With their frantic, rushed rhymes, and beats which are a bit too eager to please, the Kidz may be popular. But if they want to any cred they're going to have to learn to be themselves.

When I take The Loud Wars as a justifiably forgotten but enjoyable enough record from a bygone era, I'm soothed; it's a little better than, oh, Fake French or something, and I'm sure as hell not going to dig around to find that one with this thing floating around.

At its best, the casual atmosphere makes for one of Kozelek’s loosest, lightest collections to date: something to throw on when you don’t have the emotional capacity for his more distinctive albums.

That's the trouble with Sunlight on the Moon; things are just fine, but 12 albums in, just fine's not quite fine enough.

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

Their mistake is in forcing too many ideas into every possible second.

One of Excuses for Travelers' greatest weaknesses is that the album is too uniformly boring to be affecting in the least.

Across the album, his voice is helplessly buried beneath vocal processing and mixed conspicuously low, as if to purposely obscure his lyrics. These effects aren’t new to the Voidz, but on Like All Before You, they dominate, obscuring any humanity in Casablancas’ vocals.

These are longstanding punk tropes boiled down and Vig-ed up, removed of their typical dirt sheen and bolstered by a couple extra guitar tracks.

At its best, Ca$ino is the most reflective Keem’s ever been. He parses through how California and the Vegas Strip have poisoned him and his circle, but his warring pop star and rapper sensibilities leave his reckoning in a garbled tonal mess.

It’s hard to believe that the bulk of the project was inspired by anything that Hampton said. Instead, it exploits his image to peddle liberation-lite Billboard hits over anything remotely revolutionary. It’s not all terrible. The most memorable track, out of a whopping 22, comes from relative unknown Nardo Wick.

While Demolition forgoes the overproduction and even much of the shameless rock-god posturing that plagued Gold, Adams hasn't yet found his way out of his songwriting rut.

When you're operating within a strict template, you have to find some distinctive way to fill it out--a felicitous phrasing here, an unexpected chord change there. Without those elements, there's little on Sun Structures to remind you that you are, in fact, listening to a new band called Temples.

For some reason—fear of boring his fans, obedience to the preferences of the streaming services, a career focused on club bangers—Malone won’t let these songs breathe. The result is an album that’s overstuffed and undercooked.

Those who are coming into Transfixiation blind might just hear a notable band boasting a currently rare commitment to an '80s kind of noise-rock rather than the '90s iterations of shoegaze, goth, or industrial that’s more prominent in 2015. Then again, APTBS’ progress as a band only serves to expose the underlying one-dimensionality of their actual songwriting.

[The] Fratellis aren't so much the sound of young Britain as the sound of dad's old record collection.

The perfectly pleasant Rat Farm [feels] strangely wanting.

A slight and unwaveringly safe 30 minutes, it goes down easier than anything the band has ever done, while making less of an impression.

The irony is that Phrazes for the Young is so smoothed over--nearly all of Casablancas' trademark vocal roughness is airbrushed into oblivion--it instantly sounds like a plexiglass-covered museum piece.

There’s much to admire about When Saints Go Machine’s effort to move their synth-powered pop music away from the dancefloor into more cerebral realms. But like the band name itself, their attempts at cleverness can come off sounding clunky.

On several songs, Johansson gets lost in Sitek's swelling production, which may suggest a weak interpreter or a dearth of vocal personality but adds to the album's pervading dreaminess.

Living Thing sounds like a noble but flawed attempt by Peter Bjorn and John to test the fortitude of their songwriting using the most barren and broken of arrangements. But more often that not, it sounds like they settled on the drum-machine presets first, with the lyrics and melodies thrown on top as afterthoughts.

At just less than 30 minutes, Highway Hypnosis is in fact her longest record, and it feels longer still.

Entire swaths of music are cut from Persson’s cloth; she is a known quantity. For better or worse, this lets Persson get away with an album like Animal Heart, one that isn’t much of a statement.

Ultra Mono charges into the discourse like a hobbyist at a rally. It’s not listening, just shouting. Not radical but restless. Not bad, just unnecessary.

With all the work to try and incorporate these far-afield guest vocalists aside, it's worth noting that the production itself is more reliant on them than ever. Underneath them, the music is often flat and unadventurous, tasteful where it could stand to be raucous and rigid where it needs to be limber.

For an album called The Time Is Now, David spends too much of his time looking like he's trying to catch up.

For Now I am Winter is competent, reasonably varied, and efficiently rousing.

Sacred Hearts Club splits the difference between the bookending acts on that Grammys tribute: Maroon 5 and the Beach Boys.

With a more imaginative compiler--and fewer Big Names whose fame peaked years ago-- Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited could have turned out so much different.

Too mushy and indistinguishable to wallop you in the gut and too cheesy to be taken seriously, the album feels, at its worst, like a series of power ballads with the choruses ripped out.

Ultimately, the trip they're taking us on isn't into America, but into the past, and they show too much reverence for their forebears.

These songs introduce nothing new to T.I.’s story or sound, but they’re exactly what you’d expect to find 13 tracks deep into a curated rap playlist on a streaming service.

For 28 tracks Van discusses hidden cabals of dangerous media types so frequently that it verges on a convoluted concept record.

Like a Mojave Desert mirage shimmering tantalizingly before disappearing, Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future is ultimately left little more than a string of sweet nothings, there for your fleeting pleasure. It's a pop tease.

Tove Lo herself often sounds lethargic while singing these songs. She is contending with far more serious subject matter here than on, say, Sunshine Kitty; she is not enjoying herself. She is less daring, less awake, less alive to the pleasures of sex and love than she ever has been.

The resulting project is dimmed down and diluted.

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.

Fragrant World is curiously thin.

The bulk of Neon Icon resists coherence or purpose.

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.

There are good ideas somewhere inside The Air Conditioned Nightmare, and anyone determined enough to look might get something out of them. Lyrics ranging from naively clichéd to slyly astute.

Like a lot of free internet mixtapes, The Narcissist II is compelling but ultimately shallow, and shallow is a fault, even if that's what Blunt was aiming for.

Alice and Friends doesn't produce often in that department [solid hooks], relying instead on the kind of raw energy that fuels a good house party.

Together Through Life isn't without its charms--Dylan never is. It's just very minor, especially by his standards.

Tennant's mature gift as a lyricist is for sentimentality tempered by slyness, and he pulls that off a few times... Too much of Elysium, though, misplaces its subtlety.

A few too many other tracks, such as "Away", compensate for thin material with sheer bluster, and they can feel unwarrantedly grueling. But there's a conviction here, and that's nothing to feel sorry for.

Even tracks that circle around a hazily imagined apocalypse—“This summer might be your last!”—can’t summon more than half a head bob. There’s enough energy pumping through these songs to move the 32-minute album along, but it feels like you’re slouching through the moving walkway at an airport. “Hi Someday” is an exception.

There’s craft in Beach Slang, just not the kind that translates to a chamber-pop setting meant to showcase intricate arrangements, deft melodies, and arch wordplay. While he’s switched up the instruments, Alex hasn’t bothered to reimagine the songs themselves.

There are plenty of impulses worthy of exploration, but too often they end up tarnished by a listless desire to meander without direction, making Wilson Semiconductors feel more like a stopgap than a valuable addition to Hagerty's canon.

With Maladroit, Weezer has finally given the full punt to the nerd-rock label they sorta invented and always shunned, settling instead for being our generation's version of Cheap Trick.

By being boring on purpose, Iggy ironically proves himself oddly more compelling than on his many past accidents. If it's not an album for the ages so much as for the aged, at least it's one you may want to hold on to a bit and give another shot when you get closer to where Iggy's at himself right now.

[A] disappointing release.

Although Sigrid sings each line as if it’s eye-openingly profound, anyone looking for depth on How to Let Go will quickly find themselves in the shallow end.

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.”

The record is not wondrous, but it’s a light listen with a couple of good moments and a handful of clunkers. The weaker moments reveal his shortcomings as a rapper without being provocative or ponderous enough to provoke a firebomb, or even a raspberry, in response.

Sheezus has a few good points and some admirable intentions, but too often it misses the point.

Were it not for these issues [the album’s lyrical stasis scans as disappointing] and the B-Side's proliferation of yawn-inducing, stoned slow jams, The Getaway could have potentially bested By The Way as the Peppers’ best work post-Californication.

In its endless, flavorless drift, the album amounts to little more than a modern-day take on easy listening, with all the signifiers of lush, aesthetic experience and none of the stakes.

The bad news is that the overwhelming vibe is still that of easy listening digital mush.

Without outside direction, however, Dr. Dog quickly go back to their old ways. Afrobeat specialists Antibalas provide the horns on B-Room, but their talents are wasted on songs like "Long Way Down", the beginning of which sounds like the Wayne's World dissolve tuned to a baritone sax.

Despite its razzle-dazzle, this is the rare King Gizzard release that actually sounds like it was composed as quickly as it was.

Too often, he strays from the hushed mode he's mastered and ends up supplanting the band’s strengths with its weaknesses.

With every album, the Foos get slicker than before; the passion behind their songs waxed off by an ever-thickening veneer of overproduction. Right now, the Foos are so polished you can see right through them.

Its majority carelessly regurgitates the painful cliches of "enlightened" hip-hop's critical and commercial darlings, while the band falls back on their organic hip-hop sound as a gimmick and piles on guest appearances to disguise their lack of creativity.

Too much of Long Live the Angels just feels turgid.

That Marina--the lyricist who wasn’t afraid to detail the taste of toothpaste on a lover’s tongue, the vocalist who wasn’t afraid to punctuate a sentence with a feral shriek--has gone missing. The temptation of safe is undeniable, but mononyms are earned by embracing risk.

With songs that play like a grab-bag of genres and lyrics that have little of the humor or self-awareness the band displayed in the past, it's hard to muster the patience to uncover anything deeper.

Light Chasers improves on 2008's Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) by focusing on what Cloud Cult do best, though it lacks the colorful songwriting and hooky inventiveness of the band's most endearing songs.

Even when Turnover try spicing things up with congas, a violin, and a couple of ill-fitting saxophone features, Altogether tastes incredibly vanilla, like a playlist of department store slow jams.

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

The problem with Radlands is that, armed with the potential to go wild with a new bag of tricks, Mystery Jets often become as conservatively minded as parts of the state whose outline graces the album's cover.

Voyager’s attempts to pay homage to disco ancestors while paring his maximalism way back make it all feel like a dance night in an unfurnished room, all speakers and no lighting.

Late in the record, the perky "You Know" also stands up to the quality of jj n 2, but between these tracks is mostly B-side fare. It's a shame, but I don't get the sense listening to jj n 3 that jj's best work is behind them.

From the quality of the production, it seems that Metro knows he wasn’t going to get a progressive performance from Sean. Most of the beats on the album are standard fare with a few gems like “Reason,” which recalls Metro’s What a Time to Be Alive production “Jumpman,” and “Who’s Stopping Me” which samples from Brazilian artist Nazaré Pereira’s “Clarão De Lua,” something a little bit different from Metro’s typically modern approach.

Lissie's voice is haunting as always, but the band doesn't match this tone, and as a result it no longer sounds like Lissie's song. Hopefully these missteps aren't enough to put people off, because Lissie is still a significant new voice.

Black Cocaine comes across as not particularly different than, say, recent records from Saigon or Uncle Murda or M.O.P.

Nearly the entirety of Apparitions feels covered by some haze that's equal parts car exhaust and glitter.

After the Disco is a more cohesive record, and that turns out to be the problem: Mercer and Burton's eccentricities have been sanded down to a single, flattened plane.

As evolutions go, Ode to Ochrasy makes for a particularly awkward adolescent phase, the sound of band that is outgrowing their loud-fast-rules roots but still too timid to sever them completely.

It’s all exceedingly pleasant, which is a bit of a curse. They’re songs with ingratiating hooks—tracks that would benefit from the ambient exposure of a grocery store or a doctor’s office, where they’d worm their way into the subconscious leaving no trace of entry. It’s so comfortable, in fact, that it hardly feels creative.

While Right Words achieves a baseline level of quality or at least competency with the exception of “Goodbye Friends and Lovers” and "Love Illumination", they lack the conviction to take most of their lesser ideas to the realm of being unpleasant rather than kinda boring.

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.

The formula’s limitations are evident on Father of Asahd: There are plenty of voices but no clear message or intention.

You've got your acoustic guitar base, your occasional slide guitar fill, your Dylan-esque organ, your chug-a-lug drums, and your mildly catchy melodies. It would be offensive if it wasn't so obvious that Cracker doesn't aspire to much more than this sort of rustic middle-America mediocrity act.

Too much of it drifts into generic 1960s-nodding garage-rock territory.

On Golden, she sounds like someone playing at country music, rather than someone who understands it. Her star will doubtlessly endure this awkward release, but let’s hope country Kylie is short-lived.

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.

This album is almost a non-entity.

Perhaps in the end they are simply too smitten with the idea of Smith as a beautifully doomed artist to create anything beyond a loving, reverent, and therefore sheepish tribute.

Paling in comparison to the Pixies is expected (and it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise), but Tears isn't even a good Catholics album.

The New Moon OST has all the touchstones of what is considered, by many who consider themselves cognoscenti, "good" music-- from Yorke to Grizzly Bear to the more populist Death Cab, Killers, and Muse--but it uses its tastefulness to solidify the borders of what is acceptable, not to broaden them.

Even at its best, though, In My World resembles a less-engaging version of someone else, the sound of an artist regressing instead of stepping forward into new territory.

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.

Power and Passion is blighted by a rapper who seems too distracted by his woes to sit down and write more than a couple of full songs.

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

In Slim Twig’s incessant and overbearing winks to the camera, he’s lost sight of his own potential.

Good ideas lurk throughout the album, but they either disappear under the weight of too much echo and overdubbing, or get pushed aside as a result of what I'd imagine is either a lack of discipline or dissenting voice during the creative process.