While there's some charm in the fact that Seger is loose enough to keep his ends untied, Ride Out is hobbled by that exacting production: conceptually, it's something of a ragged mess and it'd benefit from sounding like one.

The album effectively sets a mood but tends to lack the richness and labyrinthine quality of the previous album. It's too direct, skeletal, and mechanical to function as more than background listening.

Honor is the first album where Rancid sound obvious, like on the heavy ska "Everybody's Sufferin'," where the lyrics about how everybody's suffering are delivered in cornball Jamaican accents. It's the first time they sound empty, too, like they're going through the motions with little or no passion driving them.

This kind of work doesn't make for an album which one is inclined to return to for repeated listening.

A large portion of Black Metal resembles the kind of lo-fi, quantity-over-quality, solitary works of eccentrics who would have been at home in the mid- to late '80s on labels like Factory Benelux, Creation, or, well, Rough Trade.

The hardcore fans might notice the difference but, apart from those three songs, there's not much reason for them to pick this up because Forever consists of songs they've purchased many times over.

It may bear the mark of Venom, but it lacks the heart-stopping toxicity of its inception.

Future Brown clearly know what to synthesize and how to select. The whole here, however, is less than the sum of its parts.

Projections, Fairhurst's first album, designed more for home listening than for dancefloors, is relatively listless, sometimes torpid, and often sounds more like a project than a form of expression.

Ultimately, this is likely to satisfy only the most devout sects of Brown's and Tyga's fan bases.

Ultimately, it frustrates because the listener doesn't get much in the way of reward for the chore of endurance.

The duo's desire to strip the music of all energy leaves the songs limp, unable to make an impression in an age when songs are screaming for attention everywhere you turn.

The entire album has a general lack of excitement that could be Matt and Kim mailing it in, or taking one step too far toward the pop mainstream and losing the punkish edge that made their music pop like bubbles in a bottle of shaken-up soda.

Cute he may be, but he has charisma that lasts no longer than a GIF, as Handwritten makes painfully clear.

Without their old-timey affectations, the band seems interchangeable with any number of blandly attractive AAA rockers, a group that favors sound over song.

The group's self-titled second album cuts down on the group's more excessive tendencies, with only "A Pleasure to Burn" surpassing the five-minute mark, and seems to have more of a stripped-down songwriting style as well.

A stilted album.

While one can always sense the pain and joy in the mere sound of Stone's voice, some of the songs' lines provoke head scratching rather than knowing nods. Through deep, repeated listening, the album increasingly resembles ragtag emoting. Heard passively, it's all pleasant summertime listening.

Like the EP, it frustrates almost as much as it charms, but Raury's energy is ceaselessly positive, and his potential is abundant.

It's a trivial if fun diversion.

The majority of what follows is a qualitative step back from previous solo album X.

Songs for Our Mothers indicates Fat White Family still want to annoy you, but they're only going to put real effort into it for so long.

Victorious amounts to little more than a thrown-together mess.

Chaosmosis finds the band scaling back their predecessor, narrowing their vistas so drastically it often seems as if the group cobbled it together on an old Casio.

On Music for Listening to Music To, there's a vision, but it's not Goodman's and it's not well conceived or well executed.

For Star Wars freaks, identifying the sources can be amusing, though not many of the cuts are comparable to the artists' best work.

Honey nonetheless comes across as an attention-grabbing experiment more than it does a third proper full-length.

Eventually, people will get tired of the same old song if it's sung too often. On Views, Drake is starting to sound a little weary of it himself.

On the whole, the produced numbers are better than the unadorned cuts: Bugg's nasal twang gets buried underneath the gloss and the hooks are pushed to the forefront. The whole thing adds up to a bit of a mess, not in the least because Bugg's schtick was his authenticity.

Alternating between bro country that's just past its sell-by date, summertime party tunes so breezy they get silly, and a heavy dose of southern rock, the Cadillac Three demonstrate versatility but they also seem scattered, as if they're scrambling for an audience.

This offers more of the detailed scenes only Ocean can script, as well as some stray sly quotables. Ultimately, it's a smartly ordered patchwork of mostly secondary material.

Three underwhelms from beginning to end.

Barry Johnson still knows how to write a sharp hook; they are just dulled by the lifeless production and the cookie-cutter approach. Only a couple of the tracks land.

Songs like "Star Crossed Lovers" and "Shadows" sound embarrassingly old-fashioned and make Gibb sound ancient. A more sympathetic production style and some focus would have made all the difference on In the Now.

The album feels like the duo are reaching for something greater, but the end result feels like a dilution, a compromise, and every other synonym for middle-of-the-road.

Despite the talent on board and the high-concept thinking that went into it, there's a dry, brittle quality to Savoy Motel that saps this material of its strength, and this band has only so many tricks in its pocket to begin with.

There are clever parts strewn throughout and some of the more ambient instrumental tracks like "i.v." and "l.i.v." are quite nice, but overall, the songs themselves don't have quite enough going for them to support the album's quirky intentions.

Pharrell Williams is on the couple's perseverance anthem "Work on It," a wobbly ballad, while Illangelo was involved with "Holy War," where some dulled drums interrupt a mostly acoustic number about backward societal views of war and sex. These songs, like a fair portion of the album's remainder, are not lacking in energy or conviction, but they're raw as in crude.

It's a disappointing turn of events for the band, the kind that might lose them a bunch of their fans, while failing to win them any new ones in return.

If anything, the defining factor on The Temple of I & I is that it's their most formless record to date.

More about creating a low-wattage soundtrack for chemical and sexual mischief than foundations for songs.

More Life is another overly serious, musically uninteresting effort.

The album is deficient in emotional depth and congeals into a mass of adequate mood music. It doesn't offer much more once the themes--including romantic fulfillment, solace, and longing, with a little materialistic frivolity, eyelash batting, and cutting loose--come into sharper focus.

At best, I Can Spin a Rainbow feels like the work of two talented artists savoring a long weekend of boundless creativity together, but from an outsider's perspective, the results are a bit too impenetrable to contextualize without having been in the room to witness its genesis.

While there is some appeal in this bright blast of sound, especially when he's in party mode--"One Beer Can" in particular recounts the aftermath of a raucous adolescent bash--it can also seem vaguely desperate, as if he's still clutching a reality that's faded into the past.

The issue isn't that it's a pop effort; indeed, they get points for a brave attempt so outside of their wheelhouse. The problem is that much of One More Light is devoid of that visceral charge that previously defined much of their catalog. It's a provocative challenge that ultimately fails to satisfy.

The constant recycling, along with the quantity and variety of other voices, detract from some of Evans' best, most impassioned performances, which are matched with some solid work from a roster of co-producers that includes Salaam Remi, James Poyser, and DJ Premier.

The album's 70-minute length allows enough space for a bounty of mostly nondescript trap productions that support these simplistic boasts. In these tracks, Yachty sounds like he's going through a phase more than refining his individualism.

Like their disappointing 2014 album ...Honor Is All We Know, Trouble Maker is the sound of a band going through the motions, telling the same stories over and over, bashing out the same riffs, and ultimately not connecting any punches.

The beats are fully outfitted, and several are suitably immense, but they blur into one another as they serve as a spirited if mostly unremarkable summertime backdrop.

As moving as it is to hear her and Chilli together for another album, the material is not up to par with TLC's past. Flashbacks are more likely than repeat play.

Though much of the record lies in a blander space somewhere in between, intimacy definitely takes a hit with Ultralife's expanded production, while its more radiant, rousing demeanor is likely to play well to larger venues and those seeking sunnier, or at least partly cloudy atmosphere.

The album as a whole seems unfocused, and while the producer deserves kudos for making his most mature work yet, Foreign Light contains too few high points to warrant a recommendation.

It's a clunky end to a disappointing album; one that sounds less like a reinvention and more like a giant step down a path best left unexplored further. Maybe they can strip back down to a trio, get their pedals back, and return to being a first class psych band instead of second rate indie rock troubadours.

Now feels fussy, as if every element was triple-guessed because the pressure to have a triumphant comeback was too great.

Double Dutchess couldn't possibly match the commercial success of The Dutchess, and much of it is merely adequate, but Fergie is demonstrably as energized, and having a ball with nothing left to prove.

Retro-conning the existing Songs of Experience material to suit the political climate wasn't the easiest task and the album often shows its seams, particularly when Bono decides to tackle the crisis head-on.

Neil is making music for the moment and he doesn't much care if it lasts beyond that day or not, and while living in the moment is a good way to get through life, it doesn't do much for albums.

Lackluster as music and downright puzzling as a cultural artifact, Unleash the Love confirms that whatever you think of Mike Love's 21st century edition of the Beach Boys, he's better off doing that than trying to make music by himself.

It looks like they were having fun, but sounds slightly less so--overall, it's clear that no one here was expecting to blow the industry apart; instead, they sound content just making music and recording the experience.

While the feisty, Imagine Dragons-meets-Twisted Sister vibe remains their forte, it's Vale's pop proclivities that ultimately win out, suggesting that future endeavors may rely less on fighting the man, and more on working alongside him.

All this feverish digital desperation makes the already clamorous M A N I A feel positively cacophonic: it may only be 39 minutes but it's one long ride.

Conceptually muddled, qualitatively uneven fifth full-length.

Apart from the sly and sweet 2-step rhythm on "Wasted Times," the sound of the EP is bleary R&B with beats that drag and lurch, suited for Tesfaye's routine swings between self-pity and sexual vanity, chemically enhanced from one extreme to the other.

Taken on its own terms, Revamp is dull, but its companion album Restoration: Reimagining the Songs of Elton John and Bernie Taupin--a modern country tribute that takes chances--reveals what a missed opportunity this is.

Beerbongs & Bentleys is an apt reflection of his lavish lifestyle and his subsequently begotten hardships, but its attempts at sincerity work only when Post Malone stops trying so hard.

Like Rae Sremmurd and Migos, these big-bass trap anthems owe much to their club-friendly vibe, but offer little in terms of substance or lasting impact.

Ye can feel uneven, sometimes boring, and more indulgent than usual, but it's a fascinating peek into West's psyche.

A prevailing quantity of the tracks is either forgettable or regrettable. Nas often sounds unenthused.

At their best, Chromeo are a big, dumb party, the embodiment of guilty pleasure much like the cheesiest moments of the '80s hits they emulate. But a few choice songs, special guests, and Chromeo's studied arsenal of '80s signifiers can't keep Head Over Heels from growing tiresome, absent the hooks required to keep the party going.

Davies still possesses a sharp eye and sly sense of humor, so Our Country has its moments, but they're moments, not songs, and they're overwhelmed by his clumsy dramatic pretensions, which are undone by his reluctance to tie his theatricality into an actual narrative.

Instead of a magnum opus from an artist reaching the next level of his craft, or even a serviceable new album, Rolling Papers 2 feels like an awkward mixtape (or two) without much to say and too stoned to realize it's been rambling.

Apart from the two new songs that bode well for future albums of original material, there is absolutely no reason for Echo fans to choose a spin of The Stars, the Ocean & the Moon over another listen to the songs in their original perfect state.

Jassbusters has enough chops to pull off the kind of slick 70's MOR soft rock that seems to be Mockasin's bailiwick, but as a whole, there's just not a lot to these songs to keep things consistently interesting, and the album comes off as more of an indulgent lark in Mockasin's growing canon.

There's nothing rebellious about the music and not much natural, either--but its immaculate anodyne tones are soothing, and that's superficially pleasing, even if it doesn't remotely seem attached to the Richard Ashcroft of lore.

Jake may be the weak link, but he merely reveals how the whole band seem to have learned their moves from watching late-night concerts on Palladium while buying pre-worn vintage-styled T's at Urban Outfitters. For the band and audience alike, Greta Van Fleet is nothing more than cosplay of the highest order.

This kind of well-manicured production, when paired with a series of songs focused on internal journeys, ultimately has a lulling effect. There is a pulse, but it's soft and turned electronic. There is emotion, but it's been intentionally encased in a digital cocoon, one that flattens the group's bold accents (such as an embrace of vocoders) and turns Delta into soft, shimmering background music, ideal for any soothing setting you'd like.

This Is My Dinner isn't a radical departure from the albums Kozelek has been pumping out since Benji, but it's clear evidence of how tedious and self-indulgent his style has become.

Skins takes that unrealized potential and cobbles together these tracks--basically b-sides and outtakes--strictly for fans who needed just ten more reasons to hear his voice.

FIDLAR strike out in a variety of different directions, landing some new tricks but slamming a lot more. The result is a scattershot collection that just doesn't hang together very well.

At once slight and overdone, Why You So Crazy is one of the least rewarding trips the Dandy Warhols have taken their fans on during their career.

Though it's only a lean 40-minutes long, Harverd Dropout feels like it lasts forever, losing its shine quickly as Pump runs in place, futilely reaching for the personality that made him a star.

Juice WRLD is wrecked, angry, and using drugs to cope, and even though his appeals come through at times, much of Death Race for Love transforms the listener into the shoulder that Juice WRLD is crying on.

Lavelle's trading on past glory and continued sifting through fallout can be wearisome, but his high level of enthusiasm can be sensed throughout.

An hour-long LP with little joy or even relief, one that is nearly static in energy level despite a carousel of producers.

Guest spots by Young Thug and the Weeknd inject some much-needed personality into Bad Habits, but it's not enough to save the album from its own blandness.

She retreads just about every move she has made before, even though the crop of new fellow songwriters and producers almost outnumbers the familiar likes of Ester Dean, Pierre Medor, Christopher "Tricky" Stewart, Rodney Jerkins, Jasper Cameron, and Theron Thomas.

The most surprising thing about SHE IS COMING is how detached she sounds on it.

It might not be a coincidence that the most emotive and well-defined songs are collaborations. "Needed" (Dan Wilson), "Patience" (Ólafur Arnalds), and "Save Me" (Doveman) are also the standouts on this abbreviated set, which feels almost as secondary as Blood Remixed.

A secondary release in execution and intent, this is recommendable only to serious fans with a justifiably insatiable curiosity for what the artist creates.

It's clear after four albums that the best Bon Iver is the one that manages to keep the arrangements in check and doesn't swing for the fences. I,I takes many mighty swings and at best knocks out a few infield hits, while striking out far too often.

All the songs aim for intense, tormented statements and end up being about nothing. In this way, ! is more numbing than visceral. After it's done, it's hard to remember anything that was worth latching onto.

While it was unfinished and framed in '80s studio tropes, their attempt to complete it with modern charts and muddy, hip-hop-styled mix weighs down what remains of the original proceedings.

Even solid instrumentals begin to blur before the halfway point arrives, and the monotonous wash of mediocre content and phoned-in performances becomes exhausting long before the collection ends.

While newer production tricks add some kick to DaBaby's formula, stagnant lyrics and monotonous flows present him as an artist unwilling to change; swamped by slushy imitations of his best work, the gems on Kirk aren't given the platform to shine.

While the band sometimes flirts with modern sounds -- witness the overheated neo-new wave beats fueling "High Steppin'" -- they usually default to an affectless folk-rock that shows a considerable debt to Bob Dylan.

The music sometimes coheres on an individual track level, but Screamer pushes buttons too hard. All of its strident hooks and big beat confrontation wind up being exhausting: it sounds like a band screaming at you to pay attention for the better part of a half hour.

At times, Le Bon and Cox hit on something entertaining or interesting, but it's far from essential work from two of the best songwriters of their era.