If the burden on electronic producers is to establish personality beyond a dense network of light displays and computer processing, this album gets Flume halfway there: It shows him as unquestionably human (overeager, alternately flashy and timid, sometimes more in awe than in control), but still a bit faceless.

Though the album immediately shifts gears with the decidedly more contemporary title track, a sultry waltz in which the singer implores her man to “test [her] limits,” assuring him that, underneath, every 21-century woman is a “bad girl,” there are smart, unexpected nods to yesteryear throughout the remainder of Dangerous Woman.

The Colour in Anything, as dazzling as it often is, finds Blake sidetracked by all the things he can do and doing them coldly, rather than focusing on the few things he should.

One or two of these songs might scan as tongue-in-cheek; nearly half an album's worth is a form of caricature, paying lip service to a millennial generation raised on hollow self-affirmations.

While A Moon Shaped Pool offers little in the way of new sonic territory, its newly naked and incisive portrayal of emotional vulnerability remains a resoundingly major achievement.

Eagulls are also gloomier, swapping the punk-rock call-and-response style of their debut for a more reflective kind of musical angst. But Ullages's best tracks are the most energetic.

Pantha remains less interested in constructivist concept pieces than interlinked studies riffing on a consistent theme, in which naturalistic splendor is conveyed by the interplay between thumping dynamism and sedate tranquility.

Left to his own devices, Bates's skittering effects and big, cavernous soundscapes can leave a metallic aftertaste like a mouthful of antibiotics, but the album's female guests--including Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanne Sundfør--provide the blood for Trágame Tierra's big, beating heart.

Will's coup is how it keeps one guessing, and how Barwick keeps from relying on the beautiful yet impersonal sonic washes of her past work. It's the sound an artist, whose mysterious and celebrated process has ironically created theatrical and curated work to this point, finally achieving subtlety.

Drake is still skilled enough to carry off this pose with the effortlessness needed to make it credible, freighted as Views may be with cheeseball lines and repetitive refrains. These soft points have always been part of the charm, however, and while the album is overlong and presents nothing truly explosive or exhilarating, it generally works as a steady low-key collection of modish, contemplative mood music.

The emotional focus sharpens as The Ship progresses.

If Lemonade feels less ambitious than the near-70-minute Beyoncé, it's probably because the penetrating spoken-word interludes, composed of verses by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, featured in Lemonade's accompanying long-form music video have been excised from the album itself.

Simply enough, Love Streams is a discomforting listen, and the addition of voices to Hecker's repertoire adds an additional tool of disorientation to his web of repurposed crackles and spurts, not the warmth one might expect.

On a base, per-song level, Junk is a sturdy little workhorse of an album.

This is the problem with the album's more ambitious tracks: They confuse rather than clarify the band's identity, and sound more like demos than full-fledged songs. ... Still, White Denim manages to slow the pace and discover its soul more than a few times here, most notably on the winking Al Green sendup “Take It Easy (Ever After Lasting Love).”

Fortunately, throughout the rest of the album, the band writes songs that allow them to excel as they stay well within their limitations. These are tight, economical pop songs actually worthy of Pavement comparisons in terms of not just sound, but melody.

Ultimately, though, Cleopatra is simply Americana pastiche we've heard a hundred times before.

Super's best songs cleverly subvert the expectations set up by the joyous music.

In short, a breezy DJ set attuned for meditative easy listening. When this approach clicks, the results are nothing less than sumptuous, a rich panorama of material organized by an artist whose greatest talents seem to lie in curation.

The lyrics throughout Mind of Mine are similarly by-the-numbers pop-R&B: pleasure-obsessed, vaguely misogynist, and largely disposable. By the album's midpoint, Malik's playboy shtick starts to outstay its welcome.

The album, which at just seven tracks long (and none of them 15-minute monsters on the order of “Juanita”) feels almost like a two-fisted EP.

It’s easy to chastise aging pop stars for chasing trends or trying to recapture past glories, but those efforts here are thrown into sharp relief by the maturity of the album’s first half.

A few songs, like “American Valhalla” and “In the Lobby,” are rather dreary, and feel like Homme and Pop just spinning their wheels; they could have used a bit of a Stooges-style kick in the ass. Even on the slower songs, though, Homme and the stripped-down lineup he assembled for the album--fellow Queen of the Stone Age Dean Fertita, and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders--provide a heavy, rhythmic bedrock and stylistic versatility.

Whether it was classic rock or the blues, Buckley’s covers were never simply exercises in imitation, always revealing a part of him, but it’s his original material, too little of which is found here, that truly provides a glimpse into his soul.

What these songs share, the pairing of Healy's witty, bratty lyricism with athletic and adventurous musicianship, prove that this band is comfortable moving in all directions at once.

While the juxtaposition of upbeat music and melancholic lyrics has succeeded for artists from the Beatles to David Bowie, here such tactics, amid music that betrays so little originality, render these hackneyed emotional confessions nothing more than indulgent.

West is the rare artist who can turn a cry for attention into something more: a distillation of his artistic output to date that is quintessentially Kanye, whether you like him or not.

While taking Kozelek out of his musical comfort zone at times pays off with interesting results on Jesu/Sun Kil Moon, other parts of the album makes one wonder if Kozelek wasn't better off continuing to pick away at his nylon string guitar and ramble away like usual.

More often than hitting a sweet spot in between, the songs here are overly busy (like “Big Boss”) or short on ideas (the by-the-numbers “Before the Fire” and the psych-rock “Outside the War”), and the album's title turns into an unfortunate allusion to a warehouse stocked to the brim with cheap toys, none built to last.

This is, after all, Animal Collective's attempt at stuffing a decade's worth of changing tastes into 12 disciplined, bite-sized songs. What's most impressive is that they accomplish this feat without ever letting accessibility compromise their individual preferences as artists, and vice versa.

The ultimate impression the album leaves isn't just that of an artist who failed to follow through on her vision, but who never bothered to conceive one in the first place.

The Ghosts of Highway 20 is otherwise characterized by its consistency, but what really sets it apart from Williams's previous album is its sense of emotional balance.

Sia deserves credit for so easily slipping into the personas of her muses, but “Sweet Design,” which harks back to the go-go sound of Beyoncé's B'Day, and “Move Your Body,” whose unabashed 4/4 beat and clattering EDM percussion are straight out of Rihanna's Loud, seem more like dated outtakes than underappreciated gems.

On the epic title track and vampy “Bullet to the Brain,” the approach yields sturdy tunes. Elsewhere, Dystopia is marred by repetitive phrasing and turgid hooks; the riffs here are high volume, low value.

Too often, The Catastrophist leaves its themes in the lurch, spinning its wheels when it should be charging forward.

The way the lyrics alternate between ambiguous introspection and dark whimsy can also confuse the sense of the album as a whole, but hunting for patterns or for humanity on Blackstar is less the point than enjoying the majesty of David Bowie, even on the verge of his death, sounding this incredibly alive.

The best of these 10 tidy songs are fun and uncannily recognizable, even the first time you hear them, as songs by Lynne. The worst are still uncanny, but less hooky, and earn the biggest insult you can throw at any ELO song: They're colorless.

25 is, like its predecessor, weighed down by its soggy, vanilla ballads, few of which manage to escape their '70s- and '80s-indebted singer-songwriter schmaltz the way “Hello” (just barely) does.

For a once fearlessly progressive pop star, the otherwise lovingly executed and heartwarming Kylie Christmas feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to innovate a well-worn genre.

Bloated, brainless, and completely lacking in self-awareness, it's a groaning monstrosity of an album, one that can't even put its overwhelming excess to any suitable use.

When it all clicks, it's a perfect pop moment. The worst that can be said of Art Angels is that its maximalist ambitions sometimes overshoot the needs of pop.

Ultimately, the lows are too low, and the highs not high enough to justify either musician returning to the collaboration anytime soon.

Lovato mistakes the ability to cram as many syllables as possible into each word with virtuosity. And the album likewise mistakes overwrought for confident.

There's definitely a smart-dumbness to what Shining does here: International Blackjazz Society sounds like Nine Inch Nails circa “The Hand That Feeds,” with an earnest deployment of such dinosaur vulgarities as cowbells, hard-boogie keyboards, and shout-along choruses.

Most of 1989 is much denser, without betraying Adams's inherent aesthetic.... Unfortunately, there are nearly as many misfires on 1989 as there are successful experiments.

Song for song, Revival rivals Carly Rae Jepsen's Emotion for breakout pop album of the year, but if it similarly falls short of greatness, it's due in large part to a lack of originality.

Singer-songwriter Eric Earley falls back on more subdued, and largely more generic, folksy Neil Young/Bob Dylanisms.

Janet has calculatedly played the humble-grateful card countless times in her career, but Unbreakable, a ready-made collection of deep cuts, is one of the first times she’s given a fully convincing performance.

If Settle was the thunderstorm, Caracal is the unmistakable scent left in the air afterward.

On Savage Hills Ballroom, Powers seems much too concerned with slick sophistication that doesn't quite suit him.

Every Open Eye is pop music with sharp edges and high stakes.

It's a full hour of expressively expressive-less music--unmitigated solipsism as an aesthetic choice.

Even on an album full of obvious nods to music of the past, Lucero manages to surprise.

Perhaps a bit too reticent for its own good, B'lieve I'm Goin Down still rewards close listening, steadily developing into an album that's as multifaceted and profound as its mysterious creator.

The relatively low ratio of octane riffage means many of these songs hinge on Richards's worn, oaky voice. His low, craggly growl suits the rock songs well, and he manages perhaps the tenderest vocal performance of his career on the reggae-infused “Love Overdue.”

He's right that the troubadour and his feeble attempt at greatness really are small potatoes in an indifferent universe, but at least his band can still manage to make albums worth a few spins.

What makes Poison Season a great album, though, is that it doesn't completely wallow in Bejar's newfound smoking-jacket-and-fine-brandy sophistication—as opposed to the tattered-plaid-shirt-and-fifth-of-Jack wildness of early Destroyer. Rather, refined balladry like "Solace's Bride" coexists comfortably next to upbeat, funky songs like "Midnight Meet the Rain," which sounds like the badass theme song for an '80s cop show.

With an uncanny melodic gift that enlivens even the most tired sentiments and a chameleonic ability to seamlessly transition between disparate production styles, Jepsen proves she's worthy of those comparisons [to Taylor Swift and Rihanna].

More than simply a joint stopgap for these indie heavyweights, Sing Into My Mouth serves, like the DJ-Kicks and LateNightTales series, as a musical bibliography for curious fans, and a superbly entertaining one at that.

Depression Cherry's flabby midsection finds Beach House similarly situated: treading repeatedly over the same ground, yielding diminishing returns.

Love Is Free feels comparatively tossed off, merely a bridge between Robyn 2.0 and an incarnation of the dance-pop icon we--and she--haven't yet imagined.

Yo La Tengo manages to further their transparency and place the focus even more on the material, faking their way through another series of delicately adjusted, quietly exquisite reinterpretations.

Call it a low-stakes play, but Another One is a snapshot of an artist who's found his lane and continues to mine it for affecting, melodically spry material.

For all its, well, sturm und drang, the bulk of Lamb of God's latest is pretty formulaic.

Although Currents is, in many ways, a showcase of difference (from his previous guitar-driven efforts, from some previous influences, even from other recently successful forays into disco-pop such as Daft Punk's Random Access Memories), Parker also toys with repetition as a unifying theme, sonically and lyrically.

Turns out Wilco are still full of surprises.

Born in the Echoes is frontloaded with star power, and so it comes as a slowly dawning relief that that album isn't the Chems' Random Access Memories, but rather an attempt to strip away the detritus of the now and play to their own strengths.

Isbell's follow-up, Something More Than Free, retains Southeastern's intimate acoustic-based feel and heavyhearted lyrical matter, but it's even more smooth-edged and lacks the emotional gut-punches of its predecessor.

A more sonically focused effort.

It's too bad the songwriting doesn't match the ambition.

D'Angelo may have struck a new gold standard for intellectual R&B, and even recorded a more traditionally cohesive and satisfying album, but Miguel's cocktail of furious angst, pained perplexity, and damaged tenderness is just as relevant, acknowledging the complicated realities of modern sexuality while pushing to expand its horizons.

It's never quite a tour de force, but as a union of the Orb's heady roots with their spiritual ascendants' minimalist ethos, the album is a consistently satisfying groove machine, and a worthy entry to the upper ranks of the Orb canon.

Deja Vu reminds the listener of something, all right: every other song currently playing, as Donna Summer once sang, on the radio.

Her music is as rooted in organic country and western traditions as ever, flush with cosmopolitan strings, instrumental banjo breaks, and generous portions of pedal steel, but the songwriting comes less organically, too often stretching itself thin over a genre that's historically benefited from a measure of simplicity.

With no one on hand to quell his worst impulses, Young has gone preachy to the extreme, creating music that's morally precise, but sloppy in every other regard.

There may not be many surprises musically on Ten Songs, but it's surprising enough that Adams has let the façade down and finally let us hear his music in its purest form.

Occasionally, the more ambitious nature of Everything Is 4 reveals some of Derulo's weaknesses, like his insistence on indulging straight R&B (which feels basic compared to the unique mode of genre-bending he usually works in), but stretching musically also leads to arguably the most exciting moment here, the funk rave-up of album-closer "X2CU."

Kozelek veers between wry, pissed-off, and ruminative expression without ever really settling on any of those. While that means Universal Themes never reaches the same highs as Benji, it does allow the listener to become fully immersed inside Kozelek's head, which is an alternately terrifying and hilarious place to be.

His winking in-jokes and one-liners might have gotten the Internet's attention, but Ratchet wins you over when it reveals that this smart-aleck's got a beating heart too.

Absent the lightning-in-a-bottle voltage of their heyday, Faith No More's Sol Invictus is shockingly no more than adequate.

Matsson might be offering another round of familiar sounds on Dark Bird Is Home, however impeccably arranged and played. The darkness and ambivalence that haunt its shadows, however, give the album depth and longevity well beyond its something-for-everyone first impression.

Why Make Sense? is the electronic fivesome's characteristically polished, generously tuneful tribute to wearing your heart on your sleeve.

Had she toned down some idiosyncrasies and worried a handful of these songs past what sounds like their draft stages, I Can't Imagine could've been a real coup for Lynne.

Fly International Luxurious Art maintains some level of general interest through a stacked guest list, with visitors as varied as Snoop Dogg, A$AP Rocky, Busta Rhymes, and 2 Chains, but none of them do more than distract from the overall atmosphere of paltry unevenness.

Fated is limited in scope, frustratingly laconic, and--as befits a journeyman--somewhat derivative, but it's never boring.

Wilder Mind may be something altogether worse than divisive: unremarkable.

Their forays into synth-heavy late-'70s/early-'80s prog and arena rock are alternately inventive and bafflingly blockheaded.

On one hand, some of experiments fall well outside Brown's songwriting wheelhouse, like the hideous seven-minute butt rock "Junkyard," or the vaguely offensive Caribbean-lite "Castaway." On the other hand, the album is a showcase for what's clearly a versatile group of musicians, and its strongest five-song stretch turns on a dime from pseudo-gospel with bagpipes ("Remedy") to pop-country ("Homegrown") to big band ("Mango Tree") to heavy K-Rock fodder featuring Chris Cornell ("Heavy Is the Head") to lilting country-folk ("Bittersweet").

The Magic Whip isn't a triumphant return of a Britpop champion; instead, it's a mature, measured document from a band that's never rested on its laurels.

Tyler makes a few more gestures toward maturity, cutting down the lengthy screeds and striking a better overall balance between sweetness and horror. But he continues to struggle to integrate his feelings into his material.

The focus is therefore narrower, and while Stetson doesn't reach the same heights of grandiose menace as on his previous album, the results are roundly impressive, rooted to the continuing spectacle of two discrete approaches melting into one another, each disrupting and perverting the effect of the other.

Unfortunately, Kindred only loses the plot further, entrenching itself in a sonically limited pop vocabulary (starchy synth lines; bristling, reverb-doused percussion; and huge, multi-tracked choruses) that's even further away from the chaotic chemistry of his debut.

[Brittany Howard's] performance only confirms that she's the kind of pop vocal talent that only comes along a few times in a generation, while Sound & Color as a whole is proof that Alabama Shakes have got the chops to be a lot more than Muscle Shoals revivalists.

I Don't Like Shit may be a master class in ominous mood-setting and a cutting excavation of a wounded psyche, but it also reveals that Earl is at his best when he engages the outside world rather than getting mired in his own emotional claustrophobia.

With its chintzy synths, plastic horns, and feather-lite reggae (the stiff, dunderheaded "Right Side of the Road") and lifeless white-guy funk (the bleating "Bamboula"), the album might as well be made up of outtakes recorded 30 years ago.

Where Kintsugi falters is in its sacrifice of momentum for structure.

For an album that deals in low stakes, Sometimes I Sit and Think finds Barnett hitting some incredible highs. Without sounding labored, she creates an impeccably honest world rife with humor, self-deprecation, and heartbreak.

Flashes of contingent weirdness appear throughout the album, and the lyrics remain reliably sardonic, but the band surrenders too often to a prefab pop-rock idiom that isn't entirely their own.