A suite of mostly instrumental moods and fragments, The Endless River rolls like a requiem through familiar echoes.

Devils Night's high points are some of the most accomplished hip-hop we'll hear this year. But the balance between humor, shock, raw talent and psychosis that Eminem achieved on his last two albums is off.

Nasir is among the weakest Nas albums, but there’s nothing spectacular about its failure. It is, simply, the one thing Nas has avoided being all these years, through revolutionary highs and car-crash lows: dull.

Britney is by far her most personable album, the most consistently playful and the least wince-inducing.

The songs are deliberately low-affect, if short on personality compared to her other albums. But the attention-getter is the finale "Inspired," where she writes a folksy country ballad to express some of her fears about climate change, with the opening lines, "I'm writing down my dreams/All I'd like to see/Starting with the bees." In this context, it's refreshing to hear from the Old Weird Miley again.

Apart from a voice that makes being bummed out sound almost sensuous, Yorn still hasn't developed a truly distinctive musical personality to go with his one-man-band studio skills.

A forceful march through familiar territory.

While she begs for a booty call on the twangy single 'Come on Over,' she leaves the real seduction to her restrained delivery and the album's crisp melodies.

Songs like "Unzip Your Harrington" and "Luv, Hold Me Down" aren't deep, but the charging-guitar shimmer and fun, facile choruses are pretty undeniable.

Mendes has more rhythm than you'd expect.

The result is an uneven record that leaves country’s most irreverent hitmakers sounding needlessly cautious.

She stops trying to keep up with the Halseys and happily defaults to the fizzy bombast that is her stadium-size safety zone. [Aug 2020, p.72]

Johnson appears to think that his smooth acoustic surfer music might need a retooling to reflect this scary new world.

Scabdates is as exhilarating as it is confounding.

Zac Brown is laboring strenuously to ensure everyone that he still drinks cold beer on a Friday night, apologizing for a musical adventurousness that he'd be better off simply embracing.

Stellastarr sound playful but passionate, flashing their Eighties go-feet beats ("Damn This Foolish Heart") alongside moody, Cure-style ballads.

The default mode here is a soupy power mumble: Passion Pit without the passion, Imagine Dragons without imagination.

[A] mundane melange of Avril-ish brat pop and Sheryl Crow cod rock.

Cudi’s pitchy-dawg voice remains his own worst enemy.

Gomez may be the most boring teen-pop star of her generation. She makes Ashley Tisdale seem like Lady Gaga.

Snow Patrol fall back to the blandly inoffensive safe zone--though at least they sound a little brighter.

The album works because Oakenfold has abandoned the stylistic limits of trance yet brought the genre's tuneful oomph to tracks with a little more personality.

Godhead's stash of smart musical touches proves they're more than Manson's Mini-Me.

This album could easily have been released in the mid-Nineties, when Size and his V Records crew pointed the way forward. Ten years later, it is just a skittery nostalgia trip.

The best moments come in the ballads like the blues-tinged 'Four Rusted Horses.' In such songs Manson is almost endearing, just a big melancholy dude with face paint. It's a less glamourous job title than Anticrist Superstar, but these days it suits him better.

Mike Posner is at the head of a new genre: frat-house R&B.

His handlers clearly hope he's the next Bieber; sadly, there's not an ounce of fun in him. Unfriend.

For an artist whose music aimed for maximum accessibility, often to a fault, Avicii may well be remembered as an innovator. Sadly, this record feels like he was just getting started.

Goodbye Lullaby is lovelorn and introspective, full of gusty tunes with a surprising message: Avril cares.

The emo godfather's sixth album proves he's also gotten better in that span.

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.

The LP isn’t overly burdened by the bold-faced guest spots you’d expect on a follow-up by an artist coming off a Top 10 debut. Instead, it gets tripped up by a different sophomore pitfall: Now that he isn’t an underdog, Khalid lapses into a little too much new-star introspection, exploring an ivory-tower aloneness that can recall the Weeknd’s goth-‘n’-B.

The I-need-love pop tunes are not getting any better, even with Timbaland and Justin Timberlake in the stripper ditty 'AYO Technology.' 'Follow My Lead” is an inexplicable Robin Thicke duet and 'Amusement Park' is even sillier. Much better is 'All of Me,' with Mary J. Blige. Wailing, "I got a feeling like I'm fiending on crack," Blige steals the show without even trying.

His debut is similarly flavorless: Beautifully sung but snoozy tunes.

Even a goofy Eminem cameo (the "Allen Iverson of safe sex") can't save "C'mon Let Me Ride" from sounding like an over-the-top hookup plea, and "Final Warning," a domestic-violence drama, feels vaguely like tabloid fodder.

It can be tempting to hear Shelton's new breakup songs--the bitterly comic "She's Got a Way with Words," the coolly regretful "Bet You Still Think About Me"--as targeted toward Lambert, or to imagine Stefani as the someone new he flirts with tipsily on the first single, "Came Here to Forget." Shelton's warmly confident delivery makes those romantic twists and turns sound both lived in but universal.

She's doing the same thing she did last time, except it's not as much fun.

Pop Psychology opens with the biggest, shiniest songs he's come up with, each taking on a slippery aspect of post-modern romance.

Eve 6 seem to want to improve themselves but keep bumping up against their own limitations of style and substance.

With On and On, this Hawaiian surfer's croon evokes the mellow-yellow moan of Donovan but without the weirdness that made that psychedelic folkie compelling.

Like Get Rich or Die Tryin', only not as good, D12 World works as a polished dramatization of a lifestyle nobody really lives.

Qualifies as cruel and unusual cuteness.... It's as if Jimmy Fallon and David Gray had a baby, suckled by Edie Brickell and diapered by the Spin Doctors.

Beneath the digital production and R2D2 vocals, Akon is secretly an old-fashioned romantic, and his third album is his most heart-on-sleeve.

Per the title, this is comfort music, made by a guy who seems to be chilling with friends. If it sometimes sounds too comfortable, well, Clapton has probably earned it.

Despite the title, her new album is a softer sell--and more appealing--than 2007's Will.i.am-assisted Big.

It's refreshing to hear him finally switch up his script.

This New York band's brash second album rages with the upbeat, beat-wise humor that hard rock has suppressed ever since grunge.

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.

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 beats are dandy, tweaked-up period pieces from Sixties ska to Eighties R&B. But song albums, as opposed to DJ mixes, need good songs.

White Lies' polished synth rock effuses more melodrama than any young group should be allotted.

A shameless solo debut full of Eighties-style electro bangers.

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.

This is music that is bent on connecting with the dance floor and won't deny itself anything.

Nowhere amidst all the confusion is there even a worthwhile tune to be salvaged. Hideously dull.

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

Lyrically feisty and stylistically expanded.

Songs From an American Movie sounds orchestral and homespun at once: Lustrous, fancy strings on one song give way to a slap-happy ukulele on the next. Yet it's too much of both and not enough of either.

Mellow moments abound, with gentle strings and pseudofolky melodies seeping into the mix, but most songs bank on the winsome charisma of the chunky guitars and Alexakis' grief-tinged Northwestern drawl, both of which manage to sound simultaneously cathartic and hook-y.

They sound like a marginally smarter American modern-rock act, screaming their pain over raw-boned riffs that could sure use some technicolor pizazz.

The tracks are pale imitations of the hyperspeed high-hat-and-bass sound Luger originated - fitting accompaniment for two MCs coasting by.

On album number (gulp) 10, 311 are still really freaking psyched to be 311.

On most of Blaster, Weiland's first all-new solo album since 2008, he suffers from a bad case of Generic Rock Voice.

Unfortunately, Catalano wouldn't waste an "uhh...whatever" on the hammy, bombastic third disc from Leto's band, Thirty Seconds to Mars (with Leto's brother, Shannon, on drums).

The reissue is loaded with worthy extras. ... There will never again be a rock bomb quite like Be Here Now, and as such its memory should be honored.

[His] approach sometimes leaves the songs shapeless, but sad, atmospheric tracks such as "Begging to Be Heard" recall some of New Wave's most seductive aspects without getting too fancy. [11 Aug 2005, p.75]

The draw is Davis, who spits scarred-teen scat like a guy whose parents just signed him up for military school. Not easy when you're pushing 40.

As a blast back to the past, this is the best album Lenny Kravitz has ever made--a visceral, expertly tailored blend of late-Sixties and early-Seventies classic-rock paraphrases with just enough modernizing to justify the record's copyright date.

With 7, instead of blurring the country and rap lines further, he takes the well-trod path to the rock and rap border. Like country-rap, rap-rock is a genre we’ve endured for a long time, maybe too long. Lil Nas X’s version is much more nuanced, if a tad straight-laced.

Caillat has a fine voice--clear and ringing, with a hint of a rasp--and she can write hooks. (She co-composed every song here.) But the simpering puppy love grows wearying over 12 tracks, especially because Caillat fails to convince as a romantic heroine.

More arena-ready and less ickily ponderous than this year's Be As You Are, though not as fun as the frat-rocking honkytonk from his earlier albums. [1 Dec 2005, p.128]

Most of Feedback is lightweight and forgettable. [7 Sep 2006, p.107]

A handful of songs... work up some palatable L.A. pop, but those moments are surrounded by singer-songwriter cliches and painfully precious asides. [4 May 2006, p.59]

Will it provide decent accompaniment for a Gene Simmons blood-belching performance in a packed arena? This big, dumb, catchy record passes that test.

Jeff Lynne's production on several tracks puts a Tom Petty-ready spin on laid-back California rock and has Walsh sounding less isolated from modern times than he thinks he is.

Too much of Welcome to the North sounds like emo on Ecstasy -- all hot and bothered without much to say.

What Music lacks is a great hit to pull it all into focus.

Since then [2008], Usher's marriage imploded--a development that's good for the single ladies of metro Atlanta but yields mixed results on his sixth studio disc.

Their second LP retains the goofy amiability of their debut and cranks the Nineties influences.

Rise shows where the band’s three stars’ personalities unite in a Venn diagram and work together well. It’s just that these Vampires sound best when they’re sharing the same blood source.

In the course of the album, it's hard not to notice that all the songs sound the same, and for that matter, they all sound the same as that Avril Lavigne song about the damn cold night, even if Michelle technically got there before Avril.

Although Human occasionally slides into easy-listening soul, the still-spiky star delivers assured, remarkably smooth vocals throughout.

You can't really go wrong with such great material, but this cynical ploy to sell an oldies tour is completely superfluous.

Yet, if the tunes sometimes sag, Debbie Harry's voice remains sharply sculpted.

Nobody's Daughter isn't a true success - but it's a noble effort.

A few choruses stick, and 'No One Sleeps When I'm Awake' sounds like a solid Heart cover. But the rest? What's Swedish for "meh"?

Fine as hacks, they're somewhat less fine as humans.

Whether it's a fuck-you to fans who scoffed at 2003's synth-poppy Welcome to the Monkey House or a vindictive fulfillment of their contractual obligation to Capitol Records, this crap smells bad any way you sniff it.

The music is screwy yet brutally to the point, unpredictable yet never flighty.

Five years at the pulpit have dimmed his flow. [30 Sep 2004, p.190]

The album has some diverting moments.

The music is pro forma radio pop; the lyrics lean towards insipid inspiration.

Rossdale’s voice becomes a distraction when it overpowers the group’s wooshy guitar textures. But mostly Bush’s biggest sin is going back to the same well again and again hoping to find something new, something vital but coming up emptyhanded.

Daft Punk may have become the victim of their own animatronic satire.

Occasionally they attempt to rise above their signature light Brit-pop sound with slightly heavier tunes like "My Eyes Wide Open," but it comes off as forced.

Born in the U.K. has some lovely idiosyncratic moments... but not much in the way of new ideas.

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.

Even Matchbox-ish numbers like "Ever the Same" sound fresh in this new context.