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

Like Hardcore, A Wrenched Virile Lore features 10 tracks, though it only references eight of the originals. However, even the mixes that draw from the same songs are different enough in approach and sequenced in such a way that the reappearances feel like purposeful reprises.

Fragments of Freedom is a consistent and predictable stylistic overhaul into hyphenated hipster pop for people who actually liked Cibo Matto's last album. It fits the form to a T, right down to the brief, pointless Biz Markie cameo.

At its worst, this project is just plain retarded.

Future Bible Heroes frontman Chris Ewen just isn't a Merritt-caliber composer, and this EP suffers in comparison to the Magnetic Fields.

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.

Much of Happiness Ltd. suffers from one of the cardinal sins of radio-ready rock: stuffing unmemorable verses between overblown choruses.

The aesthetics of her songs with Hershenow remain timid and careful.

After initially promising a return to form, 50 doesn't have the ability or initiative to hold the listener's interest over the long run.

Standouts struggle to hold their own amid the album's more overwrought anthems and straight-up misfires.

The Last Slimeto suppresses the knottiest and most uncomfortable aspects of his music, the moments when it feels like you’re hearing him process his darkest thoughts in real time. As a result the album is easier to digest, the songs less likely to stick out on a playlist, but at the price of the individuality that has made YoungBoy impossible to replicate.

Awful as it might be, Oskar is not easy to dismiss because awfulness has always been a part of Momus' gambit.

Doesn't extend the sound of the band's debut so much as inflate it.

Lyrically, Wolf is convincing when sticking to the grief-stricken script. It's when he goes off-book that things start to get awkward.

Ultimately, this particular dream is less one of flight or past glories, and more one of going to work and finding you've forgotten your trousers.

There are moments of considered writing and bursts of Drake at or near his mischievous best, but in its middle, the record becomes inert, making the bits of self-conscious misanthropy scan as strained rather than gleeful, as if the id could be focus-grouped.

Before Wild Things, Brown scrapped an entire album that, from press indications, probably sounded a lot like Anxiety; neither she nor the people she said heard it was happy with the results, but one wonders if it was really that bad, or just not commercial and crowd-pleasing enough. Wild Things collapses over the strain to be both.

The thoroughly unenjoyable Paralytic Stalks might be a sign that Barnes should take some time off and let the inspiration come to him.

In a sense Turin Brakes do little wrong on Jackinabox aside from the occasional gooey outbursts of gaiety.

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

If you can look past these cringe-inducing moments, The Good Feeling Music occasionally lives up to its title.

The Listener is ultimately such a strange record that it's hard to really classify; Giant Sand fans are going to love it, naturally (all twelve of them likely already own it), but people new to Gelb and his accomplices might be left scratching their heads.

It's mind-boggling that such sloppily arranged, barely listenable stuff is getting this kind of attention, but that's celebrity for you.

The sound and songs of [Aden's fourth album, Topsiders]... are no different whatsoever from the band's already homogenous and uncharacteristic previous three.

As annoying as Endicott's mascara-tainted bellyaching was on the Bravery's debut, his histrionics-for-the-masses commandeer the group's stylistic direction on The Sun and the Moon, cheapening already trite regurgitations of Robert Smith confessionals by bloating them to anthemic proportions.

So even if I Am the West is little more than another reminder of what Cube's day job was before becoming a Hollywood supermogul, if it does result in someone's hearing AmeriKKKA's Most Wanted or Death Certificate for the first time in 2010, it's done its job.

The Golden State band Golden Animals mine that particular epoch of mild psych and blues rock--especially the middle part, when 60s idealism gave way to the dope-daze haze of the 70s--for all it's worth on Free Your Mind and Win a Pony, the duo's solid enough debut.

Ultimately, 1000 Palms sounds like emotional throat-clearing, the transitional sound of a band finding their bearings, resetting their dials, and getting back on their feet in the wake of a lot of personal and professional turmoil.

DaBaby’s charm gets diluted; he sounds measured and restrained, not words typically associated with DaBaby. This is music to bob your head at, not lose your shit to. Ever the savvy marketer, DaBaby does manage a few highlights that seem packaged to go viral.

Lo-fi veneer aside, Beckett's songs could plausibly receive the same seven-word description as an Art Brut masterpiece-- funny lyrics shouted over basic rock riffage-- but here that's as meh as it sounds.

For all the good-natured vibes this record gives off, it's hard to ignore that Do Things is also a limited collection. It's easy to suspect Dent May's ambitions are as simple as to craft a record that finds itself endlessly stuffed into car stereos this summer.

As with all documents by obsessives fixated on their targets, the album can be frequently ridiculous, mildly captivating, and occasionally repetitive, pocked by moments of goofiness that come from the runoff of a man eager to chase old miseries and find new ones to berate.

XI versions works best as a companion for smitten Black Noise fans, and it offers a couple of nice moments that Four Tet and Animal Collective completists might want to keep in their back pockets.

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.

As the next step in Kittin's conflicted evolution, Two is not that much different from (or more enjoyable than) what's preceded it. As a supposed remembrance of the heyday of electroclash, it's a nostalgia trip that's best left untaken.

Alphabutt is honest and funny, and manages to sidestep all tired, kid-song tropes.

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

Someday World is well arranged, meticulously produced, even catchy at times. But there’s an overriding sense of aimlessness, of people just dropping by the studio and breezing into the songs before wafting off to a more important appointment.

The Neighbourhood is as ponderous as any forgotten post-grunge also-ran record selling for one cent on Amazon.

Franz's music is usually as crisp and tight as its constructivist cover art, and though reformatted, stretched out, and slowed down on Blood, it still maintains a strong pulse.

Perhaps unintentionally, Turning the Mind feels chemical itself--it's a cheap buzz that ultimately should have no problem finding its way into the wheelhouse of people who just can't get enough whooshy sound effects.

At their best, they achieve late-’90s VH1 rock heights, which is not such a bad target to hit. ... At their worst, they’re affected and not in an interesting way. But these are both extremes, on a record otherwise scrupulous to never sound at all extreme.

Like hearing DLR's lonely voice doing its best in the absence of accompaniment, most of Robotique is just sort of depressing.

None of Corgan’s definitive qualities as a musician—symphonic grandeur, needling immediacy—translate to his production, which burdens CYR with out-of-the-box anonymity; a Smashing Pumpkins album that sounds like it was handed off to a guy at the Genius Bar. The production’s clinical competency only highlights the assembly-line songwriting of CYR’s back half.

Instead of opening up new possibilities in the originals, Beam and Bridwell unwittingly demonstrate how limited certain songs can be and therefore how unsatisfying certain covers can sound.

Based on Andy and His Grandmother, Kaufman comes off like an asshole, a hopelessly naive loser, a crazy person, a hothead, a hopelessly sweet grandma's boy, a sexually confused teenager, and a manipulative monster. In other words, he comes off like Andy Kaufman.

The New Testament feels mostly like one just-OK thing, easy to enjoy on a pass but much harder to love.

The Drums are at least halfway to amassing a pretty great singles comp--they just can’t really call it a Greatest Hits.

It's the Brian Jonestown Massacre album that's the least informed by the usual parade of 1960s mod/psych influences, opting instead for flirtations with disco rhythms, drum loops, boom-box beats and house-diva wails. In a sense, Newcombe has simply replaced one form of repetition (droning/jangly guitar jams) for another (dance workouts).

Synths lap, strings weep soppingly, ham-fisted fingers tap, time signatures flash, and the amphetamine Beat poetry...is amphetamine Beat poetry.

The Optimist too often gets lost in non-committal melodies as Bulmer tries and tries again to capture quote-worthy elegant wastefulness.

It's never boring, and there's certainly plenty to wrap your ear around. But these sweet songs just feel like they would've been better served by either pulling back or revving up, not the slathering on that takes place here.

The R.E.D. Album will likely fade into obscurity immediately upon arrival, but if it doesn't raise some eyebrows around major label offices, then this is a failure of not just one person, but also of an entire industry.

FM Sushi, then, is a stepping stone for a group suddenly poised to do great things, things their debut never even suggested.

The greatest-hits disc is a misnomer: It's mostly a grab-bag of Shady throwaways and deep cuts.

He's at his most effective when he dials back the Rick Ross character, so the album’s standouts feature him laying bawse insight over slow-burners.

Paradox exists as a conduit between a dreamed history and a fantasized future, a place formed of nothing more than fragments that evoke a past that seems more mysterious than the present. If the end result is as light as a feather or as memorable as a breeze, that’s also the point.

Fifty percent of the lyrics are bad (“Back on my bullshit, devil emoji”) and the other 50 percent are also bad, but then they get stuck in your head and ultimately turn good (“Tell me your darkest secret shit you wouldn’t even tell Jesus”). ... Death Race For Love feels like the real Juice WRLD, wearing his influences and heart on his sleeve, putting his ups and downs into the music in real time.

The painstaking introspection here seems to stem from a need to use their success and exposure to deliver some definitive, U2-sized message when really they're so much more relatable when they're awkwardly sorting out their psychological messes on the fly.

The 22-20s evade most of the typical British rock potholes (i.e. histrionics, pretentiousness, unapologetic 60s-aping, among others), and can actually be taken at face value.

Boys and Diamonds bustles with African, Indian, and Caribbean rhythms, and boasts some genuinely interesting production in places. But the songwriting is ultimately too blocky and dull and slapped together for it to succeed as the thing it most wants to be-- a pop record.

They're not trying to pull off anything like that any more; instead, they're polishing up the durable façade of their signature sound, while the songwriting that it used to support has crumbled.

A mopey bunch of trite sap O.D.-type tales almost as unstomachable as the band's former crapothecary hymns.

What [3rdEyeGirl] don’t have is much of a personality. Recorded live in the studio using analog equipment, the album is nevertheless too proficient, too slick, and too professional to come across as much more than anonymous.

Ghost Stories certainly sounds like the product of someone working out their private pain in public; unfortunately, the results are less Blood on the Tracks and more "Can I Borrow a Feeling?".

They transform a solid album into something of an emotional journey, and hint strongly that beneath their low-key snarling, Fufanu have grander things on their minds.

Most of Don’t You aims for Babyface but lands somewhere around Surfacing-era Sarah McLachlan, except nowhere near as good.

For an artist who has undergone so many identity experiments before her debut, Soft Control is a promising, if not groundbreaking, beginning.

The measurable failure is the album's music. On a track-by-track basis, the songs make for dull labor, not worth our time and not befitting Rihanna's talent.

Walk It Off attempts "The Loon's" indie patchwork using fewer and larger pieces, causing less-than-stellar ideas and riffs to suddenly become load-bearing pillars for painfully linear three-minute pop songs.

What we get is a pretty good modern R&B album, but it’s also one that feels just a bit fossilized.

A charming enough document that fans will almost certainly find worthwhile.

We get his best on How to Get to Heaven From Scotland, an album any Arab Strap fan could love.

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.

Expectedly, the longest lost tracks (talking '95, '96) are the most amateurish.

It's not the music that sinks Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, it's those lyrics: well-intentioned, certainly, but as deep as the bowl on a one-hitter.

As big and bold as it can sound, there's little here that's especially flashy or blatantly attention-seeking.

Even as Sledge and Jessee work to add some rough edges to the music, their frontman keeps his distance on Sound of the Life of the Mind, as though he can't quite get outside his own mind. As a result, the album sounds barely able to polarize, like Folds is rockin' the suburbs gently to sleep.

If Butler falls slightly short of convincing that this particular brand of old will be made new again, it remains hard to find fault with his survey of all the fun we could have had.

There's a distinct lack of fun in the instrumental wankage of The Mix-Up, a bad sign for a band that has seen their results fade in direct proportion to how seriously they take themselves.

The Fratellis have comfortably nestled themselves among the ranks of British rock's most besotted, but even relative to their contemporaries they still manage to come off sounding bored, tired, and downright silly.

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

It's well-recorded, well-mixed, well-performed-- hell, it's even well-packaged-- but it has little spark and a bad habit of insisting on five-minute songs.

They’ve been slowing down for a while now, but here they feel nearly worn out.

On Big Grams they hit a bit more of a stride.

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

Not everything here fails in such catastrophic fashion, but because the band noodles its way through Mirror Eye's druggy, sitar-laced exercises without any thought towards coherence (or completion), even its few promising tracks feel slapdash and unfinished.

There is no scrape, no tension, no noisy bullshit, and Destroyed is eminently un-replayable as a result.

It seems boring and a bit lazy to say that Wiley sounds best when he’s still offering up recognisable grime tunes, but it’s undeniable that on The Ascent the strongest of such efforts capture the rapper in his best light.

Whatever subtlety Germano's voice and lyrics might lack is buttressed by the deceptive simplicity of her music.

It shows how Ruess might succeed on his own as a good-hearted Midwestern boy--not quite a star, but someone capable of appreciating their light.

This record lacks a single guitar-driven rock song, instead spoofing saccharine dance-pop and exotic tropical genres.

The effort and energy are there but the soul is missing.

Sonically, at least, Son of Spergy, is in the same ballpark as a SAULT or L’Rain record, its negative space, vocals, and instruments in stunning harmony. But that prettiness can’t save the sophomoric songwriting.

But when I say "neutral," unfortunately I mean pretty much exactly what you probably think I mean. The only track with an immediately memorable hook is his cover of 'Crimson and Clover.'

As a follow-up, 18 plays it safer than a quadruple-condomed fundamentalist Christian at an abstinence rally.

Myths 004 has a woolier charm [than Deerhunter's Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?], running on antic, inventive rhythms that suggest a Rube Goldberg device.