The hooks are less immediate as well. Songs like 'Carry You' and 'Here it Goes' retain the compact force of past band gems, but too much of Chase is afflicted with a degenerate case of sameness.

At its core, though, Anywhere I Lay My Head is a curious project that never seems to light on any raison d'etre beyond indulging Johansson's love of Tom Waits.

The natural energy of his performances keeps his songs appealing, but his catchy anthems sometimes sink into formula that does not take full advantage of his musical prowess.

The music on Take It to the Limit is forceful and full of bright, churning guitars, with just enough melody to elevate the songs above most of the hedonistic hard rock out there.

The band's third full-length, Touchdown, is more of a 10-yard pass than a score.

It's a slick collection heavy on pop hooks and packed with glossy guitars and studio-perfect bass and drums. Too perfect, in fact: these 12 songs have had all the personality produced right out of them.

As it turns out, the 45-year-old English singer's exploration of Soul comes up short in interpretation as it retreads ground long since broken by others.

The real shock of the disc is the hit-or-miss results.

The songwriting is weaker than on her previous two albums, though there are plenty of sugary pop hooks and a slick, punked-up guitar sound that exists solely in $1,000-a-day recording studios.

It's too bad the best songs here don't really match up with her best performances, but that's nothing new for Spears.

An act that thrives on formula continues to mine it with Unstoppable, another celebration of puppy love and sugary hooks boiled down to their simplest forms.

It's an improvement on the band's impressively dull 2005 album, "X&Y," but Coldplay's latest doesn't recapture the promise of the band's first two albums.

As on past releases, he mostly celebrates the snap and polish of the sharkskin '60s. His songs crib so blatantly from that era that citing his influences--Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Van Morrison--is almost redundant.

A sophomore effort that rarely rises above middling.

It's an odd sort of talent, making joyless slogs out of music that is supposed to be fun and exuberant, but The Beginning is at its core a shrine to forced joviality, and that's no fun at all.

She has a magnificent voice that deserves a lot better than this formulaic pop and soul.

The irony is that such a colorful person and performer in life has seen so little of that fire (no pun intended for those who recall Lopes' most infamous exploit) carry over to her work.

Professionalism is the order of the day, and most of Entertainment, recorded over two years and produced by Killers boardman Jeff Satzman, aims for the same middle ground.

The problem is that the ballads - a key to the crossover longevity Ciara desires - are almost uniformly limp.

Essential background music, if such a thing exists.

These relatively simple power-pop songs aren't always big or memorable enough to support their grand conceits.

"Empire"... isn't quite as refreshing as its self-titled debut, but it again finds the U.K. quartet strutting off in its own direction, oblivious to the ridiculousness that sometimes characterizes its compulsive bids to be hip.

This time, Madonna is just another singer drawing on the chart appeal of Timbaland, Timberlake and Pharrell, which makes this particular piece of candy taste like a sour ball: It's appealing to fans, but it's not for everyone.

'I Don't Even Know What Time It Is' sums up the whole record, stranded between sublime '80s guitar-pop and the more recent smarminess of Arctic Monkeys and Art Brut.

His vocals here are mostly murmurs, and the musical accompaniment, though skillful throughout, lacks the punch of his previous albums.

The group doesn't stray far from the template, turning in another batch of hooky mid-tempo songs that are pretty without necessarily sounding distinctive.

Universal Mind Control gets stuck in the same rut as so many other booty-jam records do: It's not all that memorable.

Chesney's sincerity is never in question, but his songs are uniformly garden-variety and obvious no matter how they are dressed.