Its heavy-handedness drags down otherwise solid material.

So ignore the melodrama and enjoy the littler pleasures that are provided on Thistled Spring-- and there are quite a few.

Babymetal are still at their best when they hover around their initial idea—harnessing the energy of metal and J-Pop into high-flying hybrids. ... Otherwise, Metal Galaxy teems with embarrassing gimmickry.

These are summer-blockbuster songs, overdriven and overproduced simply because they can be, with little-to-no actual substance behind the heavy-effects bluescreen.

Faced with a child star's dilemma of symbolizing infinite irresponsibility, Pearl dips into adulthood admirably on Break It Up.

All waves of revivalism and nostalgia aside, Are You Falling Love? sounds like it was beamed in straight from 1993.

The album is an interesting, almost peculiarly personal mix of sounds, one that almost seems underdeveloped and unlikely to win Polachek any new fans. As an outlet for Polachek’s songwriting, though, it suggests there's more interesting work yet to come from her.

If Youth Culture Forever runs the risk of alienating listeners who aren’t particularly interested in what young people have to say about anything, though, it’s a mark of the album’s endearing success that PAWS don’t seem to care.

Expecting KONNAKOL to break the pattern of underwhelming, moody R&B-pop albums, or to make Zayn as interesting as he’s tried to signal he is for over a decade, will disappoint anyone not already committed to loving him.

Much of Woman sounds like music designed by committee, better suited to soundtrack a car commercial than to actively engage the listener.

Even if every one of these tracks stands as a formal experiment unto itself, after an hour or two these half-formed ideas begin to bleed indistinctly into each other, evolving into puddles of vaguely ominous aural mush.

But for all of its immediate pleasure, In Ghostlike Fading feels slightly vacant, valuing tribute and stylization above personal expression.

She's Gone is delightfully restless teenaged guitar-pop made by grown, well-traveled women, the contrast of which necessarily adds a sheen of introspection over the whole affair.

It’s a party vibe that doesn’t entirely know the party’s about to end in the worst way. But while it lasts—through the Afrobeat fusion of “Mad Dog in Yoruba” and the upfront yet faraway-sounding horn blasts in “Macumba 3000” and the baile/bossa simmer of “Todos Os Terreiros”--it’s enough to make you wish the background music was up front.

These pendulum shifts--from frustrating to fascinating and back again--play out within the songs themselves.

Ultimately, Brandeis was more valuable and revealing as a bonus disc than as a standalone album.

As far as bringing the goods on a sophomore release goes, well, the answer is mostly yeah.

The Messenger won't be included in the body of work that made Marr great, but it's a solid approximation of his strengths.

Cry is a soulless and Styrofoam record as hollow as a booty-call text at 3 a.m. “Hey sexy, you up?” the record seems to beckon. It’s hardly an inviting proposition.

This a pop album, produced like pop and structured to grant instant gratification. And yet, this presentation throws the flaws of Tokyo Police Club’s dullest songs into sharp relief.

Whatever the songs on So Long are actually about is up for debate despite their plainspokenness, but suffice to say, they trigger the exact joy buzzers that leave you usually infatuated, perhaps a bit hopefully lovelorn.

It's unclear from this album what they came back to accomplish.

Feels more like failed market research than soul searching.

Acetone manage to take enough twists and turns on their dusty trail to stave off outright boredom, and they certainly have a talent for doing as much as they can with a fairly limited formula. However, as York Blvd progresses, the album's dreamy torpor becomes stifling, and the songs, while never anything other than pleasant, fail to distinguish themselves from one another.

Self-serious and wildly inconsistent (in both ingenuity and style), 29 is hard to swallow without acknowledging and appreciating the record's overarching storyline: getting through your twenties is way hard.

The first disc of this double album set is evenly split between sketches and absolute gems.

The album moves from infatuation and jealousy to lust and betrayal to real, young love. And it does so with not just the best of intentions-- feminism, anti-homophobia, artistic experimentation-- but also, in the storytelling style of the Streets or Sweden's Hello Saferide, a set of distinctive, well-crafted songs that should strike a chord with self-deprecating teens and twentysomethings.

Freed from the desire to make people move, Joakim put together a record that’s unified in its oddity.

Since Vitriola is meant as a soundtrack to the horror show of daily life, much of it sounds like a second-wave emo band falling down a flight of stairs and hitting every one. And it’s not just the violence of Cursive’s early years that returns—their softer moments have never sounded so beautiful or vulnerable.

Though BLACKPINK can sing and dance with precision, the production of Kill This Love is also weirdly dated, like it was crafted earlier in the decade and then forgotten in a time capsule for five years.

The group is at its best when it balances excess and exuberance, when its sparse snippets of quiet feel like clarity, not compromise.

On Yungblud, Harrison leans almost exclusively into saccharine pop-rock, making this his most monotonous and least distinctive record.

True to form, the other Kens on the soundtrack contribute nothing—doze through Dominic Fike’s noodly, acoustic “Hey Blondie,” which exists halfway between “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” and “Hey Soul Sister,” and the Kid Laroi’s howling emo-trap ballad “Forever & Again.” But the girls often can’t prove they’re worthy of main character status either.

Solar Power sounds more interesting when it bottles the jasmine air of Laurel Canyon folk, less interesting when it emulates that sound’s descendants in early-2000s soft rock (Sheryl Crow, Jewel) without any of the hooks or energy of radio pop.

With the quality and effort put into this release, Def Jux and Aesop Rock have done what every EP should do, provide something of unique value and create anticipation for future releases.

NY's Finest, Pete Rock's fourth proper solo album since 1998, has just enough comfortable tricks for the one of the grand old men of 1990s New York production to maintain warm feelings.

The project still has the feel of an accompanying piece, with titles referencing the dramatization of the Chinese story and plenty of incidental music, but it also works on a satisfying level as an experimental work or as art-pop.

A little bit of retrospective absurdity goes a long way--if only the rest of Internationally Unknown wasn’t so pale and redundant.

So as good as Abandon is, one can't help but think the more he goes through, the richer and more resonant his music will become.

If guitar-based music is still your source of shameless pop, you'll probably enjoy In the Belly more than most records that actually aspire for art.

The EP's lackluster tracklist leaves iTunes Session seeming clunky and unrepresentative--like it's not a full set, but an excerpt from a larger show.

Classics is more varied in texture and tempo and tone than its predecessor. But aside from "Lex", a pretty obvious "Seventeen Years" rehash, and "Wildcat", which samples actual fucking panther roars, there are no curtain raisers, just a whole lot more suggestion.

Oh! Mighty Engine is endlessly pleasant but oddly faceless, a record strangely free of feeling.

The brooding mid-mid-tempo pacing and smoky classic-rock guitar grandeur set a table for some serious moping.

This is the early-hours sound you nod off to, not the one that has you second guessing what you heard.

This Machine Kills Artists may not amount to more than an odd itch Osborne felt like scratching, but at least he scratches it with glee.

Despite its problems, Oblique to All Paths is the kind of commendable idea that feels like a way forward.

Range Of Light is the first album that defines Carey apart from his bandmates and contemporaries, as his developed, earnest, Midwestern glow bursts through the album's cracks.

Yep, it's the face of a guy who just recorded an accomplished, cohesive debut, one that should please fans of "blog house" and Swedish pop alike. Now if only he owned a razor.

Ultimately, Sean's a likable character.

This band lives or dies by its hooks, and in truth most of Hideaway’s are only OK. They’re straightforward to a fault, and short on those small, sometimes barely even perceptible deviations from expectation that distinguish a sublime hook from a routine one. Williams’ greatest strength and weakness as a songwriter is that he always follows the path of least resistance.

In spite of its flaws, To the Races charms with its somber atmosphere.

Anyone following Half Japanese's albums over their long stay in the rock arena has to enjoy the project's increasing comfortableness with complexity and craft. Hello demonstrates this sophistication to terrific effect, letting Jad's charming quirks take flight with more complex backgrounds.

Fifth follows the same Bacharach/Gainbourg/Motown thread as its superior predecessor, 1999's Playboy and Playgirl. But nothing new happens here, not even within the duo's derivative sphere. The beats are still bouncy as hell, and the string-laden melodies are still layered ear candy. However, this fullness is less Wall of Sound and more Vegas showroom.... What makes Fifth most unremarkable is the fact that it's nearly bereft of the great, catchy songwriting we've seen from Pizzicato Five in the past.

It's musical air-freshener at worst, and inspired homage at best. The dance's themes of infirmity and redemption are writ large in the song titles, but it's Broderick's technique, not the narrative, that captivates.

As slippery and elusive as this album's thrills can be, they'll eventually fall into place, one track at a time.

It's the most cohesive-- and, possibly, the out-and-out strongest-- Islands record yet.

They feel like the pieces that stuck to the wall when he threw everything at it.

Songs usually don't develop past their first five seconds, and the album slides back out of your attention field quickly.

Despite Weird Drift's genre-busting ambitions, the album feels humble and unpretentious.

Kibby's willingness to push boundaries makes In Cold Blood worth listening to—and, who knows, maybe one day its songs will make for some great karaoke.

After 30 years, Esoteric Warfare is a Mayhem album worth talking about more for its sounds than its associated baggage.

Pattern of Excel is similarly idiosyncratic--it feels, in many ways, like a fistful of sketches torn from the notebook and tossed to the wind. Making sense of the ways they fall is part of the pleasure of this quiet, cryptic record.

If the first half of the album has a lethargic sense that record never quite shakes, the last two tracks suggest there may be more for the group to explore in the future.

It’s a perfectly fine album by a guy who wants to be much more than perfectly fine.

Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline is deceptively experimental music in the lineage of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or Tomita: lush musical soundscapes that still come alive to modern ears, more than a half-century after they were recorded.

Their second album, Rock Island, shows Palm working harder than ever to unburden themselves of the influences heard on those earlier releases, from Slint and Sonic Youth to Battles and Animal Collective.

The content is memorable, but the melodies aren’t. Still, stronger and more diverse than their debut.

Aided by its dynamic pop-punk flourishes, Trauma Factory glows with earnestness and demonstrates all the good that can come from embracing pain.

SGP's ability to create a quarantined universe explains why Mysterious is often absorbing rather than oppressive.

While I certainly can't hold it against Kweller for trying something different and playing dress-up with a Nudie suit, Changing Horses nonetheless finds his half-assed over-countrification and half-assed under-countrification to be equally ineffectual.

2:54 have built a palatial structure on The Other I, but they still have yet to lay out a welcome mat.

Like their namesake, Quilt's music feels handmade and stitched-together, as though its creators were sifting through a collection of musical hand-me-downs and collating the bits that spoke to them into something new.

The ’90s were a decade very much in its feelings, and the best parts of Wallop are its most emotional.

By enlisting noise goblin Ian Dominick Fernow (Prurient) and Xiu Xiu-graduate Caralee McElroy to pitch in, their full-length debut, Love Comes Close, manages to stand out as a successful collaborative effort with a clear sense of purpose.

While most of Double Jointer's tracks are at least good, the band doesn't tap into that spirit often enough, and ultimately it leaves the album feeling a bit flat.

Like every Pumpkins reissue, Aeroplane is stocked with extras; the difference here is that they’re jammed onto each single seemingly at random, rather than separated into bonus discs. As a result, the tasteful and accessible arrangement of the original is compromised, negating one of its best qualities.

Mirage Rock is so lightweight and inconsequential that it really does seem more like an illusion than a record; it's wispy and indiscernible, as if the people who made it had no vision for what it should be.

Overall, it's clear that HIVE1 doesn't manage to engage all of its composer's talents, despite its occasionally locked-in blend of notated percussion parts and sharp electro-production.

While the band once pushed forward with a strength that seemed to surprise even them, So Divided ultimately feels scattered and flaccid.

In spite of their surprising stability, this iteration of the Fall is strangely lacking in audible camaraderie, and on Sub-Lingual Tablet, the distance between frontman and backing band feels more pronounced than ever.

Convertibles ends up a low-stakes affair without being a low-quality one.

The group add nothing new to pre-existing genres, but are successful in customizing familiar sounds to suit their taste for clean tones and an abundance of negative space.

Willis still viciously circumnavigates his drumkit with authority and adventure. Warren still manhandles a viscous bass tone that he funnels into heavy themes. Kasai adds texture and dimension, augmenting what's there instead of adulterating it.

Performing as Nudedragons, the group took the stage at the Showbox in Seattle this past April and played a set that showed as much love to Louder Than Love and Ultramega OK as any other album in their catalog, giving each portion of their career equal respect without resorting to simply playing just the hits. Succeeding at this sort of task is easier said than done, but it would've been nice if Telephantasm at least tried.

Between Two Shores was cobbled together out of songs left over from past sessions and home demos. This helps explain the album’s lack of focus. What’s missing is a singular idea for a listener to rest her headphones on. Instead, we get a hodgepodge of sentimental tunes that aren’t quite parallel, perpendicular, or adjacent to each other.

For the most part, Body of Song offers the expected mix of rock tracks and balladry that one would expect from a Bob Mould solo record.

A passive-aggressive album like Clash the Truth, which just sounds kind of confused.

Instead of catering to fans of that slow, sultry earlier work, she's brought in old and new songwriting partners to help her craft a fast-paced, upbeat pop album.

On Carnation, he tries and fails to be something other than himself.

While his singing is strained and incompetent, at least he’s going for it. Too much of the album seems satisfied with the small space Lean was able to carve out for himself.

For fans who hopped off the bus, Come Ahead is interesting enough to hop back in. It’s also good enough for newcomers who may have discovered Primal Scream via Dua Lipa’s endorsement of “Loaded,” or Gillespie’s participation in one of the past decade’s better memes.

There’s a stark immediacy to the production on Longwave, rendering the band’s simple arrangements and basic chords without a shade of embellishment. They’d much rather use negative space than a dynamic flourish.

Nothing's Lost is a well-meaning record that just got its priorities mixed up. These tech'd-up tearjerkers can out bench press anyone in terms of sonic fodder, but the album is whiny, transparent, and a colossal hodgepodge.

Really, no one would ever accuse Islands or Man Man of lacking character and presence, but once Thorburn and Kattner return to their bands after this dalliance, you'll be excused for thinking they'll sound a little bit incomplete without one another.

As another impressive portion of his potent '04 output, Will to Death's immediacy and quality should quiet the critics-- particularly those who pegged his early solo records as the work of a narcotics pain-train washout.

Even in its most inspired moments, Amazing Grace lacks the fiery intensity of any of Pierce's previous outings.

Heathen is the best Bowie release in years.