A handful of ballads do add variety to the album's pace, but Owl City is largely a vehicle for the one song Adam Young knows how to make.

The Black Album feels like the most fully realized latter-day Weezer album: it may flagrantly draw from old and new elements of pop culture, yet it belongs to its own feverish world.

Ballads have always been his forte, a convenient vehicle for his quivering sensitivity and accidental melodicism, yet it's still startling how slow The Illusion of Progress unfolds, as Staind rarely muster the energy to move beyond midtempo even when they deign to crank up their amps for anthems of mild alienation or vague inspiration.

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.

Witness is a conceptual muddle but that incoherence could've been excused if there were hooks in either its grooves or melodies. Instead, Witness is populated with busy, tuneless tracks that seemed designed to pulsate in the background of a regrettable night.

The album is a major production.

Add Kahne's instantly accessible production and Light is not only a welcome surprise, but an album that matches his debut.

There are some surprises on Mudvayne, like a surprisingly Slash-like guitar solo on "Closer" and the death metal intro to the Slipknot-esque "I Can't Wait," but too much of it is more of the same from the band and its genre.

Resilience mostly lives up to the promise of its moniker, delivering another well-executed, purely fan-centric collection of testosterone-fueled, post-grunge/processed metal jams with a complete disregard for subtlety.

Reincarnated the album is all heart and heart-in-the-right-place, threatening to mash up the system without ever even harshing the mellow.

Smart, moving, approachable, and well constructed, Nightbird is Erasure's mature masterpiece.

Since the beats are monotonous, since the songs are insipid and forgettable, since the girls not only can't sing but have no on-record charisma, since there's no sense of style and, most importantly, sense of fun to this whole enterprise, Dangerous and Moving is the worst kind of pop music: the kind that is better to theorize about than to listen to.

We Don't Have to Whisper is too doggedly dour and amorphous to be more than a curiosity.

That material ["Like A Drum"], as well as much of what surrounds it, is significantly less substantive than the singer's past work.

Sure, as sheer sound, it's executed well -- more assured, musical, and, well, professional than any of their other albums, their age lending them a dexterity absent in their hits -- but the deliberate retro-rage begs the question: who exactly is this music for?

It will seduce anybody already won over by his 2005 debut, "Back to Bedlam," since it's a tighter, more assured record than that. But chances are, they were seduced by Blunt already.

Even if it is not as original or wildly thrashin' as the first album, Post-Mortem is still a decent follow-up, especially considering that Black Tide are still only in their teens.

They don't expand their horizons, preferring to stick to the hyper-charged British indie they minted with their 2014 debut, The Balcony.

Backed by stale songs, formulaic arrangements, and mediocre songwriting, Williams is forced to rely on his volcanic personality to bring this album across -- and despite a few strong performances, he sinks into lame self-parody time and time again.

There's nothing preventing them from indulging in the silliest rhymes, baffling name-drops, nagging hooks, and earworm melodies.

They execute it all with a fullness of sound and compelling melodic content that pulls the listener in, almost as surely as any first-rate opera.

With friends and collaborators surgically removed, Faith is littered with jarring voices, avaricious creative decisions, and a fundamental sidelining of its visionary figurehead.

When they're on a roll, Guantanamo Baywatch deliver some ripping surf tunes, and they clearly know how to deliver a good time with a beat you can dance to, but Chest Crawl is never quite as exciting as it wants to be, and the flat, confined sound of the audio doesn't help one bit.

Rundgren is pushing the edges of his comfort zone just enough to keep himself stimulated while offering enough melody to satisfy those fans whose concentration usually drifts whenever he wanders, and the result is an imperfect but satisfying art-pop album.

Consistency is a virtue in this case: maybe Starr does little more than deliver what he promises, but he does deliver, and that reliability is a comfort in times of uncertainty.

But even if Every Man for Himself was constructed with the mainstream in mind, it likely won't win any new converts, since at their core Hoobastank remains unchanged: their songs aren't particularly dynamic or catchy, the band doggedly follows alt-rock conventions as if adherence to clichés gives the group legitimacy, and Robb's pedestrian voice alternately disappears into the mix or veers flat when he holds a note.

Palookaville could stand one more trimming pass, but it gives Cook's canon the needed depth.

Seems slickly over-produced and a little forced.