A YG album should have a higher success rate, which just isn’t the case on I Got Issues. It’s frustrating because the worthwhile moments are obvious.

On a purely sonic level, TIM is an easy listen to a fault, but taking in this final artistic statement is more difficult when focusing on the lyrics. ... The effect of these [guest] contributors effectively recasting his personal sentiments over once-unfinished music is haunting in all the wrong ways.

You almost hope Young the Giant acquiesced to some music executives' request to compromise their style, because nothing else sufficiently explains a debut so devoid of personality.

Beyond a few other fleeting moments of experimentalism on ERYS—the second half of “K,” when the buzzing of an electric razor slowly morphs into a heaving trap beat, or “Fire Dept,” a decent ode to the fast and distorted energy of SoCal punk—it’s mostly a slog, the sound of an artist with a blurry vision and too many resources at his disposal.

For much of the record, Nas sounds like he’s trying too hard.

Free Spirit isn’t the coming of age album Khalid intended it to be, though in his nascent adulthood he has mastered something. Unfortunately, it’s the art of being innocuous.

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

I've rooted for these guys because they nearly achieve that fine mix between tackiness and genius perfected by bands like T. Rex and the Darkness. Unfortunately, I can only give them points for effort.

I Love You, Dude doesn't shake off the confines of genre to reveal a shiny new pop act underneath. Nor does it meaningfully improve on Digitalism's previous formulas.

One step forward, three steps sideways, one step back, The Sweet Escape continues in Stefani's proud tradition of being caught somewhere between the vanguard and the insipid.

On Put the Shine On, when they rap lines about familial abandonment in an aloof, sing-songy chirp, the effect of both their words and the way they choose to deliver them gets muddied. The pain behind the words is real, but its rendering starts to feel like a bit.

More than many of Snoop's recent efforts, Doggumentary has something of a sonic identity.

Buffalo Daughter produce exceptional-sounding tracks that cover a wide spectrum of genres, texture and mood; they perform well on a variety of instruments, and their voices blend nicely most of the time. But they don't write great songs-- too often, they don't even write good ones.

This album drops four consecutive hard rock stinkbombs to kick things off... Senor Smoke's saddest aspect, however, is its yearning for another dance-floor single.

The kind of music that Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, La-La and Po might enjoy kicking back to after a hard day's romping with bunny rabbits.

There are a couple of good performances here and there, but no choice cuts, just songs left on the cutting room floor during sessions for recent solo albums and filler tracks from lower-ranking artists on the QC roster. The longer the comp goes on, the more obvious it becomes that nothing is happening.

Every synth setting and drum sound and vocal technique on I Think We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat is a pastiche of a sort of thing you've heard before.

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.

Women's Rights is an album created entirely for the moment, which keeps the spirit lighthearted even when they're dealing with heavy-handed subject matter.

The album is straightforward, but often so much so that it can seem as if there’s nothing below the surface.

NF also shares Eminem’s shrillness and distorted sense of volume, rapping like he’s putting on the world’s loudest Punch and Judy show. He spends much of The Search darting in and out of an overbearing rappity-rap snarl-yell that can cut right through you if you don’t relate to his roiling anger.

Know Your Enemy finds the Manics attempting to write a protest song in just about every genre. This project, stretched out over 16 tracks and 75 minutes, quickly reaches epic proportions, with an ambition approached only by the magnitude of its flaws.

A light but pervasive dusting of flanger effects and wavy-tuned synths makes the melodies sound cloudy and unfocused. Even the singles don't especially stand out.

With Crooked Shadows, Carrabba aims to bring together his competing production impulses. Unfortunately, the results are all over the place.

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.

The pop genre is in control of Kiyoko rather than the other way around. Instead of defining a unique sound, Panorama carries the unmistakable metallic tang of reverse engineering.

The music is a clear step up from his nadir on Monsoon, but it's only a lateral move in terms of quality compared to the first two Preston School releases.

Jones still croaks out songs with that wretched voice of his, an amalgam of nicotine, alcohol and AOR. The guitars still churn out feeble riffs more appropriate for a Hot Wheels commercial than a grown-up's rock album, and even when they're on to something it feels like they're only fumbling with a good idea.

Illusion is a slight effort by any standard, even the most fair: the bar set by the prior work of the band members themselves.

If it's possible to go through the motions while still mostly shouting, Ferrari Boyz would be a prime example.

At its best moments, Sounding Lines drifts in an intriguingly ambiguous space where each member invokes the genres they’re best known for playing while bending generously to accommodate their partners.

In a sense, this turgid collection is the ultimate expression of Be Here Now: as bloated and indulgent as the record itself, the music a secondary concern to the product’s status.

Words fail ("I'm dying to be living"). They fail early ("You could say we're changing formats" on opener "Final Broadcast"). They fail often ("Through our cell phones we shout"; "Who are you holding when you're sleeping next to me?"; "Ignorance was so blissful"). They fail spectacularly ("This distance is getting tough"), and best of all they're posted.

Native To is packed with well-executed, hummable stuff, but it wears thin quickly.

Unexpected Victory's sound is too lousy--and its stakes too low--to ever possibly live up to his past glories.

Every song on the album is crafted with clinical meticulousness, its production clean as a whistle, but like a flawlessly constructed garment lacking in inventive design it ultimately falls short.

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.

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.

They have general technical proficiency and a knack for a good riff, but listening to them is nevertheless a chore-- and a boring, repetitive one at that.

Helium moves with the numbing pace of a stubborn hangover, and its drums have the grain and snap of limp celery.

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.

Despite a handful of highlights, Beauty Marks is marred by filler, moving between frothy pop-R&B and stale empowerment anthems that leave Ciara’s talents largely underused.

And while, at times, Momus constructs a bitingly clever post-modern take on folk music, Folktronic has an unfortunate tendency to choke on its own concept, rendering the album a bit hard to swallow.

It’s an enjoyable and subtly diverse listen only if you give it your undivided attention.

What we've gotten instead is a forgettable collection of fairly generic, overproduced rock songs that feel, oddly, like a put-on.

All Velvet Changes creates is a disquieting malaise that deflects any attempt to penetrate its billowy, monochromatic, meaningless contours.

As a whole, Eats Darkness feels haphazard in a way that shades into self-indulgence.

This is a decently crafted, moderately hooky, fairly vacuous power-pop album, and under the right light, you could do a whole lot worse.

Someone clinically extracts whatever trace of messy humanity made it through the first time the Bravery worked the nu-wave shtick, on their debut; Stir the Blood is a parodoxically bloodless listen.

Only the truly earless would mistake this assortment of bloated in-jokes and interminable, sub-song drones for some kind of masterpiece.

The album's bluesy tenor does wonders to mitigate its shortcomings, something that the debut's spacious environs couldn't do. With Fool, the problems mostly reside in the words that Bones sings.

Replicants' problems extend beyond vocal limitations; the real issue is that, at 13 tracks and 40 minutes, this record plays like a shiftlessly uninteresting, self-parodic slab of warm-in-2010 pastiche.

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

As catchy as much of Rules is, that hesitancy brings about an imbalance of mood.

While the first half of the record is promising, however, the band loses steam toward the end.

Born is his blandest, most non-descript offering yet. Even the so-so Have You Fed the Fish? seems like a masterpiece in comparison to the downtrodden piano banalities that slosh all over this latest nadir.

It's good to hear him still recording, even if he's deeply entrenched himself in his own wheelhouse and barely has a single surprising moment in the album's whole hour. But if the album never existed, nobody's life would be much poorer for it-- possibly even Devin's.

Few releases have been as baldly transparent and destined for ubiquity as No.6, which has all the conspicuous mining of a Drake album, but very little of the finesse or cultural fluency.

Wilson’s chipper duets never reach equilibrium. Either his presence feels underutilized--the syrupy "On the Island" with She & Him, in which his vocals are scant--or the guests feel shoehorned into musty production that undermines their own charisma.

Like Skinner's recent work, instead of woodshedding on the mixtape circuit like smarter and hungrier rappers, we're treated to lightweight albums that are three years in the making and still feel like a rushed jumble of bad ideas that just get worse as they go along.

The Handler only meagerly amplifies what he was already doing, probably pleasing his no doubt respectable cadre of core followers, but handily turning off the rest of humanity.

Scattered bright spots come from guests—on “Forever,” Post Malone injects his destabilizing energy, singing with the urgency of someone in dire need of a bathroom. Kehlani’s appearance on “Get Me” enlivens the muted, Noah “40” Shebib-type beat. Otherwise, the only appealing moments appear in the last third, when Bieber sings over minimal accompaniment.

Nothing on this EP is particularly awful-- Yo La Tengo certainly can't be blamed for their efforts-- but sometimes things are better left unremixed. The sequencing's overwhelmingly tacky, and really, how often do you think you'll find yourself in the mood for Takemura's epic reworking of a vaulted Yo La Tengo instrumental? The record has its moments of beauty, but in the end, it fails to add up to a satisfying whole.

The band's new sound is nothing short of painfully, achingly banal.

Eventually Doughty is going to have to do something about his lyrics, because "The moonlight shines like a luminous girl tonight/ Yeah, Jesus Christ like a luminous girl tonight" isn't going to hack it.

Ultimately, the whole of Tinted Windows is so much less than the sum of its considerable parts that it's almost tragic.

The problem is that this was, at best, a 1997 cash-grab that probably would've worked in that economic climate, and now you just get to debate whether it's a cynical move on Soundgarden's part or, more likely, something they had absolutely nothing to do with at all.

When they play it safer, like on their workmanlike strum through Joni Mitchell’s “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” or the easy-listening wistfulness of their take on Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over,” the results are less remarkable. And while it’s a relief to be spared Morrissey’s bitterness, sometimes California Son feels too frothy, and he sounds like he doesn’t have any skin in the game at all.

If the teaser EP Splitting the Atom is any indication, that Burial remix joint will probably make a better and more convincing Massive Attack album than the next actual Massive Attack album.

YOKOKIMTHURSTON is not so much a decibel-bursting showcase for the Queen of Noise and her unruly understudies as a conversation between intimates speaking in tongues and tangles-- a voyeuristic glimpse into a private, discomfiting exchange.

Somehow, Dando's nonchalance here--his stoned cadences, fleeting hooks, loose-limbed guitar playing, and generally rumpled demeanor--comes across as a weird but sincere gregariousness.

The problem with Kane’s emulation of past performers is that he remains a tourist lost in his time warp, lacking the originality and vocal grit to elevate fandom into innovation.

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.

There's a weird outdated feel to the album; too many of the songs feel like attempts to cross over to a rap mainstream that barely exists anymore.

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

Like a washed-up athlete, Lee's stuck reliving his glory years.

Lupe often has enough trouble staying out of his own way, yet Lasers doesn't suffer for that reason; it just feels like the flaming wreckage of a project that never had a prayer.

Whilst there's no getting past some of the duller and more unbearable material on this record ... if she'd made a record full of songs as unaffected as these four ["Lies," "Starring Role," "Power & Control," "Living Dead"], Electra Heart could be one of the year's most acclaimed pop albums.

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.

The beats on Story never quite cohere, and tracks like 'Uncle Swac Interlude,' an endless phone conversation with Banner's drunk uncle, further interrupt the flow.

The old cliché about double albums is that most could be greatly improved if edited down to one disc, but that doesn’t hold true here. Animals is an anomaly: a two-disc set without enough solid material for even a single LP.

While the songs on Peace Trail are unquestionably timely and occasionally poignant, Young’s songwriting-as-immediate-response sometimes fails him.

It may actually be best to just pretend that H.N.I.C. 3 ends after the 10th song, because up to that point it's a pretty good, if slightly uninspiring, mixtape.

Montage of Heck is like a shaggier version of Family Tree, a voyeuristic document that attempts to plop you down in the living room of a dead hero, and it leaves you with a similar hollow feeling.

The transcontinental breadth of the band's influences keeps Chief from coming across as pallid piggybackers of any one scene, but for a group that hasn't yet demonstrated an ability to nail down a particular sound, keeping so many balls in the air could be stretching its talents too thin.

For an album called The Time Is Now, David spends too much of his time looking like he's trying to catch up.

Snow Blindness isn't essential listening for anyone but VanGaalen's most dedicated fans, but it is an enjoyable, occasionally even great record.

Travistan fails so bizarrely that it's hard to guess what Morrison wanted to accomplish in the first place.

It delves as far as it can without hitting government-name territory, and for that the true fans will embrace it. But how many times can you retell the same story?

Even as a record of adequate, vaguely politicized mook-rock, it mostly falls flat, whether by lazy lyrics or some uninspired drumming from Galactic's Stanton Moore, who adds plenty of percussive touches like the judicious cowbell of 'Clap For the Killers' but sinks more straightforward tracks such as 'The Oath' like a stone.

In parts, Albion's shambolism is stunning, but that's no excuse for moments of total sloppiness.

A good listen to the album today reveals some ways it was ahead of its time.

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.

Sacred Hearts Club splits the difference between the bookending acts on that Grammys tribute: Maroon 5 and the Beach Boys.

Throw Haerts on shuffle and it’s uniformly accessible and uniform, period.

Somewhere on the way to novelty-fame, Three 6 Mafia lost something, and these days they sound like they're just going through the motions.

Its chief problem is that every word, every note, and every instrument sounds dry, sapped of most of their personality.

The lyrics' yearning for something tangible and substantial ultimately feels at odds with what Sweet Sister, promising surface and all, actually brings to the table.