Beautiful Trauma's neat construction renders the album less than the sum of its parts, but individual songs work well enough, thanks in no small part to Pink's personality and charisma.

At times, it seems as though Beck is grasping at something, anything, to add conflict and tension to this effusive album. But all he comes up with are the most well-worn of sentimental platitudes.

It's the sound of a promising young singer who tried and failed to produce compelling music on the margins, turning back and self-consciously striking a more conservative pose. It's not as interesting a story, maybe, but it's also not as problematic.

Fergie struggles to balance the new with the old throughout the album. Where Stefani’s raw confessionals helped distinguish This Is What the Truth Feels Like, though, Double Dutchess is stuck in the past.

Unfortunately, an excess of downtempo tracks mires Tell Me You Love Me's momentum in its second half, concluding with a pair of refreshing but nearly identical back-to-back acoustic-driven R&B songs that might as well be a medley.

When Amos eschews her band in favor of barer piano-and-vocal arrangements—as on the contemplative “Breakaway,” the surprisingly reverent “Climb,” and the lush “Mary's Eyes,” a mournful plea to the gods to reverse Amos's mother's aphasia--Native Invader fulfills the promise of its stunning opener.

The sneaky-sounding arpeggios and the hushed, fragile vocal performances that defined albums like Our Endless Numbered Days are eschewed in favor of bright strumming and unbridled joyousness, rendering most of Beast Epic undeniably pretty but ultimately toothless. That's not to say Beast Epic doesn't sometimes explore hefty themes.

The album's lyrics, however, can't match this same level of musical precision, and Granduciel too often repeats the same vague sentiments using threadbare imagery.

TFCF lacks the forceful unity of the best Liars albums, particularly the thoughtful avant-garde theatrics of They Were Wrong So We Drowned and Drum's Not Dead. The songs here function more like a series of half-developed sketches, often invigorating but a tad shambolic, the lyrics' cryptic nature failing to connect with any coherent central thesis.

These 11 slickly produced tracks are kept more uniform in tone and content, to the point of repetition, and the feelings expressed sound more manufactured than genuine.

After a while, Crutchfield's melodies also blend together, especially during the album's middle stretch, where the similar-sounding “Sparks Fly” and “Brass Beam” are sequenced back to back.

By showing little interest in challenging the clichés of men fixated on conquest and status symbols and women focused on “feels,” Harris undermines what could have been an inspired creative reinvention.

TLC succeeds only to the extent that it captures the sound and style of the group's golden era, but absent of Left Eye's signature swagger; though T-Boz and Chilli are in fine voice, the group's success largely relied on the delicate balance of all three members.

The album won't ever take a place among the landmarks in Tweedy's catalogue, but it does provide a fresh way to hear and appreciate them.

Instead of putting their own offbeat stamp on danceable pop music, Portugal. The Man abandons their once-unique sound and retreats into imitation.

The album lacks both the big hooks that propelled Perry's past hits up the charts and the conceptual and sonic focus to give her pop real purpose.

If the album's greatest sin was simply sonic banality, it would be a lot more palatable. Far worse is the cynical nature of the album's roosty overtures.

There was an inherently intriguing incongruity between his Brian Wilson-inspired melodies and the unfathomable level of DIY grime with which he rendered them on the first couple of (self-recorded) Wavves albums. Absent that tension, Williams's melodies must be judged by their own ingenuity, and on that count, the ones on You're Welcome, especially those in its back half, too often fall short of the mark.

Her [more traditionalist approach] certainly doesn't raise the bar, but it does offer an alluring elegance and low-key appeal.

Humanz falters not when its concept runs thin, but when Albarn and his cavalcade of co-conspirators begin to run out of the meaty hooks that have defined Gorillaz's best work.

In the end, The Last Rider isn't quite as memorable as Retriever, on which Sexsmith hit his stride as a pop songwriter, or Blue Boy, which boasted a charmingly ragged production courtesy of Steve Earle. But the album has its pleasures.

Uunfortunately, the sound they've settled on is parked firmly in the middle of the road.

Songs about unrequited love will never go out of style, but The Far Field would be better served by occasionally taking the road less traveled.

Musically, Automaton possesses a freewheeling swagger that's energizing and intensely danceable, and Jamiroquai updates their familiar brand of disco and funk into something that feels fresh and progressive. But unfortunately Kay doesn't have anything new to say, as his views on society, technology, and relationships are trapped in a bygone era.

Despite collaborations with ambient-drone producer the Haxan Cloak and John Congleton (best known for his work with St. Vincent), musicians Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory have failed to materially push their sound in new direction.

Ultimately, Salutations abandons the potent vulnerability found on the sparer versions of many of these songs, and muddies its tone with the uneven newer ones.

Hot Thoughts is often at its most appealing, though, when it sees Spoon sticking to what they've long proven they know how to do best. That's not universally the case: The album's only straight-ahead garage rocker, the thudding “Shotgun,” is so uncharacteristically regressive and lunkheaded that it might as well be a Kings of Leon song.

On paper, Mercer's lyrics too often engage in heavy-handed wordplay (“I take the drugs, but the drugs won't take”) or drift off into abstraction (“I dine like an aging pirate”), though the vocals aren't always featured prominently enough to easily decipher on a casual listen.

The Tourist is a welcome shift from the amorphous electronica of the band’s last effort, but the haphazard pacing and overreliance on platitudes and generalizations prevent the album from fully achieving the emotional potency aimed for by Ounsworth’s trembling voice.

Too sleek to be real, The Temple of I and I sounds less like Jamaica than the music on the Virgin flight you might hear on the way there.

4 Your Eyez Only‘s low-key production, favoring muted live-band grooves, occasionally reaches a boil, but mostly it provides scaffolding for Cole to rap. He does the heavy lifting without ever doing anything flashy--or, some might say, anything especially interesting.

The level of discourse on Run the Jewels 3 may be higher than your standard hip-hop grandstanding, and the references may be current and the beats may be more intense, but the album remains too entrenched in the grammar of the past to ever feel entirely fresh.

A maddening ride with an authenticity problem, Awaken, My Love! finds Glover confusing his idols for muses.

He remains an exceptionally talented vocalist, yet none of the many studio wizards represented in the album's by-committee structure is capable of wrenching him out of his usual morose rhythms. To be fair, none of them really try, playing to his basic talents while also coddling his laziest inclinations, swaddling songs in scintillating soundscapes that coat these sour centers in layers of sweetness.

The album features the strongest set of beats and rhythmic hooks in Mars's canon to date, making it a could-be heir to gratuitous groove records like 1999, Off the Wall, and Remain in Light--if only it were as innovative. Ultimately, the album's magic is a trick everyone already knows.

Jessica Rabbit‘s greater emphasis on melody, along with its more diverse, if occasionally too random, structure, clearly comes from savvier musicians who are more aware of their own tendencies and flaws, even if they can’t always overcome them.

Although Joanne lacks the indelible pop hooks that those two influences [Elton John and Prince]--not to mention Gaga herself--are famous for, the album is more sonically consistent and thematically focused than the singer's last solo effort, the regressive Artpop.

While a curious, if somewhat jarring, departure from 2013's serene Innocents, this distortion-laden album too often blurs into cacophony and muddled by passive-aggressive calls for anarchy.

COW‘s inward-looking is often gray and formless, and suggests that Paterson and Fehlmann are indeed best understood when exploring the concepts they can’t understand.

Friends so incessantly refers to its generic seasons-change premise that its emotional impact is wholly blunted by the album’s end.

On Revolution Radio, his more personal songs are far more endearing.

When not vainly trying to live up to their legacy and instead embracing middle-age, the Pixies end up doing a much better job of not tainting said legacy. Head Carrier's best moments are straightforward, midtempo, guitar-based alt-rock.

Despite the extensive coordination involved in featuring so many notable guests, All Wet too often feels half-baked, with Dupieux stirring up interesting ideas only to tire of them too quickly.

Despite some conceptual shakiness and a few instances of turgid sentimentality, Sheff is doing fine on his own, continuing to detail unsteady emotional ground with a characteristic mixture of self-assurance and existential dread.

AIM finds M.I.A. content to simply make an album, not craft a definitive statement to punctuate her career.

The album meets all goth-adjacent indie-dance needs squarely. It doesn't, however, ever transcend those needs.

Unfortunately, Gonjasufi's attempt to turn his solidarity with the angry and the dispossessed into a musical concept is too blandly realized to be convincing.

By blatantly exposing a core of raw sexuality, previously presented only indirectly in their music, the group ends up removing any possible release valve while stripping the songs of nuance.

Tyler and his collaborators manage to distill the alleged death of arena rock and its rebirth as modern-day pop country into a 55-minute runtime. Unfortunately, in equal measure, it's also a testament to the depths to which Tyler is willing to superficially pander in order to remain commercially relevant.

Blank Face LP is ultimately an unfocused album, one caught between reportage and repugnant opportunism.

While the experiments in modern techniques here vary in effectiveness, they at least spur the band to capture the spontaneity and jubilance of their often rapturous live shows--a spirit that often gets lost when they pack their albums with painfully sincere, stone-faced balladry. In fact, it's when the Avetts lean back on their standard neo-bluegrass style that True Sadness is at its dullest.

The Mountain Will Fall is just slack, with perfunctory ideas waiting impatiently for guest stars to enliven them through association.

Most of the songs on Kidsticks are quick and fun, with bright hooks and buoyant keyboards, and the lyrics lack the consequence Orton has brought to the themes of love and loss in the past.

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.

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).”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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").

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.

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.

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.

While Twin Shadow's first two efforts were defined by an uneasy balance between gaudy theatrics and finely detailed production, most of the songs here lack that innate tension, catchy but unsatisfyingly thin.

Clarkson has been mining this territory since before Swift even landed her first record deal, and songs that should ostensibly inspire nostalgia (like the pointedly titled aerobics workout "Nostalgic") instead feel like they just rolled off a conveyor belt.

Non-Fiction is just blandly lazy about developing its representation of women, like it is about everything else. That lack of specificity renders the album ironically hindered by its own overt conception: a story album unable to sustain interest as fiction, non- or otherwise.