It lacks the razor-sharp focus that made Just Cause Ya’ll Waited 2, a brutal and affecting listen. Durk’s presence is strong and his endurance is inspiring, but his intentions are as muddied as ever.

Pillowfight is technically flawless but thoroughly unexciting.

Despite the dual versions, Storytone never finds a comfortable middle ground: the orchestral versions too maudlin, the solo versions over-sharing.

All the clichés from French pop and house music collected in one shiny package.

Do I really wish to describe the pallid piano ballad that is "Judy, Don't You Worry," or the Euro-dance dreck that Cracknell calls "Taking Off for France?" Nico's Liquid Steel remix of "Anymore" adds a modicum of drum-n-bass excitement to the original but not enough to excuse the Vengaboys-for-Uptown-Soirees statement of vacuity, "Penthouse Girl, Basement Boy." How about if I skip the would-be anthemic were-it-not-so-Michael Bolton "How Far?"

LSD sound like an algorithmic midden of pop music. ... More than anything, this album is both tired and wired, like drinking Red Bull after a fifth Red Bull.

The album's overall flow and structure is decidedly disjointed, with a scattering of tiny, demo-quality tracks adding virtually nothing to the record.

Like most remix comps, Decent Work is ultimately a grab-bag.

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

Jackman. takes creative risks in social commentary that often pay off.

This is clearly a band with some musicology under its collective belt, and its members have the technical skill to fold their diverse interests into guitar rock without forcing anything; the surprises come fast and, often, satisfyingly. But Haege's big voice puts a lot of emphasis on the prolix lyrics, which remain dismal.

Slum Village has little to say lyrically.

From the first track through its final seconds, Invaders joylessly stomps through overly familiar territory. It's another lunkheaded, loud mash-up of rock and dance, a sound now so beefed-up and campy that it's perhaps only suitable for shotgunning cheap beer and practicing UFC chokeholds with your pals.

Unfortunately, Seconds, Higgins' first album in 36 years, doesn't match the vitality of its backstory.

This band is particularly long on charm and short on technical ability, but anyone expecting a garage band to reinvent the wheel is expending far too much mental effort.

True Colors does traverse familiar, populous formats that may be difficult to innovate on top of, but other posi-tinted, mass audience-focused projects have found success by mixing their own cocktails of EDM, soul, and of-the-minute rap production. Zedd’s True Colors, though, feels underformed and unoriginal.

It sadly turns out to be an unsettling piece of evidence that he's lost without someone else's pre-existing sounds to extrapolate from and transform.

If nothing else, Frank's 33-minute Devil's Workshop is the punchy record that should have followed Teenager of the Year.

The group is a conglomeration of influences that, while pleasant enough, doesn't rise above being anything more than a mixing board of cool-sounding favorites.

To navigate successfully around a Kid Cudi album, then, is to get really good at squinting at the periphery.

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.

The problems with Jackie, a serviceable record that gets better with multiple listens, is that unlike her previous releases it's more heavily focused on paint-by-numbers Dr. Luke electro.

Release Therapy is probably Luda's best album since Back for the First Time, but it's not like that's saying much.

Unfortunately, Inherit tries to give the listener both of these great tastes at once, resulting in a combination that's less like chocolate and peanut butter, and more like toothpaste and orange juice.

There are brooding, rhythmically strong pop songs that fall halfway between the poutiness of Lana Del Rey and the hyperactive fizz of HAIM. The parts where it deviates from that template, however, are baffling.

But as clear as that opening switch to afterburners rings, much of Heavenly Bender sounds too-worn in at times, hooks still more familiar than barbed.

As a whole, Trendsetter is too wide-ranging and unfocused to scan as the proper debut she aspires for it to be. But when she does lock in, her mission couldn’t be clearer.

Guillemots cram themselves into awkward fits, and Dangerfield has to squeeze the hardest--whether he's tying himself to a straightforward ballad instead of clamoring for the rooftops, or standing up for a fight when he's so much more comfortable slipping into a dream.

If there's any difference between this album and von Bohlen's lackluster recent output, it's that this collection somehow manages to be even more tepid.

Spacesettings is liquidated, hookless, and entirely flaccid.

VHS or BETA have moved on, like so many bands this year, to pillaging the dance-friendly template of late-80s Cure.

Where overbearing arrangements don’t get in the way, a cloying sentimentality does.

So yeah, the tricks are clever; unfortunately, musically, There's Me... is an overstuffed mess.

Without Panda Bear on board, Animal Collective lose the pop edge that has resulted in their most commercially successful music, but this isn’t a project for scoring hits. It’s a meditative, hypnotic experience, and it’s not without the sense of playfulness that has driven Animal Collective throughout their career.

Start and Complete ultimately achieves what it sets out to do, which is to place a song-oriented frame around another off-the-cuff session by these four disparate talents, who will no doubt spin off in a completely different direction should About Group reconvene.

A few brilliant left turns that feel almost accidental mixed in with a sort of end-times hunger for a top-40 audience that doesn't seem to exist anymore.

Ultimately, they're at their most engaging when maintaining an ironic distance between subject matter and tone.

Ghosthorse and Stillborn tends toward lazy, meandering nothings.

In general, Talking to You sounds like an album that is gradually divorcing itself from history and geography, as the Twins learn to build on that West Coast sound to create something unique and personal. They're not there yet, but give them another tour.

Yes, Mink Car is crap. All the charms They Might Be Giants once seemed to possess have dissipated into a cloud of embarrassing awkwardness.

They've jettisoned nearly all their Strokes, Television, and other grab bag post-punk propensities, turning instead to adult alternative as a foundation for this late-20s midlife crisis. I guess if ya can't beat 'em, just quit and make soft rock!

Most of the seven tracks crammed between these fine bookends, including two undistinguished instrumentals, run together in a modal drone, lacking urgency or emotional inflection.

You can hear that weariness all throughout Play, which often finds him going back to his two favourite wells—wedding songs and “global” bangers—without much of the energy or good humor that made him so popular to begin with.

TP3 Reloaded is one of those albums where every song sounds like a radio single.

Bianchi's not much for such subtleties, emotional or rhetorical, which may suggest he'll have as much lovelorn electro-symphonic melodrama to recount on future albums as on those past and present.

We Can't Fly's stylistic knuckleballs lack just about everything we'd grown to love about Aeroplane: namely luxurious grooves and effortless cool.

There's a disarming simplicity and artlessness... with an increased emphasis on persistent pop melody over crafty wordplay.

The worst I can say about Dedication 4 is that there isn't one moment where I wouldn't rather be listening to the often mediocre originals. There are a dozen or so good punch lines scattered on D4, enough to make it fun enough for one listen

Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2 simply demonstrates competence. Harris may say that this album is powered by fuck-you juice; it is as threatening as an Erewhon smoothie.

While Grey Oceans is less caustic than their other work, it still has that lay-it-all-on-the-line quality that's worked for Antony Hegarty, Devendra Banhart, and Joanna Newsom. The difference is that the album never feels like anything's at stake, whereas past records embraced experimentation at any cost.

Trilla, Rick Ross's inexplicable second album, is every bit a fatty contemporary American disaster.

As silly as the songs on an A.merican D.ream are, it is Gerner’s wincingly theatrical vocals that really take the album into the realm of unintentional comedy.

Problem is, for the second straight album, they do so with the same exact set of tools as every other band in this sphere. So critiquing Ritual threatens to be a process of listing obvious influences that's just as dull as actually listening to the thing.

The weirdly distant and safe Magna Carta Holy Grail abides by the tried and true business principle that the customer is always right: you just have to remember who the customer is here.

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.

Ghost rarely does get the hint, often left too slight and too self-important for it's own good.

While Tha Carter IV isn't the first indication that Wayne's finest verses are behind him, it is the most glaring.

In the context of Matt & Kim's discography, Lightning is inconsequential. Like an echo of an echo, there's nothing here that Matt & Kim haven't already done over and over again.

The new musicians forgo the gauzy, playful dilettantism of Euphemystic in favor of expansive pop marathons.

Wish Hotel might be ephemeral but it's ultimately pleasing, a cloud of scented smoke floating from your speakers to score an overcast day.

While it's not torture to listen to Dirty Dancing repeatedly, it does contain more than its rightful share of slip-ups and missteps.

The mix here is guitars to 11, everything else to 6, as the slurring, inebriated Liam is buried under mountains of riffs for better and worse.... Familiar to Millions reheats leftovers of better songs written six years ago and force-feeds them as reminders that Oasis could once write an uplifting song. As for those looking for a compact, two-disc set of Oasis' best, it's called What's the Story Morning Glory? and Definitely Maybe-- available for the low price of $8 at your local used record shop.

Fans of Client will appreciate the more dynamic edge to City... but those without a history with the band may write it off as another limp post-electroclash exercise.

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

Beating Back the Claws of the Cold only offers fleeting glimpses of potential greatness beneath the ho-hum surface.

You get the feeling that Small Black do want to break free of their past, but they’re not always convincing at showing how badly they want it.

Where their earlier records thrived on the tension between Stollsteimer's gut-spilling confessions and the band's raucous, raw-powered attack, on Love, Hate and Then There's You, we get all the pleading, but without the violent, cathartic release.

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.

With their harmonies and swooning vocals, they're never quite Troggs-level elemental, but these guys clearly know how to wail.

A few songs are some of Morrissey’s most engaging, exciting work of the 21st century. Other songs get your attention for the wrong reasons. ... His political musings all arrive with a crushing lack of subtlety or nuance.

Despite their best efforts, nothing on Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak is even half as interesting or poignant as the CD casing itself, and musically, the decision to focus on this album's mood and textures largely falls flat.

TRON: Legacy Reconfigured succeeds as much as most remix projects do, which is to say about 50% of the time, and without Daft Punk's name attached to the project it's doubtful it would have attracted much attention.

Now that the veil has been lifted, there’s not much on Tides End worth the price of progress.

Unfortunately, more than mediocre tracks or throaty sexual goofs, what does in Majenta is its scattershot nature. There's no flow to the way the album's sequenced, to the point where it seems purely arbitrary. Furthermore, Edgar seems so concerned about skipping between genres that he neglects to refine any one specific sound; even the strongest cuts rarely rise above "nice try."

There’s plenty Sia could do with an album entirely of Christmas originals, but too many are underwritten; there’s more consistency in the art direction than the songwriting.

Reasonable Woman, the singer’s 10th studio album, continues the trend of inconsistency. Over manicured synth arrangements and beat drops blown up to eye-watering proportions, Sia belts out self-help anthems that stick to formulaic, dated sounds. It’s outsized feel-good music with little worth feeling good about.

Call it mood music for the mindless.

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

Bigger Love is rife with this feel-good energy, buoyed by his stately voice and easygoing charm, but beneath its positive exterior is an emptiness that’s hard to ignore.

After a few tracks, it becomes increasingly more difficult to ignore the pathetic lyrics and boring flows-- even the production seems redundant, bland, and horribly imitative and regressive.

It feels like a pleasant yet unremarkable switch back to the past, the sound of Air staring into a half-empty well of ideas, on the verge of becoming their own tribute band.

Too often, it’s a simulacrum of passion: feel-good house music as daily affirmation. Unlike the broad scope of their videos, their songs feel squashed, like an inspirational message made for Instagram’s tiny window.

Grrr... seems transcribed from a distant memory or read from the pages of a script.

Uncanney Valley seems too bent on interrupting serious moments with corny jokes and bewildering asides to say much of anything about anyone else.

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.

[A] disappointing release.

Toying with sound and rhythm, noise and melody, Square is less minimalist than Hope, more fractured than Second.

This record meanders through a set of passable songs that ultimately decline to move or enthrall you.

Dolphins is both hypnotic and staggering at times, but it lacks the extraordinary stamina that those earlier Mi Ami long-players kept from end to end.

This is Kinski’s most straightforward rock album, and certainly the Kinski album with the best, most concise vocal songs. If anything, the cranked-up, low-tempo instrumentals are now where the band fares worst.

Su might not have the highest aspirations, but minor dreams can still compel a listener; Sincerely Yours just needed to find better modes of expression.

It might still mortify some of his more purist fans, but there's little on this record that a few instrumental-version substitutions wouldn't fix.

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.

It’s a pleasant oddity in the Shins’ catalogue—neither a dazzling reinvention of the original release (see: Massive Attack V Mad Professor’s towering No Protection) nor a hastily-assembled insult to the band’s creative work .

Left to his own devices, Nav sometimes strays back towards raps without substance, coasting on pristine beat selection and Auto-Tune that lull the listener into easy-listening mode.

There are moments when these elements come together beautifully, as with the nostalgic dreamscape that surrounds Lola Young’s soaring vocals on “Trying.” At other times, Fred again..’s songcraft struggles, and fails, to break through.

An album in which he and his reformed jug-band compatriots paradoxically reach for a musical approach both more complex and more approachable, instead landing squarely in the realm of mediocrity.

While the songs certainly do the Whigs no favors, the production and mixing on Dark are downright unconscionable, making one long for the relative restraint of Don Gilmore or Andy Wallace.