Kanye’s tenth album arrives barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.

For All the Dogs caps off a recent persona that sounds like none of it’s fun to him—and he’s dragging us along to be the company of his misery.

Try as he may, Tomlinson has not quite progressed from featured voice to solo artist. For all the major changes in his life, his music seems to be stuck in place. You can take the boy out of the boyband, but not the boyband out of the boy.

Listening to Matinée straight through is exhausting, like being trapped in the kitchen at a college party while someone with curiously wide eyes Explains It All to you.

Outgunned is a mess of unfocused energy and uncomfortably irrelevant sonics, an odd mix of cartoonish immediacy and tired youth-cult ideas that would be the perfect soundtrack to Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie: The Movie.

The machines on 120 Days II are so holographically vivid that the human element can't help but seem wan.

It’s pointedly brief--11 songs, 39 minutes and with a scope every bit as limited.

For all that the band straddles the worlds of dance and guitars, the arrangements on Battle Lines are incredibly tame, as if the duo mistakenly joined the blandest of electronics with the politest of indie rock.

It was a mistake for VHS or Beta to subjugate their dance beat into a perfunctory structure for the guitars to smash against; the riffs sound like they're there for their own sake, biding their time and waiting for a moment of catchiness that never really arrives.

Universal Mind Control is a painful misstep from a talented rapper who's decided to be as nasty as he wants to be--which turns out to be much, much nastier than we'd like.

Positively pillaging Oasis and The Stone Roses (whom Oasis pillaged in the first place), Johnny Marr + The Healers' mediocre debut is a defeated regurgitation of danceable Britpop and Madchester traditions that, in its best moments, recalls a second-rate... Soup Dragons.

Codename: Rondo sounds like two people doing the least amount of work possible before something can be considered a "song."

Is the band's self-titled album under the new moniker a brave change-up? Sure. Is it any good? Not even a little.

Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. It’s like you drank a bunch of cough syrup and went to Live Aid: The Vatican.

At its best, its songs are serviceable bangers to nod off in the club to; at its worst, it’s a collection of strange admissions that, thanks to Nav’s affinity for taking himself too seriously, come off cringe-worthy.

[“Everything Good, Everything Right” is] a high point on an otherwise confused album that knows what it’s good at and what it’s not, and yet still chugs on anyway.

Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums.

Crafting art-house meanderings that rock turns out to be the easy part. It's sticking the landing that's hard, and no matter how much D. Rider twists, turns and tumbles in midair, they're just not there yet.

Swept up in maudlin strings and chintzy brass, Ashcroft blurs his anguished syllables like Tom Petty doing Bob Dylan, embraces U2-jerkoff bombast, and follows his idiosyncratically generic muse into uncharted depths. Keys to the World is as hilariously indulgent as "Trapped in the Closet", if vastly less self-aware; it's also a more laughable satire of contemporary music than Bang Bang Rock 'n' Roll, though less durable and totally accidental.

Sounds From Nowheresville makes me want to buy chocolate, try on clothes, take a holiday--anything but listen to this record.

Neither off-putting nor engaging, Client's debut occupies a rather uninteresting place in electropop's soft middle.

It all sounds so serious without any real reason for it.

For 28 tracks Van discusses hidden cabals of dangerous media types so frequently that it verges on a convoluted concept record.

It's awkward to witness such a gloriously thuggish monster vainly attempt the rope-a-dope.

New Glow may be Matt & Kim’s most polished album, but their songwriting has never been more amateurish.

Though much of Driving a Million rides along on a similar, slightly heavy new wave pop groove like "Neon Tom," it's the subtle lapses into more diverse sounds that are perhaps the record's most welcome aspect.

There is an uncanny, even hollow air to the album. It can feel a bit like watching a Super Bowl commercial: the budget is all there on the screen, the lighting and set dressing and sound design just so, but you can’t shake the nagging sense that there is no center, just a clot of references without a referent.

The idea that a producer of his caliber can’t put together something resembling a likeable LP-- particularly in light of his endlessly amusing Gangsta Grillz mixtape, In My Mind: The Prequel-- is insane. Here, he’s shot himself in the foot. Where the mixtape exploded with enthusiasm and wit, In My Mind the album is corroded and ineffectual. Worse, it’s predictable.

This is a guy that more than understands the music he's goofing on-- he worships it.

It's all pretty silly stuff, but if nothing else, it manages to establish Flickerstick as a frontrunner for the Varsity Blues II soundtrack.

'Relator' aside, there's little about this duo's chemistry that lives up to Matt and Kim, let alone Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.

What matters most is, with Monochrome, Helmet is back to doing what they do best.

Everything I Thought It Was brims with a misplaced confidence that can only be described as Timberlakean, laboring for such a long, long runtime under the misapprehension that a risk-averse mop bucket of last decade’s trending sounds is gonna hit through the sheer force of its performer’s waning charisma.

This album, barely over half an hour in length, bears the hallmarks of a barrel- scraping reissue program.

On his lonesome Anderson is oppressively unimaginative.

To say that the album is over-produced is an understatement; you could bounce a quarter off of most of these songs.

Maybe Funstyle will be liberating for her; maybe, as with Self Portrait, her deck-clearing exercise will let her shake off aspects of the way she's understood that she finds burdensome. At the very least, it's a shrewd way to lower expectations. After this, whatever she does next can only be a pleasant surprise.

Easy to dismiss, smirk at, or even hate on the fist listen, nine out of The Snare's ten tracks are grind-and-pause, semi-sultry pairings of exotic keyboard settings and mid-tech beats that exploit their refrains and come weirdly close to the patterns of 'risqué' after-dinner radio pop circa 1999-present.

At times it’s almost impressive how long an album called Beerbongs & Bentleys can go without cracking a smile. It is more assured and impressive than its predecessor, Stoney, but it’s also more exhausting.

[A] crushing bore of a detour.

Too many songs feel like items on a checklist. The mandatory back-and-forth with Lil Baby proves their chemistry hasn’t waned, but the formula to their joint tracks is due for an update.

The only moments where Wayne sounds marginally interested in his own music come when he veers furthest away from rap.

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.

More so than the album's overall malaise and inconsistency, it's this ridiculous (and in some cases, offensive) attempt at "edginess" that's most off-putting.

Musically, it’s unfulfilling, lacking standout melodies or exciting rhythms. The sound of Come Home the Kids Miss You, in turn, is about as sophisticated and interesting as a Daniel Arsham sculpture, neat at a glance but vapid upon any extended interrogation.

She comes across like a severely dumbed-down Lily Allen at best, and at worst she seems like someone you would want to root against in a televised singing competition

Ashcroft always fares best when he sounds like he’s addressing another person in an intimate exchange rather than megaphoning the entire human race, and there are moments on These People where he reconnects with the steely-eyed conviction and restlessness that fueled his best songs.

Plays Music offers up breezy, instrumental jazz-rock that seems to be little more than the reheated leftovers of Tortoise's TNT, The Sea and Cake's The Fawn, Dave Pajo's Aerial M debut, and occasionally, Gastr del Sol's Camofleur.

Despite attempts at lyrical heft detailing a too-vague sexual awakening ("Sebastian") and an encomium for a friend ("Ghost Bike"), Ulicny undermines himself on a second-by-second basis by finding no lyric that can't be subjected to at least six different forms of contortion regardless of its content.

This is some outlandish stuff, to be sure, but in a sense-of-adventure kind of way that feels in keeping with the vague, in-title-only themes of futurism and space travel that Orbits centers around.

Though We Are Only What We Feel plods through similar tempos and uniform textures, Wäppling sings with enough character to keep the record from fading into the background.

In between bursts of inspiration, Ardipithecus is largely a record of growing pains.

The Vines earn real damnation as Winning Days comes to a close. However boring and harmlessly vapid the first ten tracks are, "F.T.W." obliterates any possibility of forgiving them.

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.

What puts listeners in a difficult spot is that, no matter how infuriating it gets, Matricidal Sons of Bitches is clearly the product of serious compositional intention; it's not an accidental mess.

Yachty has definitely improved as a technician, making his raps more mobile and structurally sound, but most times the rhymes pass by as if on a conveyor belt. They seemingly have the same function, and the same constructions, and once they happen they’re forgotten almost instantly.

Songs feel simultaneously tossed off and over-considered; there are perhaps two passages across C6’s 67 minutes that scan as anything other than the product of a hyper-competent professional in need of serious creative guidance. It would be a disaster if any of it mattered.

Here, they shuffle through one stylistic experiment after another. The fingerprint on the album's cover art seems a little ironic, since for the first time, the Magic Numbers seem hard to identify.

While the long tracklist and equally protracted verses make for an exhausting listen, there are rewards for those that endure.

It's not until the last few tracks that Harry finds her best collaborator--naturally, it's former Blondie bandmate and paramour Chris Stein.

At the outset, This Machine seems like an apt title for a record that surges forth with a wiry, motorik momentum; by the end, it becomes an all-too-fitting descriptor of a band going through the motions.

A mess of an album.

It goes through your system like a juice cleanse—quick and optimized, but ultimately meant for the toilet.

The production of The Bridge sounds like it came out of an extended catch-up session, the work of a man best accustomed to the breakbeat era's techniques trying his hand at the last ten years' worth of club-rap digitalism.

Unfortunately, the frontman's crazed growl dashes any nuanced developments the band has reached in their songwriting, maintaining a grating tone consistently throughout.

The album’s open-door policy helps keep things fresh, and the band sounds more comfortable in their skin than they have since the ’90s. ... Jenkins’ swaggering vocals remain an acquired taste.

Green's self-consciously dweeby vocals hang his off-kilter lyrics like a doomed curveball.

This album feels like the rarest kind of unintentional parody, so ridiculous and transparent in its intent that I really get a kick out of it. But the truth is that none of Monica’s parodic elements would matter that much if the music felt like a genuine experiment rather than a self-serving, big-budget attempt to deepen his image.

If adult critics really loved this stuff, the Xanarchy team would no doubt feel they’d made a wrong turn somewhere. It’s punk, or it’s the thing people who don’t really know what “punk” means call “punk,” or it’s a dog whistle meant to sail over the heads of the the elderly (i.e. anyone over 24).

4/876 is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises.

Elixer runs the gamut of bland-but-classy R&B, from antiseptic slow jams to rote dance-pop, slick as you'd expect and completely failing to suggest what bunched Prince's panties when he initially discovered Valente.

Despite the attempts to recreate the dense power chords and pained whines that made Saves the Day emo poster boys, the formula fails when applied through Conley’s rose-colored vision of his own glory days.

Neither here nor there, the funklesss would-be dancefloor fodder of P.D.A. frankly comes off D.O.A.

Radio 4 can be commended for at least trying to move past the purposeful lo-fi of Gotham! and into fresher territory, but there's no bell or whistle in the world that could energize the utterly impotent songs at the core of Stealing of a Nation.

The King & I is simultaneously too stingy and too indiscriminate with its star attraction, denying fans new verses yet projecting his hologram raps over every song until the reflexive thrill of hearing one of rap’s greatest voices is extinguished.

The dizzying list of production credits somehow results in a flattened terrain where stock, hyper-efficient rage and trap beats drone in the background, helping to ensure that the few opportunities for Sheck Wes and SoFaygo to do Opium-karaoke are wholly unremarkable.

Neither stale tribute nor sloppy lovefest, Headspace aims for simple fun and hits it square, like a T-16 targeting womp rats back on Tatooine.

The elements are there—the R&B-inflected singing (though Bieber’s comes out more like R&B-affected), guitars so bleary they sound hungover from last night, lite-rock keyboards, little wild squiggle fills—but the dynamism has been flattened, perhaps by other collaborators.

If it seems unfair to judge Hyperion’s weaknesses against the work of Lévy’s supposed peers, it’s equally frustrating that he hasn’t yet given us a real idea of who he is as an artist.

Beyond the Neighbourhood is the sonic equivalent of a beautiful coffin.

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.

While these songs can occasionally find that perfect balance of catchiness, sweetly familiar sentiments, and home-recorded charm, there a few too many lemons for this to be a record worthy of vibing out.

If you listen to EA2 it seems like the goal isn’t for the album to be divisive or even loved—just for it not to be hated.

Jordi bounces between smeary electropop haze, wobbles of tropical house, a forgettable Stevie Nicks appearance. It’s too cluttered to sink into, too limp for catharsis.

Instead of a musical or narrative point of view, Boone relies on speaking his truth, a songwriting axiom that doesn’t take into account whether someone’s truth is fundamentally boring or has been rendered in pop music countless times before.

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

I highly recommend that Animal Collective fans seek out the re-reversed copies of Pullhair Rubeye [available illegally on the Internet]. They are enjoyable.... But then there's, you know, the thing that sits on store shelves and costs money. And that version of Pullhair Rubeye is remarkably dull.

Double Bubble is neither deep or dense enough for electronic connoisseurs, nor is it brash enough to spawn another "Connected" with kids sprung off of Justice or Hot Chip.

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.

If Moby has accomplished anything with Hotel, it's that he may have become the rare musical artist equally despised by both of modern music criticism's warring camps.

But ultimately, Margins feels like an album of songs that needed to be exorcised more than shared.

PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO succeeds, much like its predecessor, largely thanks to Brathwaite's aptitude for mood.

Nearly everything he raps on Memories Don’t Die is something you’ve heard before, performed more ably elsewhere, and the few lines that aren’t are unbelievably simple-minded or straight-up witless.

Drama in music works perfectly fine in mediated, tactical doses, but for Tourist, the stakes are unrealistically high.

It’s a long slog to get to “Guilty Conscience 2,” but there are moments of genuine inspiration along the way.

Pull the Pin might be going for the uncluttered "production" of older Rick Rubin, but instead it cops the sterility of newer Rick Rubin, each song lumbering on a chassis of waterlogged tempo and Jones' wooden melodies, begging for just about anything to grab you.

Yes, these are songs, supposed expressions of a character, but they are as artless, discursive, and slapdash as a to-do list or a diary entry; the central character seems to be only a deep sense of self-pity in need of external validation.