Otherness isn't just less immediate than other pop music; it's less self-aware, and way less fun.

Night Moves rely on the sound that got them signed rather than pushing themselves in a new direction, and the results are not as exciting as they could've been.

A fragmented 12-song album that trends toward the same path that he already spent five albums exploring.

V for Vaselines leaves a lasting pop smear.

Recent hit single aside, Smith has somehow never felt further from pop’s molten core. It’s still a pleasure to watch a singer who once consigned themselves to lovesick, gender-neutral ballads spread their wings.

Free Your Mind manages to be Cut Copy's most homogenous and it's most "message-based" record yet, and in doing little other than turning on, tuning in and dropping out, there’s precious little separating it from the vapid electro-pop to which Cut Copy used to be an alternative.

His albums are very much the work and vision of one man, and so even on a relatively easygoing outing like Innocence Reaches, that insularity can grow stifling. It’s as if since Barnes can’t escape his own head, he won’t allow listeners to, either.

Valentina is essentially Gedge and his current sidemen doing a very solid impression of the Wedding Present as they were circa 1990.

For an album with such a diverse sound palette, it spends too much time in one mode-- sincere, mid-tempo grandeur-- to be more than another solid, perfectly listenable album.

The album may be scattershot, but perhaps that doesn't matter so much when it's delivered out the barrel of a 12-gauge.

For fans missing the pause-in-the-thunderstorm pregnant solitude of Songs:Ohia, Let Me Go will get you that fix you've been craving, a teasingly short half-hour reminder of his old persona.

There's not a lick, hook, or lyric on Echo Kid that won't give you a feeling of deja vu, but the execution is strong and the music is pleasurable enough that it hardly matters.

Blue Madonna’s main value over replacement synth-pop is his falsetto, capable of reaching a glam-rock frenzy but constrained in songs that never quite allow him to go there.

After the surprising opening salvo, however, Shots clumsily bogs down in its desire to be big and rocking, even though any time Ladyhawk can be bothered to push the tempo.

It's disappointing that Clem Snide seem to have nestled into a very comfortable, moth-eaten place, and it's sadder still when you can hear Barzelay's sense of humor worming it's way in.

Rocky’s anything-goes tests come up short, but they feel like his alone.

While the immaculately blended pop smoothie that is G I R L goes down easy, its complacency is disappointing.

Only the spirited, psychedelic chug of “Spitfire” and the handclap-catalyzed go-go of “Hey Now” come close to clicking with—let alone recapturing—any portion of the band’s former glory. The remainder of the record is filled out with either bland mediocrities or downright embarrassments such as “Flying Like a Bird”, a sappy ballad that sharply delineates every weakness Inspiral Carpets has, from a dearth of energy to a lack of melody.

Starboy, by way of contrast [to Trilogy], feels more like an opportunistic compilation of B-sides than an album. Who is the Weeknd? At this point, even the man behind the curtain might not know.

B.O.A.T.S. II is an album that feels happy just to exist, a rejection of the modern idea that album releases are serious events and all the tracks that sound like they were fun to make get relegated to bonus cuts or mixtapes.

A startling and inspiring record. Eno’s been involved with quite a few of those in the past, but it’s especially nice to experience a new one that reaches us in the present moment.

He's grown up, alright. With the energy Jay brings to most of these tracks, you'd think 30 was the new 60.

Paper Monsters succeeds in revealing the "new" Dave Gahan, and that's what makes it a faintly embarrassing listen.

The result is pale, beefy, and contemptuous.

For the most part, though, King Con's an enjoyable collection, one that presents Winston as an artist with a strong enough personality to overcome that dip and to stand out in a scene where it can be hard to make an impression.

His new EP, Meantime, is an unabashedly beautiful, even sensuous 17 minutes of music.

It doesn’t shy away from sorrow, but as far as heartbreak albums go, Volume 3 is surprisingly resilient.

Style trumps niche every time here, and in its efficiently compact sub-hour runtime there's plenty of opportunity to let that style run through all kind of territory.

The band sound thoroughly comfortable. ... It's a shame, then, that on their own album, Phantogram foreground their most conventional, clipped pop selves, when their quietest moments are often the loudest of all.

As bizarre as LANY’s pivot to country pop is, they still manage to infuse it with enough charm where it doesn’t fall flat.

Vertigo is very well-studied and primed to reach the rafters of the mega venues she was thrust into early on. It just lacks much sense of her in it.

The problem with Asleep at Heaven's Gate is that the second half isn't nearly as strong as the first.

Jel's music here doesn't focus your attention to a laser-point the way Them did, but neither is it big enough to saturate it-- it lurks comfortably in the middle distance.

While Van Pelt has crafted an album that's sharper in most ways than his debut, it could do with a bit more of these tracks' personality and sense of melodic wonder.

Plenty of moments on The Fall-Off remind of the hunger of his early mixtapes, the purposeful thrills of his 2010s hits, or even the misguided zaniness of KOD, though none materialize in meaningful doses.

A solid, spunky-yet-reflective country record told squarely from the teenage perspective.

He’s remarkably consistent as a songwriter; the weakest point over 10 songs is “Soon Az I Get Home (Interlude),” mostly because of its brevity. On “Let Me Know” he shows off his sweet (and under-used) falsetto, adding a coating of earnest gloom.

Lyrically, the songs cling to familiar themes of loyalty, betrayal, and soured romance, but the writing feels hollow. Repetition, once a rhythmic weapon in his songwriting, becomes a crutch and registers as filler.

There are few fiery guitar freakouts, folk-influenced melodies, soaring space-rock bridges, or psychedelic flourishes here; instead, the empty space is mostly filled with serviceable falsetto funk and glassy-eyed yacht-pop.

You get the feeling as you listen to the entirety of Lost Themes II that someone let their finger linger far too long on the butter button at the movie theater concession stand.

While the album isn't arranged chronologically, listening to it as such reveals the series of intuitive leaps between lo-fi bedroom folk that emphasized monotonous gloom and cacophonous samples to comparatively laid-back country biased toward majestic arrangements and electronic beats.

Much of Hyphenated-Man has that kind of blunt, unblinking tone. It sounds like Watt is using Bosch's figures to confront some hard truths, but he does so in a spry, often joyous way.

Mister Pop stays the course for the rest of its relatively compact 10-song, 34-minute length, reshaping the Clean's core components into poignant bossa nova instrumentals ('Simple Fix'), propulsive Krautrock-outs ('Tensile') and, as only they can, bizarro fuzz-organ jigs that resemble White Light/White Heat-era Velvets auditioning for "Riverdance" ('Moonjumper').

The paradox about them is this: With two people, Om sounded expansive; with more, they sound comparatively weak. The music is unmistakably theirs, but the intensity of it feels lost in the arrangements.

[Producer Nick] Raskulinecz brightens the band until the mystery and suspense disappear, turning these evil thoughts into baubles that sound safe enough for big money and rock radio.

As it is, it feels like dead patches make up almost half of Chopped & Screwed. Shelve it next to the Knife's Tomorrow, in a Year as an effort that hearteningly shows an inspired artist staking out bold terrain, but one that only fitfully delivers the impact of the artist's previous, pop-focused work.

It’s not an essential release in the Men’s rapidly growing discography, but as a rare snapshot of a band constantly in motion, Campfire Songs is sensible at least.

hile he become incrementally more skilled over the years, not much else has changed. Throughout I Decided., Sean conflates the passing of time with growth and progress. Nothing on I Decided., however, suggests that he has gained perspective worth sharing or to which he should devote a whole album.

Someone Else's Déjà Vu would've benefitted from Knapp making a stronger claim of ownership to his lofty visions.

His process of filtering out the bad has failed him on Adrian Thaws, leaving an album that bears both his names but offers less of himself than ever before.

Most of these tracks have hooks aimed straight for your jugular, but "Can't Lose" shows the band could go even farther with a little restraint.

Ultimately, it's the unbearable triteness of the lyrics that does Long Knives Drawn in.

After the limp meandering of Afterglow, We Are Science is unquestionably a leap in the right direction.

Unfortunately, Hold on Love's more serene moments only weaken the lure of their more intricate and involved songs, ultimately underscoring the group's true strengths.

Classics is charming and sleepy in a '60s samba sort of way, filled with whispering percussion, light electric guitar solos, and string arrangements worthy of the silver screen.

But the album ultimately feels like a status update, never really probing or conveying why freedom is so important to Offset.

The album could use a little more of Fitzgerald's fiery extremes, and a bit less of meandering disappointments like "You Looked Good to Me" or "Dancing in the Stacks", but at its best it's a clever piece of musical storytelling by a band unintimidated by genre.

Nothing is a long album, with one cut coming in over the six-minute mark, and when it is sludgy, it is exhausting.

While Kasher’s platitudes are presented as hard truths forged from experience, most of the time, it just sounds secondhand, scripts written by someone whose worldview has been shaped mostly by Cursive records.

An unbowed creative spirit ran through Perry’s gloriously multifarious career; on King Perry he sounds frustratingly submissive, a passing supplicant in someone else’s court rather than a king on his throne.

Ambitious production can’t quite cover the fact that none of the songs on Run Fast Sleep Naked have a conceptual core.

An uneven album so preoccupied with giving every single type of fan exactly what they want that it might as well be crowdsourced.

Worlds Apart is an aspiration, an apology, the sound of confusion.

The surprise is that it's as cohesive as it is, with remixers and remixes alike plumbing the same lines of soft-edged, computer-processed home-listening lullabies.

The joy of watching them not fly off the rails made even the weaker shows worth hearing. But in turning that experience into a scrapbook, Remember kills the magic.

Earth Has Doors feels like the diametric opposite of "fiddling around."

You could reasonably argue that this is Fake's most well-rounded record to date; the bigger question is whether such small refinements to such an established, well-trodden genre should merit attention from anyone other than diehards at this stage in the game.

Christmas in Reno is uncomfortable to listen to--the tracks that you so often associate with being jolly are torn up into pieces and burned at the core. However, that's exactly Ramone's intention.

Despite its reduced scope, Life Sux is actually pretty versatile depending on where you stand with Wavves--take it as further confirmation of his permanent immaturity, or a sign that rattling off rudimentary but undeniably hooky punk-pop comes fairly easy to him.

Despite the emphasis on atmosphere that pervades the album and that seems like a necessary byproduct of its creative technology, The Fall may be the most earthbound Gorillaz album yet--and at times, therefore, the most banal.

Bint's mostly relaxed and easy approach teases out enough pleasant moments on Into the Trees but rarely offers a resolution.

McLamb seems to be relishing the chance to get outside of his head, making music that is gorgeous and unashamedly fun.

The Divine Comedy's constants are a Wildean wit with an apposite sense of style, and they persist on extravagant ninth album Victory for the Comic Muse.

Scintilli is a disappointingly static record from a duo of born tinkerers.

FUTURE is a fine mix of the stylings of past Futures layered in a rich blend of sounds from a now refined sonic palette. It doesn’t communicate the same intense and complicated emotional concoction that fills his songs when he’s at his most vulnerable and compelling. But it doesn’t have to.

On We Are the Night, the Chemical Brothers have switched from integrators to imitators.

Lil Baby and Durk’s new joint album, The Voice of the Heroes, is not quite a marquee work for either artist, though it is reliably consistent and casts them as a natural pair—near-ideal complements to one another in writing and execution.

The immaculate emptiness is, in a sense, Asiatisch’s masterstroke, helping bolster the pervading sense of dislocation of being exposed to a society that’s been fed through the photocopier one too many times.

If their debut explored the space within, the Earlies' latest, The Enemy Chorus, peers into the void of the final frontier, with a similar kitchen-sink approach and more of the krautrock sprawl that characterized early singles like "Morning Wonder".

The Singles' six originals would make for a disconnected night out, and no doubt an energetic live show, but they're a wild ride in headphones.

It's a huge headfirst leap into the unknown for Kidwell, and more often than not, he sounds pretty lost. But it's an encouraging kind of lost, and the scenery is often breathtaking when it's not so jarring.

Unfortunately, this humanity doesn't translate to the music. The performances are flawless, but overly so.

Most tracks here make no bones about aiming straight for the radio. Choruses are airy and open, melodies are sticky and straightforward and tend to lodge in your head with or without your approval.

Blouse found a balance between texture and melody: here was a band that clearly cared about atmosphere, but never at the expense of a solid, Top Gun soundtrack-worthy hook.

It would do well as an introduction to the group for an unfamiliar listener, but doesn’t feel necessary by any means. If anything, Spirit comes across as more mood music by design, bespoke and undemanding, and it probably already has real estate on every bedroom-themed playlist on Spotify.

Five albums in, Cults sound just as eerie and cheery as ever but struggle to transcend the fleeting pleasantries of paint-by-numbers pop.

This is deeply un-portable music: It either demands your complete attention or invites you to shut it off. Once through that opening stretch, your attention will frequently be rewarded. There is powerfully evocative, richly imagined music to be found here.

Joanne never reveals much of a narrative or stylistic through-line, and even her brief dips into indie-rock--her collaborations with Father John Misty on “Sinner’s Prayer” and “Come to Mama” (Misty is also credited as a writer on Beyonce’s Lemonade), and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on “Perfect Illusion” (Rihanna covered Parker’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” on Anti)--feel familiar.

Just as "Viva" did an admirable job of troubleshooting the band's lazy weaknesses while expanding their sound, Prospekt's March offers a truncated version of their svelte and marginally progressive new formula.

The rhyme skills and lurid way with imagery that first brought the group to national attention remain on display throughout the album, but YRN's warring agendas suggest a few more tries are in order for the Migos to get their formula sorted.

Despite its overall hazy, sun-lit-kaleidoscope feel, it's just too sonically scattershot to truly take in and enjoy as a body of work.

The hard-driving Blame Confusion, in too big a hurry to stop and take in the scenery, simply lets too much whoosh by in the periphery.

There are a handful of moments here when he turns himself inside-out over the course of a song, bringing him into the orbit of those artists he so obviously idolizes. Now he just needs to figure out how to emulate his starting position.

Rather than feel tacked-on incongruities, the three Rave Tapes remixes found on the EP’s second half provide a welcome, unpredictably outré counterpoint to the linear songs heard on the first.

Though it clocks in at just 28 minutes, This Is Steve is generously overstuffed--with gorgeous melodies, compositional quirks, sonic details, goofy ideas, and messy feelings.

Van Weezer’s two-handed tapping revels in its hamminess. And for all its pyrotechnic guitars and arena stomp, Van Weezer never actually roars all that hard.