With JACKBOYS 2 delivering nothing to really bite into, all there is to do is chew on it awhile and spit it back out.

The musicians still churn out standard-issue heavy metal thrash à la Metallica to support Chüd's nihilistic pronouncements, usually sung in an enraged howl.

It is stronger all-around than "Supernova," the poor 2001 album that never came out in the States, with the stitches less audible than the average post-humous album. And yet, nothing here comes close to rivaling the best TLC material.

This album ultimately emerges as an erratic project, its highlights spread too thinly to do much good.

He's a better vocalist and more charismatic than most of the dullards who followed in his wake--but this is still deliberately tepid music, more concerned about appearances than hooks or drama.

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

It's painful to hear such floundering work by a performer who listeners know can do better.

Not everything works--Tisdale isn't convincing when she tries to deal in either pain or carnality, but when she sticks to the surface, she makes sure that Guilty Pleasure lives up to its title.

These Thieves do often come off as just another trendy outfit hawking tawdry 20-year time warps, albeit with more streamlined sonics than many.

Some of these songs are familiar, but these arrangements are distinctly Weller's own, and it makes for an effective listen -- maybe not a major effort from the Modfather, but an enjoyable one all the same.

The album is mostly about emotion and expressing emotion, and finding the right driving piano hooks and reverbing guitar chords to enhance such feelings. All of which means that Beyond the Neighbourhood is not particularly extraordinary.

The end result is an album on a shaded, comfortable grayscale, music that's suitably mature yet sidesteps stultifying notions of middlebrow class.

Straying far from home, Tomahawk Technique isn't an awful Sean Paul album, but it is an odd one.

The mostly mid-tempo songs plod along, usually turning to a screeching lead guitar over chunky chording to differentiate the choruses.

Coming from an artist whose personality was at times their entire appeal, Eternal Atake 2's lack of compelling identity makes it even more of a letdown.

The album consists entirely of songs begging for a singer that could give them their own personality, to which Michele and company respond by making every song louder than the last.

Yours Truly doesn't quite match the caliber of the albums in the Sublime discography, but it's a fairly enjoyable spin-off just the same.

Levine and company aren't the focus here, they're the connective tissue on a softly amorphous album that sounds entirely like latter-day Maroon 5 without ever quite seeming to belong to them.

It's a partially successful successor to "Yeah!," following through on some of the overall feel and punch but lacking enough songs to truly bring it across the goal line.

EVOLVE feels very much like the digital zeitgeist of 2017: good intentions aside, its bold, colorful textures elbow aside any notions of introspection or reflection.

Tonally, Beck and Depp don't quite mesh -- Beck's guitar wants to soar, Depp stays earthbound -- and instead of generating something rife with tension or an outright failure, the results are just leaden and dull.

A couple tracks and a few stray lines aside, these verses could have been dashed off by the MC at just about any earlier point in her career.

As on their last two LPs, it's heavily reliant on nightclub anthems and will.i.am's throwback rapping, alongside Auto-Tune harmonies and waves of synth

America succeeds in representing its namesake: it's confused, inspirational, and, like Thirty Seconds To Mars circa 2018, at a serious crossroads where the future is uncertain but oddly hopeful.

All in all, it's clear that chart-driven pop circa the second decade of the millennium rarely gets much better than LMFAO on this stand-out album.

Overall, American Heart is pleasant, but lacks some of the rock'n'roll kick and glitz that Boone's stage flipping antics imply; a momentary rush of moonbeam ice cream that leaves a sweet aftertaste, but not much else.

Like many other tracks here, it seems ideally suited for heavy rotation on Radio Disney. The songs tend to have sledgehammer hooks as simple as schoolyard chants, all the better to be bellowed from the backseats of mini-vans across America. There are a few oddities, however.

They seem like a garden-variety hard rock band, one that would have been generic and forgettable in 1974, and one that is generic and forgettable in 2004.