Raditude doesn't have that stench of minimal calculation on it; if anything, it's as earnest as the famously confessional Pinkerton, just written by someone whose age doesn't match his POV.

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.

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.

Mostly, though, this is a depressing reminder of the distance between what Depeche Mode once were and what they've become.

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.

The overall stylistic consistency that made Listennn unusual now makes for an exhausting hour.

Fall's worst moments are queasy and charmless.

Climb Up is filled with an odd (for indie listeners, at least) brand of stadium-sized rock that can't quite escape the notions of cheese and bloat that accompany that term.

The joy of watching them not fly off the rails made even the weaker shows worth hearing. But in turning that experience into a scrapbook, Remember kills the magic.

The oddest development of Angelheaded Hipster is that most of the 20-plus participants opt to inject angst and torpor into Bolan rather than revel in his pomp and frivolity. ... Sadly, Willner’s last great tribute album tells us little about its subject.

Every now and then, he can still crank out his signature sweeping production or drop a line that stops you in your tracks. But no minor edit or revamped version of Donda 2 can conceal the album’s inherent flaw: It is presented as a revolutionary work but it is decidedly a non-event.

Although songs like “King of Hearts,” a pummeling Eurodance stomper, or “Castle in the Sky,” another pummeling Eurodance stomper, might allude to urgency in their lyrics and music, they still feel totally anemic and bereft of passion.

This record is the SoHo-boutique equivalent of a Thanksgiving dinner: it tastes all right, but good luck staying awake 'til dessert.

For now, though, Kimbra's status as "That singer from the Gotye song" woefully underserves her full potential, but so does The Golden Echo.

Though Time is never less than competent, its biggest problem is an unfortunate lack of personality.

Pacific Daydream, in spite of its name, mostly just gives you a feeling of being nowhere.

End Titles rewards just about any amount of listening investment equally, and it completely lacks sharp edges.

I'm sure defenders of the band will champion Mars Volta as a keeper of the prog-rock flame, but The Bedlam in Goliath renders the term meaningless--the result couldn't be more averse to actual progress in rock music.

Pale Communion only toys with the building blocks, revealing influences that were already apparent but refusing to invigorate them alongside each other.

A 19-minute EP bookended with the Billy Ray Cyrus remix and the original version of “Old Town Road”--he opens himself up to the criticism that “Old Town Road” bypassed. Each new song on 7 is an attempt at stumbling into another lighthearted hit. ... For the entirety of 7, it’s unclear if Lil Nas X actually likes music.

When it isn't a high school poetry recital, Lustre often feels like a disappearing act-- an attempt to put on a few musical disguises to see if anyone likes them better than the musician beneath.

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.

On Carnation, he tries and fails to be something other than himself.

There’s rarely any stylistic flair to his vocals anymore; so often, he’s doing a milquetoast rap-sing that makes him sound like everyone else in the Atlanta mainstream rap circuit.

le there are bits of great humor and wordplay scattered throughout (occasionally spat out in dizzying double time), the fogged-over choruses, tough-guy posturing ("In Gotti We Trust"), and spurts of disquieting misogyny ("Scrape") feel like too much padding.

He relies on inane songwriting concepts, rote misogyny, and feelingless flexing. The lyrics are puerile and half-baked.

Four years later, though, all Blonde Redhead has to show for its lengthy studio hiatus is another too-obvious bauble.

They're sounding less and less relatable, leaving us pining not just for the days of a little grunge trio from Seattle, but for the relentlessly catchy and charismatic Dave Grohl of the Foos' still-fantastic self-titled debut and the better half of "The Colour and the Shape."

A bloated and expensive version of the rap he’s always made but without that signature effortlessness.

The Adventures of Bobby Ray is a curiously lonely affair, the sound of a singular talent being drowned in a tidal wave of cheerful banality.

Even the songs here that show flashes of congealing eventually end up falling apart into a watery mess.

The Vision seems to be exactly what Joker wants: UK pop R&B of the vainest and most vacuous possible variety.

Loewenstein's problems seem to spring from a penchant for textbook hard rock and an almost astonishing lack of range, failings that are amplified by his choice to record all of At Sixes and Sevens' instrumentation himself.

A mellow, slightly sub-decent album delivered at the wrong time.

Unfortunately, bare-bones arrangements, train songs, and good intentions are no shortcut to supposed authenticity, and still less are they a guarantor of overall quality.

Once Upon a Time in the West is pretty dull itself.

Most of Weathervanes is serviceable modern rock, so it will find an appreciative audience despite its egregious derivativeness and a lyricist who seems like he'd use the word "inebriated" to talk about how drunk he got last night.

Kittenz and Thee Glitz is Housecat watered down by trivia and outside egos.

It is an anodyne pop record for a post-EDM world, one where trap and trop-house mix with pale imitations of the Migos flow and Coldplay’s cornball sentimentality.

This is the band's most autopiloted effort yet, a hacked-up last-gen rehash of said space jams, only now with greater emphasis on glitz and glam. Somehow Muse, always loveably lame, have managed to take a turn for the lamer.

By co-opting and debasing punk-disco's vitality and sincerity and thereby rendering the style accessible to the botox-and-bulimia set, Jackson betrays the visions of those whose ecstatically powerful music he lavishly degrades.

Their bar band approach sounds as if they've taken a book of rock history and, dutifully following along, bookmarked some of the most unremarkable passages.

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

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.

Form & Control immediately shows the band's strengths and their weakness: It's a smooth, utterly precise study of the formal elements that make disco and electro-pop tick, but with far too little of the body heat that actually gets that stuff going.

Dead Media works on occasion, but primarily when Hefner revert to the traditional pop trio format of bass, guitar, drums.

The underlying problem here seems to be that Hebden still isn't comfortable in his own skin while improvising, with Reid or otherwise.

Live It Out is stymied by lame riffing and unqualified wonkage.

Lemonjelly.ky's nine tracks consist largely of samples from atrocious Nana Mouskouri songs and soundclips nipped from 100 Strings mood music albums. What binds these samples together is a series of predicable hip-hop beats and root-note basslines.

They feel like the pieces that stuck to the wall when he threw everything at it.

Picture, the more ambitious of the pair, simply sounds unfocused, overly concerned with effects and production--with moments and sounds--than with songs or overall shape.

On Ten$ions, they replace what made them sometimes intriguing and slightly subversive with tired tropes and lazy lyrics.

Only the spirited, psychedelic chug of “Spitfire” and the handclap-catalyzed go-go of “Hey Now” come close to clicking with—let alone recapturing—any portion of the band’s former glory. The remainder of the record is filled out with either bland mediocrities or downright embarrassments such as “Flying Like a Bird”, a sappy ballad that sharply delineates every weakness Inspiral Carpets has, from a dearth of energy to a lack of melody.

Look at the Powerful People begins with 54 of the most exciting seconds of music I’ve heard in 2017. And then they start talking.

Billy Corgan needs someone on his shoulder to whisper "no."

[Come of Age] is even more of a dystopian nightmare than Kid A or an El-P record: The Vaccines draw us into a universe that revolves entirely around Young, and if he's got nothing to say, his only possible conclusion is that nobody does.

The album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms.

The lack of any sort of critical thesis or undergirding may seem merely academic, but it translates into performances that are wanly reverent and unanimated, celebrating the music mainly for its age but not its actual history.

Weird to say about a hippie, but it's humanity that's missing in Sharpe's mild but mannered and certainly unmemorable music, which feels focus-grouped, stone-washed, and artificial.

If Samson's voice had the full-blooded verve of her old bandmate Hanna, she might be able to sell this stuff. Instead, she delivers all the album's lyrics in the same flat monotone, and she just sounds bored the whole time.

Overproduced, under-written, swaggering nonsense.

Too much of the album either throws the group into truly unflattering contexts or returns them to the hamster-wheel formalism they’ve been running into the ground for years now.

Like much of X&Y, Magnet is exceptionally unobtrusive, music to ignore.

Despite good intentions, the wincing lyrics border on pandering and even exploitative, revealing little in the way of insight or palpable compassion

Not all of Diamond's new songs go awry. Most just go away, their melodies dissipating, their lyrics flimsy even through those tremendous pipes.

Run-DMC wind up overwhelmed by the guest stars and the schizophrenic nature of the production.

It's true that the new versions sound more modern and souped-up than the originals (which you also get if you buy the "deluxe edition" of Xscape), but their producers don't have enough distance from Jackson's presence to reframe his voice the way that, say, Junkie XL's remix of "A Little Less Conversation" reframed Elvis Presley's.

The result is an album that tries to be all things to all people, a sonic overload that bludgeons the listener with bastardized “empowerment” for 15 songs. Treat Myself is clogged with oozing ballads, contaminated funk, and garish shudders of EDM.

The sonic makeup of Nova is split between nasty bass workouts and straightforward pop, but Steinway seems incapable of distinguishing himself as a producer in either mode. ... These by-committee moments on Nova only further the theory that Steinway’s still in search of his sound.

Overtly aping Mogwai, Jessamine and the entirely mediocre Bardo Pond, Kinski's aimless, ten-minute jams fail to deliver sonically or structurally, content to wallow in self-satisfied discovery, using distortion pedals to mask their junior varsity musicianship.

There isn't a lot left on Nothing, apart from these faint reminders, to indicate that these two guys were the same pair who once revolutionized the sound of hip-hop.

The Vines get credit for ambition, but Highly Evolved covers so much ground that none of it seems convincing: there's just no emotional depth here.

The album is filled with nearly indistinguishable third-hand indie-pop songs.

The disc infuses folk with frenetic intensity, but it's all so over the top that it's hard to take it as anything more than a distraction, like an annoying buzz or a particularly scratchy pair of wool socks.

Instead of focusing on one idea and shaping it into something unique, though, the album tries its hand at everything that is "now" (noise-pop, dance rock, etc.) and owns none of it.

Iron Sea is filled with the sort of greeting-card poetry that would even give Bono pause.

The result is pale, beefy, and contemptuous.

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

To some extent, WYWH can get by on vibe, but really, a listener can do much better, even without going further back into the Concretes catalog.

Thirty-six songs is too many. ... He seems to have lost a great deal of energy as a singer and performer, leading to a ton of uninspired retreads and some truly generic filler.

On the whole, though, the women Craft expends so much breath obsessing over drift in and out of his songs like cardboard cutouts from a bygone era, there to be lusted after and then blamed when they don’t fit into his fantasy.

Cudi too often assumes some sort of higher ground even though his self-pity is flaunted no differently than any other tacky rapper accessory.

Winners Never Quit plugs along on two gears-- the "ballad" and the "rocker." The ballads rely on obvious signifiers like acoustic guitars, brushed cymbals, and pianos. Moody!

Even when their songs pass muster, the performances feel ineffectual, which makes long stretches of Venus on Earth drag semi-miserably.

I'm With You's hip thrusts and gyrations simply go through the motions, the work of a band with all kinds of capital to blow but no incentive to do anything differently.

The long list of guests here indicates a record in need of some padding, but most of these names provide little more than hook fodder.

Adams' 1989, for all its sincerity and technical execution, is ultimately hollow because it's nothing but context.

Mallet percussion, multilingual lyrics, chesty vocal huffs, fumbled acoustics, roundabout vocal harmonies, tentative EDM dipping, Asian monasticism, "Rule Britannia", American gothic: they all get sucked into the vacuum of This Is All Yours without leaving an impression.

Rather than build off each other's styles and arrive at a cumulative, comprehensive sound, Teenage Time Killers' revolving cast have conflated quantity with quality, resulting in a pedestrian product that, at best, offers a decent soundtrack to throwing back beers at Punk Rock Bowling.

Monkey comes off resembling either a padded greatest-hits comp or an "inspired by" soundtrack for a non-existent movie. What it certainly isn't is a DJ mix where previously hidden links between seemingly unrelated songs are unearthed through the ancient art of juxtaposition.

The sad fact is, no marketing strategy, no matter how savvy, could conceal this collection's bathetic, overwrought travesties and gruesome failures.

As a think piece, Rehearsing My Choir is enormously engaging, but as a pop record, it's exhausting and fruitless.

More focused on offering Banhart's international and oddball bona fides than crafting songs that feel at all like home, What Will We Be finds Banhart in need of direction and editing.

Their caveman take on 70s nostalgia-- simultaneously misguided and entirely too obvious-- renders them mostly forgettable and entirely ineffectual.

If you liked the new Oasis and U2 records, never bought "Turn on the Bright Lights," and tend to ignore clumsy lyrics, you might enjoy raising your beer to this album just fine.

Wild Nights' drab sound might have been saved if the lyrics had some life to them.

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.