Things pick up toward the end with the slightly more upbeat run of Lost In Yesterday, Is It True and It Might Be Time. For the most part, though, Parker is a better producer than he is a songwriter.

There are a handful of feel-good moments. ... But it’s not enough to carry the bloated 18-song track list to a satisfying end. Instead it feels like getting caught in an endless kaleidoscope of solipsistic nostalgia. The effect is suffocating in its repetitiveness.

He’s managed to inject this compact collection of eight tunes with more than a whiff of 90s alt-radio nostalgia, but the songs are hummable enough to rebuff anyone inclined toward cynical eye-rolling.

With 22 tracks over 80 minutes (including a few skits you’ll skip after the first listen), it’s way too long. It’s themed around Chance’s wedding to his longtime partner, Kristen Corley – a rite of passage that mirrors the “big day” of his debut album release. And like a wedding in which the priest’s sermon is getting in the way of the dinner buffet, you can really feel it drag.

The album wouldn't be satisfying if it was just another version of Freudian. But Caesar calls the album an experiment, and that's often what it feels like. He's still figuring it all out.

Individually, the songs are absorbing, but when listened back to back, they begin to lose their magic.

He remains a confident and commanding rapper, full of agile double-time flows and verses that skip from biographical vignettes and life lessons to boasting. But, given he rarely has more than one verse per song, Diaspora gives us a fragmented window into his thoughts.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with sticking to a formula that works, and in Cowboy’s case, it’s pretty acoustic songs and (mostly) mellow vocals. But for a songwriter like DeMarco, who on previous albums has triumphed when trying something new, perhaps change is worth pursuing.

There’s a world-weary wisdom that was only hinted at in party-heavy previous albums, and the band is skilled at translating it into catchy lyrical nuggets you can raise a tall can to.

The fleeting interlude Sonora, inspired by Cochemea’s Yaqui (an Indigenous nation from Mexico) ancestors, brightens the album with a hint of tropical sax.

She’s become her own worst nightmare – boring.

The record lags a little in the middle as the songs start to blend together. There’s enough differentiation that you don’t want to skip them altogether, but it’s a kink to work out on later records.

Where the project falls short is in the handful of filler tracks that pollute the listening experience, including the repetitive Temptation, F&N and Overdose. Yet it still counts as a victory for Future, who has now introduced The WIZRD to the world. It will be interesting to see what he does next with that persona.

Her percussion is often mesmerizing, the glue holding it all together. It’s all cinematic in a broad sort of way, the kind of album you can put on and walk through the streets, imagining how the movie of your own life would unfold. Thematically, it swerves through early 20-something existential angst in a rather predictable and trend-chasing way, which starts to lag and feel samey in the album’s second half.

The problem is that Earl’s stream of consciousness style does not lend itself to easy listening. Off-kilter drum loops and piano chords bury the lyrics on Red Water and Peanut, creating an unfriendly sonic experience reminiscent of listening to a song with cheap earphones in a noisy room. Listeners will only be able to appreciate Earl’s poetry once they devote every ounce of their focus to hearing it.

After the long wait it’s not a disappointing effort, but it’s all over the place.

There are enough good songs to give Queen a pass, but if it’s going to be 19 tracks, it needs to be more consistently awesome.

Kanye West has always been a troll but there was once an empowering, heroic quality to his narcissism. As he struggles to find his footing in a strange new world, there is still merit in a work like Ye if you can somehow look past the self-destructive celebrity behind it.

Rault’s commitment and ability to ape the sounds of his idols is both his strength and his Achilles’ heel.

There’s something bewitching about this free-form section of Testing, but there’s still that feeling Rocky's stylistic adventurousness--however appealing--is overwhelming lyrics and flows that aren't as ambitious as the production.

There’s more softness and vulnerability than one usually associates with the Weeknd, but also his signature numbness. ... Opener Call Out My Name’s title is typical of the EP’s uninteresting lyrical approach, but he sings with a grandness that is further amplified by sturdy production choices: a buzzing bass line and waltzing drum beat that sounds recycled from hit single Earned It.

The album as a whole drags a little. But the softness of Kline’s vocals and the instrumentation anchoring her lyrics and stories make up for it.

White’s yelps and screams, reverb, synth and jittery guitar riffs could be more pleasant or cohesive, but that’s not White’s style, especially not on this record. Piling it all on seems to be the point he’s trying to make--this sense of being overwhelmed, constantly, at the hands of technology.

The album doesn’t sound phoned in, necessarily, but it absolutely sounds vacuous, vapid and clichéd.

When it works, it’s as joyful as the best Tune-Yards songs. ... Given her soaring delivery elsewhere, the talk-sung ABC 123 and Now As Then fall flat in comparison, and the reliance on 808s feels a tad dated for a group lauded for their innovative production.

Another artist might show signs of disappointment or uncertainty when faced with the notion that not much has changed in half a century, but on Medicine Songs, in the face of the unchanging nature of the oppression she’s expressed through her music, Buffy Sainte-Marie has chosen to be just as determined, unflinching and constant in her own art.

dvsn’s deeply satisfying and sputtering beats are accentuated with wandering and jazzy piano riffs, melodic guitar and classic soul/R&B nods that maintain warmth and red-bloodedness but also overemphasize the Morning After’s sentimentality.

Now, her newest batch of songs feel overly done up and superficial, with squeaky synths and drum machine beats fabricated for the club.

The only misfires include Brother, an old-tyme shanty à la the Decemberists whose Back On The Chain Gang-style background chants are an uncharacteristically tacky production choice. Still, The Wild is full of serviceable songs and outstanding playing, with Banwatt once again proving he’s one of the best drummers in the biz.

Grainger and Keeler are now more than six years into their reunion, but it’s still hard to listen to these songs without making knee-jerk comparisons to their early work (which, let’s face it, offered more thrills). That being said, Outrage! Is Now shows that they’ve shifted into a new phase of their career – one in which they’ve honed their craft and matured into seasoned pros.

Some songs feel just short of full-blown biting, like No Question, which is awfully reminiscent of the classic Breeders single Saints. Still, it feels hard to write them off as some kind of revivalist project. If anything, the band’s unshakeable determination to stay in their own lane seems like an ideological gesture. You can’t be cool if you’re worried about being cool.

For an album that otherwise condemns the materialism and narcissism of the modern world, Everything Now works best when it practises what it preaches: block out the superfluous noise for direct appeals to the heart.

4:44 is intimate, refined and mature--fascinating partly despite its flaws and partly because of them.

It’s far from a perfect record, but it’s their best in years.

Unfortunately, few songs truly stand out. Peven Everett’s effusive turn on Strobelite is the biggest pop moment, while De La Soul fronting the pounding Momentz gives the album some early momentum.

This is unabashedly a pop album, full of big melodies and simple metaphors, that adds just a bit of analog fuzz to her usually pristine sound.

The album’s clean production (courtesy of producer Youth) and comfortable mood (nicely summed up by the song Mood Rider) is somewhat surprising and a tad disappointing. However, they don’t sound aloof, either. The mirror JAMC are holding up to the mainstream nowadays is less distorted, but still fully engaged in sharp and timeless songcraft.

His more abstract, mellow songs don’t work as well, too often sounding like buildups to a big drop that never comes rather than completed tracks. But Greene has filled out Feel Infinite with just enough bangers to keep the momentum from lagging too much.

NAV’s songcraft is sharp, but the lack of dynamics ultimately makes this debut feel one-note.

If you can deal with the frequent ridiculousness of the songs, Wild Cat is a fun listen. The production is raw enough to approximate their live sound, and more than a few choruses will get stuck in your head. If you’re looking for much more than that, you’re listening to the wrong band.

Though there’s some absolutely gorgeous production that recalls the lush sound and synthscapes of 80s rock, the songwriting is weighed down by clichés.

His latest, Love in Beats, is his most seamless collision yet. That harmony is thanks to the unified vision that comes with having two producers on the project: Omar and his brother Scratch Professor.

Satellite feels very much like a transitional record in which Kid Koala is exploring new terrain. Not all of his tangents are successful, but his enthusiasm for stretching beyond his turntablist roots is refreshing.

On Immortal, he tackles paranoia and police brutality in ways that are both heartbreaking and bluntly nihilistic, while Foldin Clothes is a blissful and unapologetic diversion into domesticity ("I never thought I'd see the day I'm drinking almond milk"). Elsewhere, his earnestness comes off as unwieldy in moments that precariously sit on the cusp of sleepy sentimentality.

The burst of primal aggression is welcome (especially in today's political climate), but this EP is too meandering and amorphous to hit as hard as the band’s best stuff.

It isn’t until album closer Spring Fever that you get a sense of how much further the band could’ve pushed the experimentalism.

A bunch of tunes seem built for radio (So What, Error), ballad Sorrow is overly dreary, and Skin Me borrows way too much from Nirvana. But the strength, emotion and new directions make this album a winner.

At 18 tracks, Starboy delivers some pop gems, but its last third falters with a string of schmaltzy ballads eventually rescued by the Daft Punk-assisted closer, an enjoyable bit of retro lite-funk that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Random Access Memories.

Gaga has wrenched herself away from dance-pop to focus on the country and classic rock influences that have always been present in her music, albeit gussied up like a coked-out drag queen stumbling out of a bar at 4 am.

Ruminations is difficult, packed with depression and despair. But closer Till St. Dymphna Kicks Us Out, with its rejuvenating piano, shows us that things haven’t gone completely dark yet.

Requiem is a double album but only 13 songs long, which means you’re in store for plenty of extended instrumental jams. Those chugging epics help establish the hazy mood and create plenty of atmosphere, but the best moments come when Goat attempt more conventional song structures.

Their records are blueprints laying out a basic architecture to be improved upon, expanded or subverted when the band plays live. Big Boat offers glimpses of the group's playfulness.

Despite a couple of interstitial tracks just past the halfway mark, RR7349 is more like a suite of discrete moods than a cycle of songs.

It's nice to hear De La Soul stretching themselves creatively, and even the less successful detours are interesting additions to an already eclectic catalogue.

Too often, Jenkins's use of melody fails to create sticky songs in a pop sense, but it does offset his gruff baritone and stern messaging. ... Jenkins is at his best when taking everyday scenarios and cutting to their emotional core.

Preoccupations don't fully hit their stride until album closer Fever, which sounds a bit like Heroes-era Bowie without coming across as derivative.

Skrillex-produced banger Go Off, Blaqstarr-assisted Bird Song and Visa are solid electro-rap party jams that also reference some of her past hits, while low-key dancehall track Foreign Friend and clubby Fly Pirate are among the handful of cuts that get stuck in filler territory.

In a genre based on repetition, standout moments are critical, and We Move provides too few of them to be impactful. But when they show up, the results are stunning.

The central dichotomous tension is blandly predictable (loud-quiet-loud-quiet), the songwriting occasionally sharp, but its political themes--like its vocalist--are lost in the fury.

And Agnes, the gloomy, anticlimactic closer, ejects the listener out of the edgy world that much of the album finds strength in by relying too heavily on a mainstream radio sound that feels too safe. Nonetheless, as a whole, HTBAHB is thrilling enough to achieve replay status.

The lyrics are vivid and occasionally rote in their romanticism, but the formlessness of Endless is deceptive.

While the best moments prove the country queen is still at the top of her game, missteps like spoken word breaks add unneeded cheese, and Pure & Simple isn't all that thematically diverse.

No matter how sobering Hypercaffium Spazzinate gets, Descendents keep things light by playing these wistful, grown-ass songs like teenagers.

The distance between men and women--emotional and physical--is at the core of many of these songs, yet the album manages to be the most playful PARTYNEXTDOOR record to date.

Sonically, Nothing's Real is in line with the gliding, easy-listening 80s pop that's back en vogue thanks to Blood Orange, Haim and La Roux.

The amount of fatigue and cynicism baked into 14th album Innocence Reaches is not just a bummer; it's verging on ominous.

There are rhythms and sounds that instantly come off as nostalgic, but in the best moments the beats and textures merge to form something wholly unidentifiable.

Like all Hip records, this is a snapshot of a band constantly moving away from their past and toward a strange musical unknown.

Morning Report finds Arkells lost and deep outside of their comfort zone.

It's a bold move to pick up the scraps from the floor, finish them up and declare them worth hearing, even if they don't fit tidily on any previous (or future) albums. Song by song you could be forgiven for asking "Is this the same band?"

Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not is 45 new minutes of Mascis's solid-gold shredding, but there has never been less to hang it on. The hooks that bracket the bouts of soloing are almost instantly unmemorable and the chord structures uninspired.

It's a solid denouement to Elaenia's touring cycle, and perhaps helps us appreciate that album for its use of exactly the right tools for the job and appropriate scope for its ideas.

Seventies and 80s soul and funk influences shine through on nearly every track.

For All We Know could make a stronger statement, but that doesn’t change the fact that Nao’s voice is one of the most exciting--and fun to listen to--in modern R&B.

Ultimately, it’s Rubinos’s unflinching lyrics that linger long after Black Terry Cat ends.

Hit Reset, the Julie Ruin’s second album, is super-spunky.

Q might appear masked on the album cover, but his explicit tales of hardship, prosperity and loss hide nothing.

The tongue-in-cheekness can create a distance that prevents the songs from hitting hard and/or stirring up your feelings. But you can still sit back and appreciate Arner's songwriting craft, knack for memorable hooks, the intelligent places his songs go to, his and Delisle's harmonic chops and the lo-fi production aesthetic that speaks to a talent for doing a lot with a little.

As the narrative grows sleepier, it feels as though she wants to see how much she can reduce her theatrical pop image into something small and seemingly impermanent.

While IV shows a progression, it lacks the progressiveness that would keep BBNG in a league with their aforementioned jazz/hip-hop predecessors and peers. However admirably, it stays in its own lane.

Each woman's distinct singing and songwriting style is front and centre, but their voices blend beautifully.

Recorded in Los Angeles during the summer of 2015, the 10-song release is noisy, messy stuff. What sets it apart from Segall's other numerous bands is Shaw's contribution: he brings a punky, tough sing-shout to the lo-fi, overdriven tunes, while Moothart and Segall (on drums here) go in for a thrashy vibe.

While each song is its own curious, maximalist wonder, it adds up to something fairly cacophonous. So much is happening in each trebly, dizzying track that there are few new heights to reach after the first three or four.

Yes, all the songs are nice and pretty, but there's something missing. It could be that in 2016 there's palpable nostalgia for mid-2000s indie rock (see Wolf Parade reunion tour). But it's the actual music from a decade ago that fans are yearning for, not necessarily the newest versions of the bands themselves.

When they stop aiming for catchiness and instead get real about relationships, LYTD sparkles.

There's no grand resolution on Tired Of Tomorrow, but you can't help but hope Palermo finds some peace in all the noise. That's what making noise is for.

In a way, this could be Glasper's Black Radio Volume 3: The Davis Edition. However, positioning the album as a tribute runs counter to his forward-looking use of the material.

Kidsticks's risk-taking, while not always on point, proves Orton capable of reinvention. She's still a voice worth listening to.

Rae's languid enunciation gets lost on faster tracks, and on Caramel and Night her vocal style shifts to a heavy-handed singer/songwriter coffee house/lullaby mode. Most captivating are the moments when she returns to exploring the thrill of vulnerability on Hey, I Won't Break Your Heart; emotional standoffs on Been To The Moon; and anxiety-inducing ruminations on Do You Ever Think of Me?

The Colour In Anything is a good album that could have been great if Blake had been a bit more willing to edit and discard his less successful sonic experiments.

There are moments where the restraint feels almost too determined, as though the abundance of care and attention to subtle detail also places a cap on the kind of impulsive energy essential to a rock-oriented band.

It's an unnerving listen that demands a certain amount of masochism, but you've definitely never heard another band like Nissenenmondai.

Ward's writing--though universal and singalongable--sometimes suffers from vagueness and clichéd rhymes. He should have a bit more faith in his audience, because Hope is most interesting when it strays a little from this formula.

A few songs recall the off-the-cuff, askew rock 'n' roll they built their name on. Others, though, are barely listenable.

The album is full of the group's signature dreamy arpeggios, massive drum rolls, epic builds and breaks--expertly produced with Stuart Price. But it's the push and pull between the sociopolitical reality and urge to escape into nightlife, where dressing up, social cliques and the pounding beat of pop music can feel life-saving, that fuels the drama.

Blue Wave fails to clarify what kind of band Operators truly is. Are they post-punk rabble-rousers? A modern pop band hiding behind retro synths? A gritty indie rock trio? Of course, they're all of the above, with Boeckner happily shape-shifting in between.

The album repeatedly teases you with glimpses of the unhinged, earnest urgency that made the Violent Femmes semi-famous, and then flips into an annoying faux naive whimsy just as you’re starting to enjoy it.

Glitterbust is the sound of someone coming out on the other side of that moment, armed with heightened instincts and unfaltering confidence.