Weaver’s benefitted greatly from the rising tide of artists who are challenging pop’s sonic and structural rules, but on The Fool she sounds like she’s lost at sea.

Sleepwalking doesn't have a startling track like Northern Sulphuric's "Spellbound" to lift it out from the polite sludge of trip-hop mush.

But where their previous three albums translated that dynamic into emotionally-charged metal, Eat the Elephant assumes the form of a gloomy adult-alternative record flush with grand pianos, classical strings, and slackened tempos.

What puts listeners in a difficult spot is that, no matter how infuriating it gets, Matricidal Sons of Bitches is clearly the product of serious compositional intention; it's not an accidental mess.

for now we're stuck with Dig Out Your Soul, which like every Oasis album from 1997's "Be Here Now" onward, makes cursory gestures toward making the band's mod-rock more modernist, before reverting back to the same ol', same ol'.

It’s progress, probably, that Mayer keeps the condescension to a dull sneer, but this also makes everything sound that much more anodyne.

A Hundred Million Suns is rife with the sense of a band striving to be taken more seriously, whether through rocking more manfully, displaying a more sophisticated subtlety, or simply stringing together three ponderous, already-overlong songs and calling the impenetrable result a 16-minute stand-alone epic.

Unfortunately, the frontman's crazed growl dashes any nuanced developments the band has reached in their songwriting, maintaining a grating tone consistently throughout.

Most everything you'd expect from Cornershop pops up somewhere on Disco and the Halfway to Discontent. You get your guitars, sitars, and Singh's tasty subcontinental breakfast of a voice. But you also get slapped with a dosage of bad opium.... For the majority of its duration, Disco merely simmers when it should be sizzling.

50's new album is a blatant rehash--a bottom-line sequel that insults the same audience it mindlessly panders to.

The album's one redeeming element is the band itself, who-- over the course of one EP and two albums-- have improved tenfold.

For an album about a doc about a book about going into the wilds of California, One Fast Move sounds awfully sleepy.

It would sound overproduced for 1998 yet seems curiously rinky-dink compared to the current pop maximalism of any continent; Scott & Rivers splits most of its time between ruthlessly utilitarian power pop and midtempo, jangly acoustic alt-rock that reimagines the break between Pinkerton and the Green Album as one where Cuomo ditched Harvard for higher education in the form of Stroke 9 or Eve 6 CDs.

Too many songs here feel like aggregations of quirky, tossed-off riffs.

Where the weight of expectation and precedence get to have a say, this feels like not just a failure, but a heartbreaker.

The EP has little textural detail; the music is not immersive, much less transcendent. It isn’t just a score to modern ennui but a work that itself feels indifferent.

If Rise of an Empire is meant to read like some kind of State of the Union address, it paints Young Money as a fractured team that’s lost its compass.

Beyond Yudin’s massive artistic debt, Cayucas’ main flaw is failing to recognize the difference between leaving something to the imagination and making the listener do all the hard work.

Fans of shivery folk music with subtle plateaus will surely find things to like, but the rest of you might find yourselves wishing the "black dog" in Selway's basement had a bit more bite. At least he let it outside.

Listening to Matinée straight through is exhausting, like being trapped in the kitchen at a college party while someone with curiously wide eyes Explains It All to you.

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

Widows’ Weeds contains little in the way of electrifying suspense or carefully-hidden, internalized trinkets—only empty gestures and lazy execution. Nearly 20 years into Silversun Pickups’ existence, we see them for what they are: a little big, a little brooding, but mostly boring.

Sugar is notable as much for what's missing as for what's been honed and emphasized. Morris no longer howls like Kurt Cobain, nor does he drawl so studiously. There are no 12- or seven-minute stoner epics either; instead, the songs are shorter, more compact, punchier. Almost missing: personality.

Kicks is not the follow-up that "Cookies" deserved, but its handful of winning standout tracks also suggests that its predecessor wasn't simply a fluke.

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.

Like Coldplay's two previous albums, only more so, X&Y is bland but never offensive, listenable but not memorable.

Paper Tigers is one or two decent singles surrounded by a bunch of mediocre-or-worse filler.

As a double album, Scratch might have produced something like an elaborate mixtape with originals on one side of the Maxell and covers on the other. In execution, however, I’ll Scratch Yours plays like another artifact of the 90s, this one less fondly remembered.

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.

An unhurried, casual nature is part of what makes Get There’s softer material pretty, but it could also be the thing holding Minor Alps back from writing truly great, uptempo rock songs.

Every song drips with bawdy attempts at sexually shocking the listener. But just as Vince Neil screaming "girls, girls, girls" and name-checking strip bars is unlikely to whip a woman into a frenzy of amour, the Donnas attempt to titillate and fail miserably.

The music feels wedged between weight classes--too ridiculous to be indie rock and too ponderous and generic for Top 40 pop.

One senses a massively missed opportunity, a chance for exploration blown by Jarre's insatiable need to make everything bigger, more impressive.

It’s a not a crime for a revivalist outfit like the Black Angels to occasionally lapse into flower-power corniness; if delivered with a little self-awareness, it adds to the appeal of the anachronistic package. What’s not forgivable on Indigo Meadow is the pretension.

Those at this taping presumably got their money's worth, but other than the few excised morsels that leaked after the show (a long anti-Radiohead screed and a defense of Chris Brown's attack on Rihanna), we don't know what was cut. Alas, those who pick up this record get an abbreviated, neutered version.

Get Back still finds McBean trying to tap into something risky and surprising, even if the results are the sometimes-egregious misstep of a mid-40s rock musician obsessed with the letdown of aging.

By the end of the album, Tricky returns to acting on his worst impulses, stumbling through hackneyed sonics and wincing lyrics.

It's a shame that premature commercial success has sullied Editors' creativity, because <i>An End</i> contains its share of bright spots.

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.

Doused in interminable glimmering drones and wimpers, spending 45 minutes in its company feels like being smothered inside a snowglobe.

“Mr. Solo Dolo III” is only memorable because of its title, which like too much of Man on the Moon III is coasting on a legacy built a lifetime ago.

When taking advantage of the opportunity to be as dumb as they need/want to be, West Ryder succeeds, which is another way of saying acoustic guitars have absolutely no reason to be involved.

The diluted authorship leaves him floundering amid songs that manage to be overly complex and fiercely indistinct at the same time.

It’s pointedly brief--11 songs, 39 minutes and with a scope every bit as limited.

While it is by no means a good album, The Sleepy Strange is a small step up from its brain atrophy-inducing predecessor. On the album's closer, "Vinyl Fever," the band almost attains a tight, Tortoise-esque instrumental groove. But after over 40 minutes of boredom and frustration, odds are the album will most likely be occupying a precious spot in your septic tank before you get there.

None of these tracks are all that interesting beyond a listen or two-- even the best ones get tired fast.

Whatever Other People's Problems is trying to say is lost beneath the fact that it's so sonically muddled and abrasive, and lyrically imprecise.

A band that displays a fine grasp of orchestral pop and baroque studio flourishes on some tracks should be delivering something better than Souljacker.

On Tyranny, that guy has simply worked too hard, and that sense of needless toil bleeds through in every bum lick, brick-walled sound, and garbled burst of noise shoved onto the record.

The best ones spit in the face of death; this album instead finds aging men trying to reclaim their youth.

It's ultimately debatable whether or not Four is the "real" Bloc Party, but revisionist history isn't supposed to be a duller version of the real thing.

The lyrics really don’t offer themselves up for much analysis, and they’re also sung in a way that lets you know your attention is best directed elsewhere.

The stiffly prefabricated industrial-dance grooves that Laibach habitually fall back on don't quite cut it any more, and without a monolithic state to serve as the object of their satire, they're reduced to mocking political fatuity.

Yet no amount of reverb-drenched vocals, acid-flashback harmonies or Hammond organs can prevent The Bees from being a bunch of blokes from the Isle of Wight who happen to have better record collections than songwriting abilities.

Riot Act meanders from one song to the next with an overwhelming insipidness.

Yelawolf sounds like he's just going through the motions instead of actually covering ground.

In its best moments, Small Talk is pleasant background noise. .... The good news is that the songs don’t get worse from there. The bad news is that they stay almost exactly the same. Each track sways into the next at a similar tempo and with similar intensity, which is to say none.

The performances are blandly professional, because any major-label rock band of Green Day's abilities could shit this stuff out in their sleep, and emotionally inert. This is the crafting of a modern epic as a dreary day-job routine.

You don’t listen to a Diplo album for the songwriting, and Snake Oil suffocates in treacly kitsch.

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

Sculptor postures as a manifesto of independent thought, without saying anything specific or of substance.

It's obvious that Hi Beams was meant to be a candy-colored experience, but instead of inducing a sugar rush, it results in little more than a fitful stomach ache.

While there's nothing here that suggests Berninger and Knopf are truly incompatible, there's equally little evidence that Knopf's spirited arrangements are suited to Berninger's spotlight-gargling word soup.

The dizzying list of production credits somehow results in a flattened terrain where stock, hyper-efficient rage and trap beats drone in the background, helping to ensure that the few opportunities for Sheck Wes and SoFaygo to do Opium-karaoke are wholly unremarkable.

The Uglysuit are certainly competent, but on this debut their music feels too by-the-book.

The album's only worthwhile moment [is] the title track, which has already become a concert fave for fans.

This album features perfectly serviceable and perfectly competent, middle-of-the-road punk rock music that probably sounds much better live than it ever could in a recording studio.

The quixotic charm wears thin as "Some Slender Rest" dips into lugubrious emo-folk, and the remainder of the album's murdered wives, enraged sheriffs, and luckless roustabouts pile up cartoonishly.

It's both overstuffed and messy, and so overworked that what life there may once have been now exists as a kind of primordial paste.

At 14 tracks in roughly an hour, Wasteland, Baby! falls prey to the humdrum, all its power wrung dry.

It’s a long slog to get to “Guilty Conscience 2,” but there are moments of genuine inspiration along the way.

The Hamilton Mixtape has managed to drain away the edge and danger from a Broadway show, a curious inversion and just more proof that you can’t Xerox Miranda’s inimitable work.

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.

Levine’s voice murmurs and glints in the corners of the arrangement, and the total effect is exactly as pleasingly immaculate and numbing as all soft rock should be.

Raw Data Feel might be the most confident album Everything Everything have ever released, but in a way that feels deeply hubristic. If this album were a person, it’d be that pompous, motormouthed philosophy undergraduate who treats seminars like extended soliloquies.

Even when A Head Full of Dreams hints at experimentation, it inevitably drifts back onto predictable paths.

With Witness’ confounding combination of songwriting sloppiness and sleepiness, broad strokes are the really the best Perry can hope for these days.

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.

Pinewood Smile has got more jokes than ever, and it’s the first time the Darkness don’t evoke 1974 or 1984 so much as 2003--and they’ve never sounded more dated.

A Complicated Woman’s wide-reaching, mollifying remit feels like Taylor trying to be too much to too many people, to live up to the validation that her last album occasioned. Its best moments are the most personal.

Most of these songs aren’t offensive on their own. .... The cumulative effect, though, is exhausting, a daisy-chain of shaky half-measures that doesn’t even feel particularly committed to being depressing.

The project's shortcomings are even more pronounced this time out since The Dark Leaves sounds like it's striving and somewhat succeeding in being the band's most rhythmically vital record.

4/876 is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises.

The band has... streamlined their songwriting, whittling away the unconventional turns and multiple pre-choruses that made their earlier material more interesting, leaving emotionally aerodynamic compositions free of atonal snags or polyrhythmic left-turns.

Everyone needs to have a doomed romantic stage, but Lloyd's is going on twenty years.... The lyrical juvenilia is a bit of a shame, because this is a solid collection of pop songs otherwise.

Structural over-tinkering is endemic on Neck of the Woods, an album that Silversun Pickups claim was inspired by horror movies; if so, they're the kind of horror movies where you wait a long time for twists you can see coming a mile away, with the visceral impact all but diluted by a glossy CGI sheen.

More than Lightbody’s lack of cogency, the imperious tone burdens Wildness.

Awe is in the ear of the beholder, sure, but after being predictably pounded into the ground for half an hour by Rodriguez-Lopez/Hill et al. and their bag of heavy tricks, it's hard to tell if we're meant to walk away impressed or oppressed.

This isn't the Latyrx that won over backpackers and Cali-funk fans back in '97--far from it. It's not much of a reunion, that's for sure, and sixteen years is a long time to wait for a sophomore slump.

O.N.I.F.C., his second major label album, is a resounding misstep, and it's the first sign that Khalifa's unwavering focus may be getting swallowed up by the haze.

Try as he may, Tomlinson has not quite progressed from featured voice to solo artist. For all the major changes in his life, his music seems to be stuck in place. You can take the boy out of the boyband, but not the boyband out of the boy.

What truly separates Daybreaker from other Orton efforts is its lack of emotional resonance-- moments where Beth just belts it out or where she actually seems engaged with the songs she's singing.

Whether or not they've produced anything that justifies the time away they could have spent producing something better, more consequential, by themselves? Well, the jury's still out there.

Broder is better at details than broad strokes, and Ditherer contains some excellent ones; they're just buried in the piecemeal and decidedly indelicate songwriting.

Her pop exists to exploit and sand off edges, packaging esotericism for the masses. It’s just that on Madame X, she is not merely dining out on other cultures; she’s whipping around drive-thrus.

It’s hard to imagine the wild-maned early incarnation of Kings of Leon even wanting to listen to a band like this, let alone play in one. In truth, their current iteration doesn’t sound all that thrilled about it, either.

The most successful [alternative versions] are the ones that drastically reinvent their material, recasting, for instance, rock songs as synth-pop songs, synth-pop songs as rock songs, or busy twee-punk as slightly less busy acoustic twee-punk. But Supermoon never takes those kinds of leaps.

Even more denatured and opaque than the soupy Melbourne, Sunshine Redux is self-produced to a gooey, garish, gritty and barely mobile gel.