Vile has mostly left his interest in extreme tape manipulation and soggy lo-fi charm behind him, but the Jamaica Plain EP offers a brief and fitfully pretty glance backwards.

A record that takes bolder swings than its predecessor while falling even flatter.

There Are Rules isn't a return to form sonically [...] but a return to results, a just-all-right record from a band that always felt a step behind even in their own genre.

It's too listenable overall to be outright dismissed as some sort of flop. But it's too willfully unobtrusive and happy with its lack of ambition to try and sell as good pop, even in a year thin on the mediocre kind.

One of the best things about the AMY documentary is that its pacing feels so natural--invisibly punishing, just like life. The effect of this soundtrack is exactly the opposite. The power of her voice is undercut by the regular intrusion of the film score, which doesn't reference her musically in palette or instrumentation. As a result, the album feels like a powerful hand clasping a limp one.

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

Certainly there's more to Costa than a one-man acoustical jam, even if his pleasure zone isn't far from the AM Gold dial.

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

It's awkward to witness such a gloriously thuggish monster vainly attempt the rope-a-dope.

On The Great Satan, Zombie sounds torn between wanting to revisit the boo-metal sound that made him famous and wanting to continue coasting on the gibberish trucker-rock of his later years. What this record suffers most from is a lack of direction.

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

Notes and the Like is par-for-the-course lap-pop.

It's a showy album with very little to show.

Unfortunately, Welcome to Condale is stylistically all over the place and, despite its generally upbeat tone, kind of a drag to listen to.

Work finds these former Next Big Things railing against maturity while tacitly embracing it.

While that title may suggest a navel-gazing bedroom-auteur beatshop, Record Collection proves a surprisingly gregarious album, varying up the sounds and styles and making better use of cameos by his famous friends.

Far too many tracks here opt for atmosphere over impact: In particular, the interchangeable dubwise ballads-- "City of the Dead", "Road to Paradise", and "The Architect"-- veer perilously into a Club Med cocktail-hour circa 1984.

In short: We all really wish this was better-- less tiring, less dour, less sluggish-- than it actually is.

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.

Transit Transit maintains a puzzling lack of urgency for an album so long in the works.

Bartos is one of the few people allowed to get away with such blatant mirroring of the past, but it's hard to escape the thought that he's done it all before, and better, and with a little more elegance and wit.

Pinned reels in some of APTBS’s famous noise, but it doesn’t budge Ackermann from his station as a long-standing rock’n’roll archivist.

The band's seemingly desperate to reinvigorate their cultural cachet, but Absolute Garbage's latter half emphasizes the depths they've fallen.

Ultimately, what’s most disappointing about What Happens Next is not that it will in any way tarnish Gang of Four’s legacy--if their vanguard reputation could withstand Hard and Mall, it can withstand this. Rather, it’s the unshakeable feeling that, if Gill had released this as some newly branded collaborative project, no one would question why it wasn’t a Gang of Four album.

Rock made on an assembly line-- predictable, economically efficient, and about as dynamic as a Model T.

Reynolds has a story to tell, but the music fails to be the ideal delivery system.

Devotion is not a disaster, but the chasm between ambition and execution feels vast. The new ideas are ill-fitting, when they’re not derivative from the start. Beneath the processing, the album’s best moments sound oddly like a less polished version of Emotions & Math.

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.

Love’s rapture is on full display on the lyrics sheet, but throughout Myself in the Way, the chemistry feels lab-sterilized.

Few releases have been as baldly transparent and destined for ubiquity as No.6, which has all the conspicuous mining of a Drake album, but very little of the finesse or cultural fluency.

They spent all their daring on concept, with little to spare for execution. Even for a duo as image-conscious and savvy as these guys, there is little style in their reduction.

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.

There’s a familiar, overriding sense of a couple of guys reading something about history and having a lot to report. If you don’t mind the idea of These New Puritans as your dad after a Ken Burns binge, you’ll find signs of life and creativity within Making a New World’s overall confusion. If not, no one could blame you for moving on.

As far as mainstream pop-rock records go, Brain Thrust Mastery occasionally gets the job done.

For the most part, it's all the same old bong-thrash, save for the record's one non-heavy trick: English-jig folk.

It’s all so simplified, not only selling short teeangers’ ability to handle more complex emotions (hello, Olivia Rodrigo) but making Teezo look like a generic corporate vessel, genre-hopping to distract from the hollowness.

Perhaps TMBG are just happier making kid's music - even when they try to grapple with adult situations on "Upside Down Frown" or "Climbing Up the Walls" it still comes out G-rated.

Spiritual, Mental, Physical-- a follow-up collection of grotty practice tapes and studio goofs culled from a set of tape reels recently unearthed in a Detroit basement-- is a bit less awe-inspiring.

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

By stripping them down to their bones, Lynne gets the skeleton of these songs right, but in the end you can't help but miss the meat that made Springfield who she was.

Not a bad album, yet contains too many mediocre tracks to be comforting.

DeVotchKa cycle through and marry varying strains of world music with great aplomb. It's very rare that you'll find a seam.

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.

During Lupercalia's first half, he continues to prove himself a fine craftsman of major-key melodies, and this is his most confident and convicted vocal performance yet. But like most of Wolf's records, he eventually gives into sad songs and waltzes as Lupercalia progresses, and studded with the same overproduction tricks of cluttered strings and processed samples, "The Days" and "Slow Motion" don't offer much in the way of contrast outside of tempo.

Despite the blatant bid to sound modish and rejuvenated, U2 cannot help in certain respects but sound the same.

Tidelands, by contrast, finds the Moondoggies (and particularly lead singer Kevin Murphy) admirably striving to find their own voice, yet it's frequently a more crabbed and deliberate album than its predecessor. In other words, a quintessential example of artistic growing pains.

Not only is the trop-house she's mocking low-hanging fruit, but throughout Ancestor Boy, it's never clear where precisely she's coming from, literally or artistically. Her perspective is blandly adrift, tethered to neither a point of origin nor a destination.

In Space would be a decent Posies album, and there's enough for a passable Chilton solo joint, but as a Big Star release, it's inescapably disappointing.

Deer Tick's primary shortcoming is that the band evokes authentically gutty music from the past without noticeably inserting much of themselves into the equation, achieving superficial mimesis and comforting recognition while failing to put their own stamp on their creations.

While it is certainly admirable that the Scissor Sisters' creative vision is strong enough that they sound very much like themselves no matter who they work with, they really could have used a strong push from their collaborators this time around.

It’s too bad that many of the other collaborations here feel as generic and laborious as a ProTools tutorial.

Given Ruppert's past predilection for dramatic singing, one would think his vocals would be a perfect match for these backing tracks. Unfortunately, he often doesn't rise to the challenge.

In a sense, this turgid collection is the ultimate expression of Be Here Now: as bloated and indulgent as the record itself, the music a secondary concern to the product’s status.

Even at 46 minutes, Preparations is wearying; it's the same Prefuse tricks once more, with less feeling.

For the moment, cherry-pick the highlights from this album, and cross your fingers for her sophomore release.

Timbaland's productions are the weaker links on this frustratingly ordinary album.

It's a nice flourish on an album with more than a few such moments, but they're not enough to make the Donkeys' nostalgia sound like more than a pose, or Living much more than dry and dull.

On Big Boat, they come up with a few winning moments.

The album's saving grace is the surrounding music, which almost, but not quite, makes up for Kinsella's constant barrage of tiresome non-sequiturs.

Collaborations like this work best when there’s some meaningful contrast between the performers, though, and Joe and Remy Ma are too similar to establish any kind of yin/yang dynamic.

Despite its slightly more diverse palette, Sleep Forever merely dabbles in more styles rather than explores them, and as soon as their creative finger slips off the pleasure button, it's hard to resist from dozing.

Unfortunately, the ratio of thoughtful zeal to clunky screed this time around is decidedly not in his favor.

For all the champion horsepower in their stable, Gone Is Gone just never really gets going.

There's something uncomfortably sterile about The Sea and Cake's new, seven-song Glass EP that precludes it from functioning emotionally.

Despite production from current-day heavy hitters like Da Internz and Mike WiLL Made It, he still comes off like a relic from the past, the class clown who never quite grew up.

Infinite Arms just feels less tender, less personal, more twang-by-numbers than the last couple, despite its familiar sound and many of the same principals.

Where the Rock*A*Teens played an artful, echo-laden take on rockabilly, Tenement Halls takes traditional pop and plays it through a murky wall of sound.

Discodeine settles too comfortably into a consistent four-on-the-floor groove that ends up sounding an awful lot like a rut.

Occasionally plodding, and too ruminative by half, Anarchic Breezes is a journey in need of a destination, stuck between staring at the sun and gazing thoughtfully at its own navel.

The unnatural and unnerving smoothness of Canopy Glow shows that if there was any one Anticon record that deserved to be called Alopecia, it's this one.

The album is simply not the format for DJ Snake. The conventional song barely is. He makes tracks. Instead of being, at least, a collection of great, standalone singles, the album is riddled with ill-advised rap songs and bad ballads.

Fifth Harmony isn’t offensively bad, in fact, it sits quite comfortably with many other acts dominating the charts at the moment. But it’s too safe, too by-the-numbers, too beige to stand up to even Fifth Harmony’s previous work, which carried more lyrical and musical heft.

By aiming for so many different styles, settling for subpar-at-best lyrics, and trying to pay the bills with rock'n'roll, they never find a sound that's fully captivating or convincing.

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.

A Very She & Him stands guilty not of being oppressively adorkable, but of being not nearly adorkable enough.

Pretty, lovely, fine, fair, comely, pleasant, agreeable, acceptable, adequate, satisfactory, nice, benign, harmless, innocuous, innocent, largely unobjectionable, safe, forgettable.

Grand Animals may jostle for more musical elbow room, but it sounds just as preening as their previous efforts.

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

WHY? has never been a subtle band, but they’ve also never been this overwrought.

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

It's good to hear him still recording, even if he's deeply entrenched himself in his own wheelhouse and barely has a single surprising moment in the album's whole hour. But if the album never existed, nobody's life would be much poorer for it-- possibly even Devin's.

Dapperton’s potential shines when he pushes himself, when it sounds like he’s making music for self-expression and fun, expanding his vocal range and messing around with reverb. He loses it inside of self-imposed pop formulas and strained symbolism.

If Wale, Meek, and Pill could find a way to focus on their own strengths, maybe they'd sound more comfortable alongside their new boss. Instead, they all sound like they're trying to become mini-Rosses, and it doesn't work for them.

In its drive for conceptual rigor, the album neglects to engage the listener musically. That puts a lot of weight on the story, which tends toward the abstract.

Anyone who buys this without owning Ironman, Supreme Clientele or Fishscale is going to miss the bigger picture, and anyone who buys it while already owning those albums isn't gaining much at all.

Hot Hot Heat sound like they're playing scared and playing it safe, and in doing so fall through the cracks between their established fans and their imagined ones.

On Diamond in the Ruff, he sounds more than ever like he's the ultimate good soldier, one desperately in need of a general.

Until they can really stand out from the crowd, Seapony just come across as garden-variety twee.

Riceboy Sleeps can keep you company in your cubicle or gridlock traffic.

Swoon ultimately delivers the exact same results as its predecessor mostly because it's written in nearly the exact same way. The problem all along for the Silversun Pickups isn't that they sound too much like the Smashing Pumpkins. They just sound way too much like themselves.

While Theater isn't quite as dire as the above may indicate, like every other Ludacris record, it doesn't grow on you--in fact, it actually contracts.

Thrills are few and far between amid this hour-long morass. Bloodmoon suffers from two problems that seem as though they should preclude one another: It is thin on fresh ideas and unexpected twists. Its hard rock-meets-hardcore permutations are familiar to anyone who has ever heard, say, Evanescence and Breaking Benjamin.

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

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.

Their experiments don't always yield useful results-- the downcast, acoustic-guitar-powered "Partners in Crime" comes awkwardly decorated with free-form piano rolls that trip up rather than propel the song's momentum. But there are moments when CSS find a way to successfully evolve without alienating their base.

Besides a handful of catchy verses, though, there aren’t enough standout moments on B.I.B.L.E.

If only the rest of the record caught on to that out-front force--the words on Love Letters might scan as more than lonely fridge-magnet poetry, the beats might feel like more than just placeholders, and the music could be something to dance to instead of just drift off to.

Time of the Assassins could have used a few more trips to the Rolodex to bring in a ringer of a singer or two, since Fraiture doesn't seem up to the task, or necessarily even into it.