In Spektor’s catalogue, Remember Us to Life balances comfort food for Spektor fans with the maturity and wisdom you'd expect from a singer-songwriter passing the 15th year of her career.

It’s as if the goal of Honestly, Nevermind is anonymity—inoffensively, sort of fun music that simmers in the background all summer and beyond.

For all the good-natured vibes this record gives off, it's hard to ignore that Do Things is also a limited collection. It's easy to suspect Dent May's ambitions are as simple as to craft a record that finds itself endlessly stuffed into car stereos this summer.

Too often Mowgli feels like a series of exercises, its mantra-like repetitions eventually rendering themselves somewhat directionless. Other times, things simply don't pan out at all.

One can imagine the project’s subject would have ultimately preferred the more understated tracks, concerted in their muted menace--focused on the task of creating a cinematic impression of the unknowable.

The album’s relaxed charm makes it an easy, endearing listen, but some of its collaborations don’t transcend their novelty.

None of the songs on Shadow of the Sun sound new, but the familiar sounds create an atmosphere of safety that allows the more unexpected elements of the record all the more noteworthy.

It’s telling that the Unsemble grip hardest when they’re hewing closely to their inspirations--as well as the bands from which they sprang.

This obsession with connecting and disappearing in rapid succession is fitting for a record that finds Purity Ring trying to stake their claim at pop's center but ultimately retreating within themselves.

White People, for all its ambitions, fails to coalesce.

Although Michael is likely destined to end up a minor effort in Bundick’s expanding catalogue, his talent and radiant passion for new musical ideas and a wide breadth of sounds render the album a worthwhile effort for even casual listeners.

These 10 tracks refine RBCF’s formidable strafing abilities. They roll. They’re feverish. They also coast. ... RBCF get in trouble, however, when they want us to pay attention to words and such. This is more of a problem on the material sung by White, responsible for the this-is-pop moments that require a slight deceleration.

Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will--doesn't change the pattern Mogwai have set for themselves on recent, often middling, releases: There are some anthemic guitar blasts, some prettily drifting comedowns, and one or two vocal tracks.

B&C aren’t at that level [Foo Fighters, Deftones, Brand New or Thursday], but considering the leap they’ve made from their pedestrian debut Separation, The Things We Think We’re Missing serves notice that we shouldn't be surprised if they get there.

The low ebbs detract from an album that’s otherwise difficult to resist bouncing to.

Destruction In Yr Soul isn't strikingly original, but it is heartfelt and comforting, and there is plenty of starlit sky here to stretch out beneath for those in search of it.

Though Salutations is one of Oberst’s most demanding albums, it’s also one of his least ambitious, even before taking these new arrangements into account.

Far from aiming for some grand unified statement, The Mountain Will Fall feels a lot more like a DJ set--a curated grab bag of ideas that overlap and collide, sometimes in unexpected ways.

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.

Off record, the band’s ideas about getting free are much more urgent, inventive, and contemporary than those psych clichés. Sadly, the band's stylistic conservatism has such a blurring effect on their records that any three tracks contain its total rewards.

The back half picks up where the debut left off, full of inspired pieces of paranoia-inducing industrial guitar noise and moribund pop textures--it too often seems like a misguided attempt to connect dots for the listener.

Ultimately, 1000 Palms sounds like emotional throat-clearing, the transitional sound of a band finding their bearings, resetting their dials, and getting back on their feet in the wake of a lot of personal and professional turmoil.

Bigger Than Life takes Black Marble aboveground, where some songs bloom, while others struggle to adjust to the daylight after so long in the shadows.

Long Island probably isn't going to win any new fans for Endless Boogie, but their strengths are on display regardless.

It’s an album that feels less like a roving party than a backyard BBQ, and the music seems designed to fade pleasingly into its surroundings. Such an anodyne approach has its appeal yet it’s strange that a record from a singer/songwriter as ambitious as M.C. Taylor equates optimism with simplicity.

Even when Vestiges & Claws exudes strain, González never gives the impression of truly challenging himself.

Restless Ones establishes Heartless Bastards as a straightforward arena-rock band, one that's grown more refined with time.

Doubled Exposure is a fun, chewy listen as it spins, but there’s also nothing too sticky about it.

With his wry charm absent, the album ultimately shows only a partial picture of Jeff Tweedy as a solo artist.

What Pharoahe Monch is doing may not be as vitally important as it once was, but it still can feel surprisingly vital.

Projector is best appreciated not as the work of post-punk’s resurrectors but its cocky, charismatic trust fund kids: unconcerned with the legitimacy of their inheritance and confident that there’s no way they can fail.

The best songs on Profound Mysteries operate within those comfort zones [midtempo, instrumental tracks], making it more of a return to form than even The Inevitable End, but Röyksopp still trip themselves up.

It is hard to parse all that's disparate here, and in searching for its most personal form, Son Lux unwittingly dipped into the uncanny valley of digital music trying to become human--something a little too perfect to believe.

The Coast is Never Clear sounds a lot like its predecessor, but it lacks the originality and heartfelt delivery that won When Your Heartstrings Break a constant presence in so many disc players a couple summers back.

The real difficulty lies in the fact that even if this is the most catastrophic heartbreak that’s ever happened to Herring, the band is content to write essentially some version of the same songs they’ve been writing for the past decade. They are good songs, but it’s almost impossible to draw any deeper meaning from Herring’s writing while it seems like the sequel of a sequel of a sequel.

A collection of mosh-pit conductors, crowded songs, and fleeting moments of delicacy. Outside of the clear-eyed admissions of Abstract, the vocalists often get swallowed in the heavy mix, making the absence of Vann, their sharpest MC on past releases, noticeable.

Their penchant to recreate the music they love leaves little room for innovation, and ultimately the album has the freshness of an unearthed time capsule.

Early fans of those raw recordings may be less than happy that she's given into the customary tropes of bubblegum pop. And Cara herself sounds a little unsure about leaving behind the walls she knew so well for ones that may end up holding her back.

Considering the pedigree of its personnel, Radical Optimism is oddly incoherent. The absence of Future Nostalgia’s many topline writers is notable both in the lack of ironclad melodies and unfamiliarity with how to handle Lipa’s vocal weaponry.

Nothing here feels like soapboxing; instead, the lyrics are subtle and poignant, with as much emphasis on storytelling as dissent.

It's a decidedly bummer affair, and even though the aggressive tempos suggest they're willing to fight against the crushing weight of existence, there's no relief to be found anywhere in Dartnall's lyrics--not in material goods, not in your fellow man, and certainly not in romance.

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

Move Way, dBridge's new EP and his first for the evergreen R&S label, puts a strong focus on his efforts to maintain the structural integrity and rhythmic impact of drum and bass while pushing its forms outward from the template-driven repetition he's spent his post-Bad Company career trying to counterbalance.

Nights Out may turn in a little too early, but for about three songs, it wrests synth pop supremacy from Metronomy's many competitors.

While better than some of their previous releases, One Time Bells still isn't a mind-blowing album.

Aided by its dynamic pop-punk flourishes, Trauma Factory glows with earnestness and demonstrates all the good that can come from embracing pain.

Frenetic, mercurial, and of wildly variable listenability, theFREEHoudini feels like a retrospective and a retrenchment of forces, but it also serves as yet another step in Anticon's breathless, never-ending push forward.

Tortured Poets’ extended Anthology edition runs over two hours, and even in the abridged version, its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level, where Swift’s writing is, at best, playfully unbridled and, at worst, conspicuously wanting for an editor.

It takes something else, something that can’t be explained by a mission statement. For a band so well-loved for writing from their heart, it sounds like they got stuck in their head.

These new songs are energizing for González, but they lack that sense of genuine discovery, of a songwriter being lifted away from his usual comforts. Instead of letting the drum machine reshape his songwriting, he mostly uses it as a metronome.

If this is an album about growth and greatness, then it’s the kind you see depicted in charts on an end-of-year earnings report. It is precision engineered to stream big, and all the duller for it.

The rest of the record isn’t as brassy as "Foreign Object", an obvious crowd-pleaser, but it’s occasionally as bold.

What Fantasy is missing isn’t any one synth preset, or a cultural reference for the next season of Stranger Things to popularize. It just lacks urgency.

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.

If Durand Jones & the Indications was the party, their second album and first since signing to Dead Oceans, American Love Call, is the slow dance.

Too often the rawk they bring feels terribly labored.

Lindstrøm may have timed these tracks to fit on a vinyl record, another sign of putting material concerns over creative vision, but there’s a good 15 minutes of so of beauty within those grooves that just might make a believer out of you.

For all its blatantly ill-conceived moments, there's something charming about the sheer audacity of Derulo's often bizarre choices. Even when it falls flat, there is character here.

Blueprint can be so effective when he's down to earth, it's a shame he feels the need to step up on a soapbox.

Angel Guts is yet another strong, occasionally frustrating record restrained by Stewart’s consistency.

Her ambitions are bold, but the album has a sense of polished remove that prevents it from scaling real emotional heights.

Some tracks are more compelling than others, but that’s to be expected when an artist writes by throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. The melodies on Hammond’s album are in ample supply; it’s the urge to self-edit that’s taken a breather.

This uneven album is mostly a vehicle for “Legos (for Terry)”, an accomplishment that’s not only worth hearing but good enough to leave you hoping for more like it, too.

Because she never fully commits to one mood or genre, it is difficult to feel fully immersed. Gika’s songwriting is sometimes too vague to resonate emotionally, and her delivery, though gorgeous, never feels fully unencumbered.

While it showcases the breadth and the peaks of her capabilities, My 21st Century Blues lacks a clear thematic throughline.

"Why Did You Leave Me' and 'Can't Say Goodbye' are some grown-up songs, and Snoop probably has a whole album of them somewhere in him. But as long as the pothead-pimp shtick keeps selling, we'll probably never hear it.

While the productions are animated and spacious, creating openings for his jam-packed phrases, the sound doesn’t take the full step forward that would help spotlight and redefine Seattle rap.

NYC, Hell 3:00 AM isn’t going to be your thing if you’re on the hunt for the next edgy crooner about to blow up--you’re only going to hear it in DJ sets if the DJ is extremely brave or suicidal or both. But if what you’re looking for is an experience, one that can offer something extremely rare and powerful, if not exactly fun, then this is it.

So though Lungu Boy will deliver on Asake fans’ expectations, what’s missing is something more personal.

While Funplex's super-sized dance pop can't quite compare with the band's best moments, there's plenty of residual B-52's-ness to satiate longtime fans.

There’s an album’s worth of tracks here that put Clavish head and shoulders above his peers, which only makes the other album’s worth of misfires more disappointing for their inclusion.

The songs on Offering are fuller and brighter than they’ve ever been, leaving behind sinister samples and moribund imagery and making good on the promise of uptempo revelry that “Go Outside” offered.

While four songs clocking in at 14 minutes is slight by design, Ariel is wise to accentuate Mering’s voice.

Unfortunately, The Art of Hustle is mostly forgettable as a major-label rap record, but it bears out a teachable truth about Gotti's career: sometimes showing up is more than half the battle.

The album needs the percussive abrasion of his voice, and digging into some of the more typical slabs of Death Grips' instrumental tendencies doesn't unearth much more than a pretty solid workout soundtrack.

Ultimately, though, Pressure Machine rarely escapes Flowers’ Brandon Flowers-ness: try as he might—and you do get the sense that he’s trying so, so hard—his usual wide-tipped brush can’t do justice to what should be finely detailed scenes.

Halstead's knack for stunning arrangements is in top form on Spoon & Rafter, and in this capacity, his music remains compelling, if no more or less than on any of his previous trilogy of Mojave 3 releases.

Lyrics aside, there's nothing distinctly unappealing or half-assed about this album.... It just feels awfully familiar.

He sounded breezy and at ease [on 2014's "Good Kisser"], finally confident enough to date women his age. So it’s a little disappointing that on Hard II Love, Usher’s eighth studio album, he hasn’t managed to hang onto that effortlessness. But there’s plenty to like, starting with his voice, which sounds better than ever.

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

The four-track fidelity and crowded mix don't give her the space to fully command your attention as she does in concert.

Songs this bitter demand catharsis, but nestled in its pop cocoon, that side of Hatfield's story instead gets stifled by the soft bomb approach when what you really want is for the singer, once and for all, to explode in rage and break something.

Coming on the heels of the beef, though, the regionality of the album seems more like an elaborate gotcha to Drake rather than a musical pivot sparked out of passion. That missing spirit is in the production, too clean and synthetic.

Ali's focus on his inner landscape is the rapper's greatest asset and his biggest liability.

The guests regularly outshine the hosts, but each has a variation on the sort of rugged, gruff flow that doesn't leave Erick or Parrish gasping.

Deep Fantasy captured the ferocity of an absurdly tight band playing together in a room, thrashing against the walls and playing off each other’s anger. That ferocity has faded. By contrast, Premonition sounds like talented professionals working remotely.

Fascinating as it is to hear the full text of these articles aloud, the prose doesn’t have quite the same supple musicality as previous Richter sources like Franz Kafka’s journals or the letters of Virginia Woolf. After a few times through, the primary text of Voices starts to take on the rigidity of an employee conduct handbook from HR.

McCauley’s raspy crow often overwhelms the more delicate material, but throughout both albums, the band varies its rhythms and arrangements with surprising agility.

The 22-20s evade most of the typical British rock potholes (i.e. histrionics, pretentiousness, unapologetic 60s-aping, among others), and can actually be taken at face value.

Instead of catering to fans of that slow, sultry earlier work, she's brought in old and new songwriting partners to help her craft a fast-paced, upbeat pop album.

The Strange Boys have proved to be great attention-grabbers but seem a little lost when things get too quiet.

She hasn’t yet sorted out the particular combination of influences that fit her strengths, and few of the songs’ melodies are compelling enough to overcome the album’s strangely stale take on alternative pop.

He struggles to let his guard down, and ironically, operates best when he keeps it up. Tiller comes off not as the passionate lover, but as the sappy everyman—too bland and full of tropes to be the new hero pouring his heart out in a thunderstorm.

To make the personal sound universal is no small feat, but there’s a fine line between universality and sounding like your songs could be anybody’s.

Heard as individually and spaced many months apart, the best tracks here were diamond-hard realizations of very specific sonic ideas; placed on an album alongside songs that use similar ingredients but are markedly inferior, they rattle around in the can, perfect objects in search of the right container.

Though the album doesn't work in many places, it's a laudable attempt to mix together two styles which are, at first appearance, utterly alien to one another.

Make no mistake, the record is extremely endearing and flawlessly constructed-- it's just hard to love an album that has a dazzling surface and not much underneath.

If the younger Black Francis might have transformed a cover of the Flying Burrito Brothers' "Wheels" into a cool surf epic rather than a Velvet Underground-inspired reconstruction, the elder delivers an intriguing mix of vitality and cool detachment. It's easy to take those seemingly at-odds qualities for granted, but here Black Francis sounds not just comfortable with that aesthetic but surprisingly and paradoxically in control of it as well.