On her fifth solo release, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, she may be maturing, or more vulnerable, or more vulnerable to her maturity. But regardless, the sheen gets slicker and her music gets duller as the time passes.

Isbell is obviously familiar with the music of the region, yet Something More Than Free sounds nondescript and--worse--placeless.

Algiers have produced a record that is timely and necessary but also scatterbrained and messy, one that is so over the top it becomes a political melodrama, undercutting the issues it seeks to amplify.

In short, it's fun and functional, yet disposable.

They aren't inept, amateurish or even exactly boring, but their parlor music takes a slow and emotionally neutral path that almost fights against engagement.

Code Orange’s second album for Roadrunner, the exhausting and uneven Underneath, lands like a glib attempt to do just that while forsaking the idiosyncrasies that made them interesting.

There's a lot of remarkable music on Celebration--the work of an artist who's spent a quarter-century in a passionate body-lock with the question of what exactly makes pop music popular. She deserves a retrospective more interesting than this haphazard piece of contract-filling product.

Replace crackling vinyl and subwoofer bass with somber piano and mournful cello, and all you're left with is... well, a pretty goddamn miserable woman who happens to have a great voice.

At its best, 3.15.20 Trojan horses some of that terror into happy surroundings. ... Glover is not always successful at adding dimension to these songs.

While Rap-Metal 101 drums bang away in the background, the basslines are replaced by chugging guitar riffs reminiscent of your high school hardcore band. What remains, though, is the exceptional quality of Pharrell's voice, which, unlike the bass sound, doesn't lose its intensity due to repeated radio exposure.

Master and Everyone is a solid collection of rather thin songs that never quite sound intimate; songs that meant something profound to someone-- but always, it seems, someone else.

While BTS’s rapping usually incorporates a dated style of aggression and braggadocio, the fire in the delivery was often enough. Songs like “2.0” and “they don’t know ’bout us” instead sound sleepy, as if the members are just clocking in at the Biggest Band in the World factory. What remains in a lot of these tracks, then, are dazzling little ornaments.

The band known for continually surprising listeners ultimately falls short, mostly hiding behind unexceptional, diluted alt-metal. Instead of letting this bold idea guide the way, it’s offered up as an apology affixed to the end of their least ambitious collection yet. Mastodon, once transgressive in its refusal to be put in a box, has shaved off its sharp edges and crawled inside.

If this album is indeed the beginning of a long, arduous journey of rediscovery and rebirth and other fun ponderous stuff, here's hoping the rest of the trip is more enjoyable than this initial misstep.

Bringing it live is still crucial to metal success, and on that front they are ready to ascend to the next level. That doesn’t translate on Heartless, where too much space is squandered.

Townes, though well intended, shows neither of these formidable artists in his best light.

My biggest complaint is that De-Loused in the Comatorium just isn't fun.

Now, by denigrating this Ya-Ya's reissue as a commodity and by questioning the album's canonization in general, I don't mean to imply this set doesn't cook. Even if it's not larded with 20-minute workouts, Ya-Ya's is manna for guitar freaks, thanks to the fiery interplay between the immortal Keith Richards and inarguably the greatest lead guitarist the Stones ever boasted, Mick Taylor.

The hybridization that made Tool so popular on the radio in the late ’90s has rusted: They are part stoner metal, part prog rock, part mainstream metal, all working in ignorance and opposition to each other. Things do come together a few times. The 15-minute closer “7empest” brings the biggest fireworks from Carey and Jones, the two undoubted stars of the album, adding alluring melody and texture to these bloated epics. But the highlight far and away is “Invincible.”

After an hour of getting your heartstrings tugged with such intense proficiency, You Are There starts to feel no less egregiously manipulative than hearing Celine belt out "My Heart Will Go On" for the thousandth time in a Vegas ballroom.

Time & Space is actually a punishingly familiar collision of yesteryear's crossover rock with textbook hardcore bluster.

Not all of Diamond's new songs go awry. Most just go away, their melodies dissipating, their lyrics flimsy even through those tremendous pipes.

That mischief is largely missing from Origin: Orphan, and the lack of lyrical cleverness seems to have infected the music as well, making for a mostly cloudy listen from a formerly sunny-day band.

It's a shame that Falkous is playing to the cheap seats on The Plot Against Common Sense.

Despite its apparent intricacies, Evangelic Girl is a Gun feels oddly flat.

The lack of palplable passion on Nobody Wants to Be Here is, once again, somewhat disappointing and even more surprising.

Pulse and Quartet feel plucked from a vacuum, a place where flickers of dissonance yield to waves of redemptive harmony and where the chord always comes back to sparkle. In a world of increasing entropy, these are two too-tidy self-reflections, Reich on what made Reich great.

Ugly sounds like something far less interesting: the sort of generically angsty guitar music that only a ’90s major label executive could love.

There is nothing on Lily-O to break the spell these musicians have too carefully cast. In other words, there is nothing to get Amidon out of his own head or out of our collective past.

For Smith's first four albums, Outside Society is an abridgement that doesn't really do her justice.

Though Mull Historical Society is an act one could easily file under "pleasant-enough pop," at 13 tracks (plus a bonus disc!), MacIntyre's strictly 80bpm velvet-lined melancholia will test the patience of any Anglophile.

Private Suit shows the band taking some risks. They continue to write catchy and cute guitar rock songs, but also experiment with backing vocals and strings, a noble ambition that raises the bar higher than "the little band that could" is able to reach.

Ultimately, the picture that emerges on Twentyears is a simplified version of Air that swaps out most of their quirks for only their most palatable qualities. It’s a lite version of the band, and a frustrating missed opportunity.

But while the sound of this album is more expansive, the influences a bit less obvious, and the approach more varied, the guys forgot to tote along their initial strength: the songs.

The tracks on Yanqui are content to continue building to bored, satiated endings we can see coming 20 minutes in advance.

Music this theatrical demands a stage. On disc it plays a bit like a conversation-starting party favor: colorful and bright, but no substitute for actually being there.

Assume Form is aggressively pastel and suffocatingly serious. He has lost the playful sense of surprise that guided his falsetto’s agile twists and turns on his debut.

This is a merely pleasant album, and especially after 11 long years, pleasant is a low hurdle for such an inimitable singer.

All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is the musical equivalent of a late Woody Allen film (possibly a good or bad thing, depending on your temperament): The action unfolds predictably, but the dramatic effect can also be increased by your fondness for and familiarity with the idiom.

Some of its songs deserve to be cut into halves, while others should have been chopped wholesale. With those snips, Exai would be a really good Autechre album that summarizes the various successes of their career in an hour or so. As is, it's as much a frustrating obstacle course as it is a grueling marathon.

The big, inescapable problem with O is that, aside from being derivative, Rice's songwriting is also unbearably repetitive-- he stubbornly relies upon time-tested singer/songwriter formulas (quiet acoustic strumming and sober, wavering vocals), and repeats them almost exactly the same way, every time.

To its credit, {Awayland} rarely comes across as false, but O'Brien's affinity for cleverness over clarity ensures it rarely comes across in any real way.

Taylor writes about big issues—income inequality, political corruption, a society fraying at its edges—but these complex matters are undermined by the rote uplift in his songs, an optimism assumed but never really earned.

Draw Down the Moon most often plays like a collection of Total Life Forever extended cuts, moments of thoughtful lateral thinking tacked onto the beginnings and endings of otherwise familiar indie rock songs.

Even if their whole style is essentially a throwback, there's plenty of room out there for throwback done right. But on too much of Youth and Lightness, they're not the machine they could be.

With Aesop Rock on production, Felt becomes a triangulation that canvasses almost the entirety of U.S. undie rap in terms of geography and affiliation. So why is this thing kind of a bummer?

Mordechai doesn’t quite commit to delivering fleshed-out songs, or to synthesizing Khruangbin’s influences into something new. It’s too busy to settle fully into your subconscious like the intercontinental ambience of Khruangbin’s 2018 breakout Con Todo El Mundo, but not substantial enough to satisfy more active listening.

Set aside the negligible opening and closing tracks, and Sol Invictus has just eight tracks spanning 34 minutes, an underwhelming running time considering how long Faith No More have been away. Such brevity could be overlooked if Sol Invictus was accompanied by a significant shift in the band’s sound, but many of these songs feel like retreads.

Subtle breakbeat drumming and glistening guitar be damned, Bono will ruin a song. And so the story goes for the entire album-- one of the band's finest, if not for the tweeting and hooting of The Fly and his grating lyrics.

Throughout it's fourteen tracks, there's no doubting The Weakerthans are smart guys who keep up with literature and politics, but over the course of an entire album the band's ambitious literary posturing drowns in the bland songwriting and lack of captivating hooks.

The album spends nearly its entirety trying to revive a sound prevalent in 1994.

The voice is willing, but the musical backdrop is weak.

All this pomp and pap is unfortunate, because the moments on the album where Halsey zeroes in on the concrete realities of her life, as opposed to her own ideas of how others perceive her, are some of her most interesting songs in a long while.

His beats are generally chunky sample flips and simple loops, but he also has an ear for a good sound. But if you’re listening to a Royce album it’s because you want to hear the guy rap. To his credit, Royce has the rare effect of a rapper’s extreme technical ability making him seem limber instead of rigid.

Virtually the whole record settles into the same formula the band's been dutifully churning out since the dawn of the millennium.

Divest the Smashing Pumpkins or Hum of their singers, give the bands room to jam, and this album might have ensued. Without vocals, it feels slightly empty.

The problem lies with the songs themselves, which simply lack outstanding or memorable hooks: Most are content to meander behind a curtain of big rock guitars and bigger rock cliches, infinitely repeating themselves or, in some cases, never saying much of anything at all.

clipping. never present themselves as resurrectors of horrorcore, and Visions’ songs are livelier than those on TEEATB, but the way the group embraces the style feels archaeological.

It's ultimately a spotty album from a guy who has released a lot of spotty albums.

It doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know about Cash in his final months, nor does it sound like an attempt to re-brand an icon or re-shape a legacy.

Ultimately, Blessed has the feel of a transitional album-- from lonely to married, from troubled to contented, from regretful to joyful.

It's all good enough, but how many times, really, do you need to hear the term "rock the mic" in an hour? Not this many.

Their bar band approach sounds as if they've taken a book of rock history and, dutifully following along, bookmarked some of the most unremarkable passages.

The title of Age of Transparency acts as Ashin's commentary on the way we live our lives out in the open, and his music seeks to pull you through uneasy, emotional dregs with its every turn. But what once felt intimate has started to lean to over-exertion.

He’s so dedicated to synthesizing his most obvious influences--channeling Tyler, the Creator and N.E.R.D. down to their throat-clearing ad-libs and neo-New Jack funk--that he hasn’t quite established an identity of his own. That failing doesn’t dull the jams or diminish his evident potential, but it does hold him back.

Every card Gough plays is painfully transparent from the first time you play the disc. It's elementary stuff. It sounds manufactured, refined, cosmetic and sterile; in a word, silicone, like a pair of Badly Sculpted Breast Implants.

The Stills are what The Posies were in their day, and what The Libertines were a few minutes ago: stuck in a phantom zone called "not there yet," and possibly because the personalities of their influences eclipse any sense of identity they could muster.

There is no wobble in the bass or flutter in the melodies; they are presented as-is, with little space for the listener. Fever can sound plastic, unpliable at times.

Mitchell’s voice is gorgeous and rich throughout, a piece of high-pile cotton velvet warmed in the daylight. She renders “Both Sides Now” with the wisdom of survival, the “up and down” having still somehow delivered her here. But too often, her patient approach is swallowed by the tide of well-intentioned boosters, associates who make Mitchell feel like little more than an honorary guest at her own party.

Is a Woman is a disappointment.

Lemonjelly.ky's nine tracks consist largely of samples from atrocious Nana Mouskouri songs and soundclips nipped from 100 Strings mood music albums. What binds these samples together is a series of predicable hip-hop beats and root-note basslines.

If his eccentricity was tamed and the pained attempts to hop genres were avoided, Luke Steele could just produce something close to sublime. As it stands, Lovers is a fairly pleasant application of some charming reference points, but please, let's stop pretending that that's good enough.

These songs rarely sound lived in or personable; rather, they're more like museum dioramas where he can pose figures like Calamity Jane, Casey Jones, and Casey at the Bat in stiff tableaux.

The album doesn't have any of the euphorically propulsive standout tracks that held Redman's older albums together.

At heart, this is an enthusiastic debut that can’t quite live up to its own billing, but at least it shows two veterans who have bravely embraced the neophyte’s challenge of figuring out their sound.

Diet Cig’s debut is almost entirely made of other people’s gestures hastily collected and cheaply executed.

The emotions are big and the choruses are bigger, but the production is too washed-out to risk actual vulnerability. It’s music to sink into, an electronic dreamy mush that’s somehow equal parts Foster the People and Mazzy Star.

If there's one positive remark to be made about What's Next to the Moon, it's that it sheds revelatory light on the subjective nature of lyrics. Yet, that might be the only truly positive remark this album deserves. Sure, Kozelek's voice is still smooth and sad, and his guitarwork is still deft, yet modest. But these are standard factory settings.

Magnolia Electric Co. is no Crazy Horse, and Molina's vocabulary on the guitar doesn't yet have the presence to carry such extended interpretations of his material.

Flirtations with big-sky atmospherics can hardly hold these songs together. What sounds like a hodgepodge of Edgy experiments and raised-Zippo nostalgia is just that: a hodgepodge.

What’s most disappointing about the album is how Ryder-Jones has almost completely abandoned taking any sonic risks. His vocal is dulled and rasping throughout, and the songs never blossom like those on If..., seemingly hamstrung by his limited range.

It’s as if O’Brien set out to make the paragon of a modern My Morning Jacket album and succeeded in both style and sound, only forgetting to leave room for the surprises that actually gave their early works ineffable power. It’s boring.

For a record so bent on impressing the listener, Culture of Volume somehow never manages to leave a mark.

COW has some of the Orb’s most gentle moments to date, but in eschewing their own classic album and instead oddly reflecting on one from their peers, they fail to get beyond the Ultraworld and the world of Chill Out, at times mimicking little more than some BBC sound effects.

Most of the textural differences from song to song on Né So are slight, so they tend to bleed into one another.

Marigolden fares best when it loses the florid similes and addresses character and story.

Geist's contributions to electronica have always seemed fringe--label head, remix specialist, in-demand crate digger--and it's once again nice for him to have something to put his own name on. But after years of waiting, Double Night Time confirms that Geist is most valuable behind the curtain.

His one-man band's busy textures can't fully distract from insipid songwriting.

But with all the excitement and decadence drained out of the music and the voice, the trite themes stand out a bit more clearly.

Watching such an undeniably talented artist blindly follow such an errant muse can be endlessly compelling, and the failure of these two albums to capture his visions and ambitions with any adequacy possesses the pull of true tragedy.

I’m not sure any skeptics will find their gateway with the well-meaning protest music of Days of Ash. .... But if nothing else, U2 at least sound like they’re learning to trust themselves again.

The production isn't a disaster, but most of the stylistic flourishes can feel gimmicky or, at worst, like dry history lessons... There's also the tugging sense that Springsteen and Aniello are trying to cover up some of the album's lackluster songwriting.

Taiga is OOIOO's broadest, busiest, and furthest reaching album to date. Strangely, those same characteristics ruin it.

They try and fail to reinvigorate themselves in the rock’n’roll fountain of youth they helped create, only to emerge with a dozen hackneyed duds.

Stricken by the same backward-looking guitar worship disease that seems to have struck many in the indie community, the relentless string-bending and beer-bottle slides can't help but sound like stale recidivism.

None of her songs here are as indelible as 'Rehab' or as cutting as 'You Know I'm No Good'--and the best are co-written with Nas and Fugees collaborator Salaam Remi.

The album suffers from the same primary problem that plagued the original S&M: Metallica’s best songs, intricate and ambitious though they may be, are not actually well suited for the additional orchestrating they get here, precisely because they are plenty symphonic already.

There are real, new stylistic portents here. But Josephine mostly suggests new directions rather than moving in them, and the traceless ache of its muddy middle-third ('Hope Dies Last,' 'The Handing Down,' 'Map of the Falling Sky') is burdensome.