Lesser Known, then, is about self-exploration in unexplored territory, and how to lose yourself in that void. Boeldt's escaped, and it sounds like he's all the better for it.

There's nothing terribly new to the electro-psych sound he's worked up for himself-- it actually throws back quite a bit to the Roses-- but here he has a clutch of great melodies for him to hang his honey-dipped voice on, and he delivers those nicely.

At least OX 2010 doesn't feel entirely like one MC stranded in his own malaise. The beats are serviceable, with some unostentatious boom-bap from the likes of Kount Fif, Harry Fraud, and Ayatollah. And the guest verses range from complementary mediocrity (Cappadonna treading water on "I Don't Care") to complete upstagings (Guilty Simpson going berserk on "The Verdict").

The central flaw of Mob-- and it's a profound one-- is that its attempt to refine Employment's boundless levels of boyish vigor with introspection and intellect comes across as tired and bored.

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

Rather than feel cathartic or caustic, it’s oddly cold and rote.

Secrets has its finger on the pulse of mainstream radio, judging from its oppressive sonics. But stuck between a tired, nebulously elucidated artistic direction and their own nebulously elucidated commercial aspirations, they just sound a whole lot like the major-label also-rans that they actually are.

The music is pretty but still--without many shifts in color or tone, they sit there like flat, two-dimensional objects.

Remember My Name as an album isn’t going to change lives.

Taken together with her other albums, it’s a part of a motley crew of modes that is shaping Princess Nokia into a great experimentalist. On its own, it lacks the completeness of a coherent project of genre hybridization, and lacks a standout single on the level of, say, “Tomboy” or “Kitana.”

Sleep Mountain's lack of originality is made worse by the fact that few of its songs actually go anywhere.

Legendary Weapons' greatest asset is nearly two decades of goodwill, but at what point are you just flat-out going to admit that Ghostface has been badly coasting downhill for at least five years?

It's not Reznor's best or boldest work, but it's a promising first step down a new path.

I Believe is one of those albums that hardly anyone could bring themselves to hate, but almost no one could truly latch on to.

If these tracks had even the slightest shred of originality, it would be one thing, but Tillmann's on autopilot from the moment we push play.

Charango reeks of Warner Brothers' attempt to find a viable audience for this waning band.

For a band that's lyrically so devoted to upsetting the order, Goatwhore sound unequivocally content with replaying the past.

In their slightly glib mastery of pop-song forms, and their apparent belief that great pop music can be forged through sheer force of will, Cut Off Your Hands sometimes recall Bloc Party. The difference, thankfully, is that Nick Johnston seems far more appraochable and grounded.

The trio unlearns everything that distinguished them as instrumentalists on snakes, ending up with something that’s more entertaining when seen as a potential document of alternate history.

Although Empire tries mightily, they collapse underneath too many ideas before the record is even half over.

As a synergistic mythmaking effort, the album is certainly doing its job; as music to soundtrack your actual life, well, it’s about time lute pop got its shine.

Like any poseur worth her salt, she can make a superficial costume seem compelling without drawing too much attention to the fact that the person inside of it may not have a whole lot to say.

It's the songs they've neglected: They plod forward with generic piston-like rhythms, focusing solely on the one-dimensional vocals and limp songwriting.

It's all crunchy and cloying and probably better if you're high, but that just makes Wasted on the Dream something like a store-brand version of your favorite cereal; it's close, but not there, usually a matter of texture and feel.

The problem isn't that Red Carpet Massacre pushes Duran Duran out of their comfort zone. The problem is that they sound just a little too comfortable there to make the most of bad situation.

'Someone Like You' is the stand-out track on a fairly solid album, but how much better would they have sounded with a little judicious editing and a sharper focus.

Rather than embalming past glories or forcing a big statement, the Orb sound like they're having fun on these jams, recorded quickly in Berlin, with pioneer Lee "Scratch" Perry.

It can't be said that Senior fails to meet its modest wallpaper-ish aims, yet it hardly represents the best Royksopp has to offer.

Expektoration is DOOM at his live-show peak, and people who go into this knowing this set's from six years back might feel a bit more charitable. But releasing a concert album with an "Act 1"/"Intermission"/"Act 2" structure instead of a telltale tracklist, and obscuring its actual place in a years-distant history? That's not supervillainy, that's antagonism.

As with prior Matmos efforts, the ambition here is bold, both in the base concept and its execution.

It's a sad case of an artist forgetting what makes her great, settling for what makes her merely good instead.

The bulk of Neon Icon resists coherence or purpose.

Much of Birthmarks is catchy enough to get stuck in your head, if not necessarily memorable enough to stay there.

At over an hour long, the album suffers from sag and bloat. Each song loses momentum after the first minute, despite the endless parade of guest stars – Lil Wayne, Ludacris, Mario — popping by. Still, there are moments where the experiment almost works.

Lupine Howl essentially take the bluesiest moments of past Spiritualized records and use them as the starting point for their sound, placing the emphasis on gritty rock rave-ups, and adding another Marshall to the stack for every orchestra member Pierce hired for Let It Come Down.

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

Aside from a few bright spots, Rainbow Edition is ultimately a thin record of short, demo-quality beats. Like so many of Hype Williams’ records from the past, this one will feel like a curio or better yet, another reason to ask the question: Who the hell made this?

This album is almost a non-entity.

Many of the songs on the second half slide into each other in a forgettable jumble, but Grateful’s best songs are here, too.

It's the stay-the-course dancefloor material that proves the most rewarding.

Jada's too talented to produce a completely worthless album, of course, and there are the usual one or two frustrating glimmers of the promise that keep getting him record deals.

The problem with Chapter II is that even the album’s high points are only just good, when the dubstep world has reasonably come to expect great things from Benga.

Empire is a wonder of absurd tricks and unforeseen turns, but the ultimate goal--rendering its music as something more than just a side platter to gripping TV--proves elusive.

One might suppose that solo album(s) from the chief Furnaces songwriter Matthew Friedberger would magnify his flaws/assets, and in the case of Winter Women and Holy Ghost Language School, one would be correct.

I cannot remember an album that suffered from such an extreme case of risk-aversion, nor demonstrated so little faith in an artist’s potential, nor any notion that their fanbase might be willing to grow with them. If anything, it shrinks his already narrow proposition.

It feels neither like redemption nor realization; rather, it's just a reminder that--for the past 45 minutes--you've been sitting alone in a room with stable gases. Nothing has changed.

The Return is supposedly a Kool Keith album, but four of the 14 tracks are skits, two mangle his vocals so the producers can show off their DJing, and one is a Princess Superstar song with Keith on the hook.

Never have they turned in an effort as pretty or economical as Out of Nothing.

Ultimately, The Catheters are big on style, and troublingly low on ideas.

This is ultimately a transitory record, its gate-crashing momentum tempered by songs that feel like holdovers from Gauntlet Hair’s more whimsical debut. With Stills’ crisper production cleaning up the band’s formative psych-pop splatter, the album’s more sanguine tracks.

If you're striving to restore faith in a world of "prophets, pimps, angels" and "whores," you gotta do better than Sarah McLachlan melodies and a rented Haitian choir.

Places Like This proved that Architecture in Helsinki could grow out of their early sound without growing tame, that they could change their voice but keep their charm; Moment Bends too often finds them losing one, the other, or both.

His vocals are becoming more textural and less the main focus. That actually works, as Crown has his smartest writing in years, keeping his youthful demons alive, if not running amok. He may have matured, but we don’t want to him to grow up.

There's that unmistakable "side project" air surrounding this record, the sense that this is just an enjoyable way to wile away time during hiatuses in other endeavors.

Demo Tapes contains moments of precise delivery, sticky flows, and hooks primed to be enjoyed in the context of an arena show, but there’s a fair amount of well-tread material, too.

With much of the songwriting on The Monsanto Years taking the form of hastily scribbled screeds, the most revelatory moments come when Neil grapples with the paradox of making complex politics more pop-song palatable.

Megadeth proves that Megadeth can still do the thing, but it’s missing the communal gravitas of a band’s last hurrah.

Even if the concept falls flat, though, T.I. vs. T.I.P. still warrants a listen, if only because T.I. seems constitutionally incapable of releasing an album full of uncompelling music.

The Faint are sounding way out of their depth on the Important Concepts front, while seeming perfectly at home on material about relationship-muck.

From Here On In is inches away from being a success. It's just that it's weighed down by so many repetitive textures and songs that fail to impact.

The Cliff's Notes of classic rock.

Coldplaya-hatas will loathe Keane; most others will just be insulted.

War Stories is the most unadventurous, most typically rock UNKLE release to date.

Twain’s team of co-writers and producers have past credits with Halsey, Justin Bieber, Pitbull, Fred again.., and Iggy Azalea, and too often the material they’ve assembled for Twain feels like third-tier scraps intended for other clients. Queen of Me’s bland and plasticine arrangements are a far cry from the energy and sizzle of hits like “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.”

The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2 is not only superfluous, it actually erases some of the gains made by its predecessor as it plays into the worst trappings of self-indulgence.

It’s an album that seems to exist primarily to be disliked, and it couldn’t seem prouder of itself for achieving that sad goal. Credit Joan of Arc for this, though: 20 years in, they’re still finding new ways to alienate and infuriate.

With much of Certified Lover Boy, Drake seems to be doing what he thinks Drake would do, and ticking the box is taking its toll.

While some of the album's songs are terrifically cloying, I can't call it a disappointment; it's more a case of diminishing returns.

Shobaleader One's not tuneful enough to pass for pop, not funky enough to satisfy a club, and lacks the wildstyle (if sometimes infuriating) excess of Squarepusher's other records. Whether hard or soft, there's nothing here that you can't hear executed with more joie de vivre by a half-dozen Frenchmen.

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.

On Sorry 4 the Wait 2, he's enjoying being Lil Wayne again, for better or worse. It also feels like rapping is once more a choice rather than a contractual obligation, which, at this point, might be the single greatest compliment one can pay Lil Wayne.

The edge that sparked Spank Rock's best moments back in the day either isn't there or flails around without direction.

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

With their staid textures, the songs tend to blend into one another, sounding at best like a spiritless hodgepodge of About a Boy's weaker moments.

It works fine as a stopgap or as background music. It sounds like license-free 2010s trap, for which there always seems to be a market. But it is so ordinary, so uniquely uninspiring that it makes it difficult to imagine a solo work from Quavo that would truly grip our attention (or our club nights or car stereos).

So Entertainment might be music for their performances, it might be for others' dance performances, but it's not for the dance floor.

Dead Petz is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can.

Clearly, these boys can't grasp the concept of "say when."

On Thank You, Diana Ross’ musical star shines strong after six decades of inspiration, offering signs of renaissance even as she teases tender farewells.

Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, the debut LP by the London folk-pop quartet, bites its best sensitive-indie forebears and then pukes up all the most superficial chunks.

Listeners looking for lyrical meaning will still be disappointed, searching in vain for hidden significance in these nonsensical love song lines. A word of advice: It's best to just accept his words as conduits for his dreamy voice, and give in to his charming tunes.

Calamity shows Cohen struggling to balance his twee pop tendencies with experimentation, the same thing Deerhoof mastered on The Runners Four.

On all of these songs, Nicki is dartboard focused-- she's rapping harder here than on almost anything from Pink Friday... But much of Roman Reloaded sweats with a too-big-to-fail desperation.

At times, it sounds far less like his beloved Boys of Summer 2009 so much as a simplified homage to Kompakt's more populist acts, electronic's version of a neophyte performing solo acoustic versions of Zeppelin or Radiohead at a college bar.

Explore suggests that while Park can produce listenable songs that do right by their influences, he's still an inexperienced talent in the process of finding his own voice.

The noxious muck on evidence here obscures most of what made his past music so singular.

Argos is still witty, but here his punchlines tend to be predictable, due in part perhaps to the disc's overstretched answer-song conceit.

Where the Big Pink previously sounded invincible, nearly every attempt to intellectualize or streamline their sound makes Future This come off as timid and malnourished.

A darker album, a slightly clumsier album, but an album with a strong unifying themes and a few songs worth stepping away from the bar for.

"Holiday Call" and "Black Lion Massacre" aren't among Barnes' best songs, but they are bold and show that he's an artist who is eager to challenge himself rather than stick to what has become a very successful formula.

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.

Though Non-Fiction only occasionally rises to the high songwriting standards of Ne-Yo’s seamless 2008 album Year of the Gentleman, it does correct some of the faults of his last record, 2012’s R.E.D., where the R&B songs and the Euro-dance songs played as if they’d been written for entirely separate projects.

Fantasma offers a better introduction to Songs: Ohia than the last couple of proper albums.

The problem is the production.

But without the name recognition and expectations that go with the first new Meat Puppets album in five years, Golden Lies likely wouldn't even see release. And I can't say that I'd consider that such a bad thing, having heard it.... It's representative of the sad state of affairs that the best moments on Golden Lies transparently recall highlights from later albums already past the Meat Puppets' prime.

As it is, Peace & Love sounds like a rough draft full of rookie mistakes, rather than a veteran defiantly going it alone.

New English is so woefully derivative it almost builds itself a new vocabulary from the Lego blocks of other rappers it stands on.

For the most part... the seemingly endless boundaries and subtly propulsive rhythms draw the listener into an engaging world of manipulated samples and shimmering loops.