess.

False Idols is vintage Tricky, which means it could slot in at around 1997--the melodies are spare, the beats spacey, the vibe dark.

Every song sounds like some other band, from the Bee Gees disco of the title track to the Talking Heads-y paranoia of "Running Out." But that's no reason to hate on this good-natured party.

Solange simply doesn't have the pipes to pull off her songs, and her attempts at "mystical" psychedelic-soul (the six-minute-plus opus 'Cosmic Journey') are embarrassing.

As a utilitarian background soundtrack, it'll do nicely.

It's hard to see Gift as anything but an exercise in redundancy.

The once-giddy melodies now settle for midtempo jangle or novelty...

[All Fall Down] is a dark journey lyrically: Good folks fail, lovers betray, salvation is an even bet at best. But the music... heals.

Unfortunately, the tunes aren't so hot, and Common Existence veers between overbearing and pretty ordinary.

The downside to The Tipping Point's chameleonic variety is that the Roots too rarely sound like themselves, or even like a collective. [5 Aug 2004, p.108]

The running theme here is a giddy release--the Buzzcocks-style guitars and dark jokes about commitment in "What I Want," the helium-gospel rush of "Witness"--packed with care.

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.

Roadsinger is a crowd-pleaser, hewing to Yusuf's classic sound in tight, sweet ballads like 'Welcome Home,' which pushes his acoustic guitar and ragged voice to the foreground.

On his full-length debut, Starlite turns his faith in catchy tunes into a series of studies on the persuasive power of pop itself.

Like Alice's Wonderland, the world of Joker's Daughter is freakish and marvelous by turns, a perfect soundtrack for your next mushroom tea party.

Mascis sounds surprisingly spry here. [14 Nov 2002, p.89]

WSC specialize in Elvis Costello-y power pop and caffeinated danceability. [8-22 Jul 2004, p.126]

On his fourth solo country album, Rucker is warm and easygoing, more buddy than bro, winningly carrying bar-hopping honky-tonk ("Good for a Good Time"), down-home anthems ("Half Full Dixie Cup") and low-sung ballads ("You Can Have Charleston").

Too often, it all sounds boastful and sad in the same moment, like a promising young fighter warning you he can hit so hard it doesn't matter if he's too messed up to form a fist.

The songs aren't terribly memorable, but several cuts offer imaginative mash-ups.

Notwithstanding a brassy, helium-voiced cameo from Nicki Minaj on the catchy, booze-celebrating "Bottoms Up." Otherwise it's just steady mackin' over dull, airbrushed slow-jams.

Bromberg still makes every track shine, like the A-list session man he's always been.

Overall, it's a fun but hit-or-miss affair, and in the end the most compelling songs are played straight.

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.

The lyrics? Unmemorable. But that leaves your mind free to wander the quiet spaces between the notes. [10 Feb 2005, p.84]

Minimalism can be tiring, so the group has a secret weapon: solos, of all shapes and sizes, scattered at random.

Landing somewhere between a posthumous tribute and a completed album, Exodus feels like a view of DMX as a product instead of DMX as an artist.

Australian synth-pop quartet Cut Copy do the Eighties eerily well. Too well, in fact. Cue up the band's third album, and you find yourself playing spot-the-influence.

The album was inspired by world travel, but it has a pleasantly isolated feel: a portable home, conjured between headphones.

Autumnally pretty tunes that are also full of quiet gravity, as if Neil Young and a lover popped Valium and decided to hash things out on record.

Every song is rooted in some long-gone Seventies AM-radio hit... doing for disco what the New Pornographers do for rock & roll.

Weepers and waltzes prevail, but standouts push beyond that: Shelby Lynne's Western swing, Alison Krauss' dark Latin tinge, Wynonna Judd's husky honky-tonk blues, Mavis Staples' Bill Withers soul cover.

On their third album, they move far away from their garage-rock starting point and construct an expertly lyrical world of yearning and insinuation.

He does it [copying Prince and Roger Troutman] well, at times, but he usually makes you want to YouTube up the originals.

The eclectic sounds are impressive, even if a tighter focus might have hit harder.

Chuck Berry's first album since 1979 is a classic as he always made them, with knockoffs of his own inventions, blues filler, even a live goof delivered with one of those raised-eyebrow vocals. All of rock & roll would have crawled on its hands and knees to St. Louis to record with Berry, yet Chuck makes do with a gleeful bar-band stomp.

On their sharpest disc since their commercial peak in the early Nineties, Mike Ness confronts a trail of devastation, over a melodic tumult steeped in rootsy allusions ­"Gimme Shelter" gospel singers, gritty balladry.

It's Not Me, It's You is far from perfect, but it sounds fantastic.

The beauty of A Hundred Days Off is that it pumps and churns so suggestively; it somehow evokes the blues of the otherwise successful modern man, who goes out every night and dances alone in his head.

Covers of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits are good fits; elsewhere, his off the leash vibrato oversells.

To paraphrase J-Kwon, everybody in this beach gettin' "Tipsy" (another song title here), so drink up.

It's hit-or-miss.

Standouts [are] "Where the Sky Hangs" and "My Brother Taught Me How to Swim." But much of the rest of Kindred is so relentlessly up, it starts to feel suffocating.

Logic rhymes in exciting ways, but the meanings can be a little strained.

Their songs carry bossa nova chord changes, analog keyboard bleeps and icy-cool chanteuserie from singer Inara George. So why is the second album by George and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin so soul-deadening?

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

Whether Daft Punk have created a worthy soundtrack is for filmgoers to decide. As for the album they've made - it's so-so mood music, full of dramatic, string-suffused sounds that are sometimes moving and sometimes just there.

The standout is "L.I.F.E.," a raw recollection of an addled childhood ("I ain't got no pictures of my mother/She was a crack fiend/Nothing like crack mother") that proves there's more to her than bubble gum.

The music is engrossing and Cudi's angst genuine, but his raps get pedestrian.

They don't get what their industrial-punk forbears like the Cramps, the Birthday Party, Ministry and NIN knew: It takes soul to be weird.