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.