All Encores takes a step backward [from 208's All Melody], toward a simpler, sparer sound. In essence, it represents a set of rough drafts, avenues abandoned as All Melody assumed its final form.

Much of Birthmarks is catchy enough to get stuck in your head, if not necessarily memorable enough to stay there.

He is so compelling when he digs deeper into his psyche this way, providing more than superficiality, but there aren’t enough of these moments to sustain Issa Album, which is as basic as its title.

Fatherland is a significantly simplified effort, a work of gentle, singer-songwriter consideration largely haunted by lost loves rendered as exactingly as still lifes.

Ritual holds down his rock-star impulses and ties the album to a specific time and place, settling for the merely pretty instead of the all-consuming. Richly textured and carefully composed, Ritual is an impressive composition, but for Hopkins it feels rote.

Michael is an origin story that works best when it examines how worshiping at the altars of sex, money, and Jesus created the man we know today. But when he petulantly doubles down on critiques of his public persona and status as a Black multi-millionaire, the album is harder to stomach.

[Anderson and O'Malley] find a middle ground of compromise that steers safely away from the frisson of conflict. At least they sound good doing it.

An album with more than two dozen credited producers really ought to have more surprises than this.

He runs into trouble when he loses the self-awareness of it all. ... Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams finds its true comfort zone when it is simply sweet.

It may not go down as one of Neil’s definitive works, but Earth achieves something Young hasn’t been able to accomplish on record in a while: he's made an album worth spending some time with.

About half of it works reasonably well, though the end result is somehow closer to Low-era Bowie or Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain than anything truly contemporary or avant-garde.

For the most part, these covers are faithful, fine-tuned, and sound great. No track on Candid warps its original in a particularly wild or ambitious way; Whitney are more concerned with nailing these takes respectfully than fundamentally reimagining them.

While My Dear Melancholy, makes for a slight curio in the Weeknd’s discography, it also feels like an unnecessary step backwards following the down-for-whatever approach of his recent work. There’s nothing wrong with reflecting on the past, but sometimes it’s better to just leave it there.

SNOOP CUBE 40 $HORT is merely a good album on its own merits, which is not shocking at all to anyone who’s followed these rappers in their resting-on-laurels decades.

On his own, he’s not a particularly compelling songwriter. The album aspires to cult-classic obscurity and lands in the realm of the tolerably generic.

All around, Blockhead's first foray into solo sound collage is far from bad, but it rarely steals the show the way his rapper-associated work tends to.

The album tries to conjure the anchorlessness of travel, but instead it sounds oddly weightless, floating by pleasantly but unobtrusively and rarely demanding your attention.

When Silkjær traces his vocals over the lead guitars, it’s enough to make “Uncombed Hair” and “Pills” stick. Otherwise, A Youthful Dream can only push through its weaker melodies and reverb through self-will.

Sonik Kicks is a good record, but it doesn't have the songwriting depth and range of its two predecessors, and as admirable as it is that Weller is still playing with his formula and searching for something new to do with it, the electronics here do the songs few favors.

While Ecstasy is essentially a concept album about the fantasies and realities of love and family, it includes as much sex, drugs, and rock n' roll culture as any of Reed's earlier work.

Sometimes the fervor gets to be too much for them: the grating but mercifully brief "Blood for You" is little more than the junkyard clang of the rhythm section and Sollee's stuck-pig shout, and the verses "Cradle on Fire" seem to get away from Sollee, who loses the melody somewhere in the back of his throat. But there's few moments when they don't seem to be throwing everything they've got into these performances, and that furious intensity drives them past both rough patches and easy comparisons.

The opener is as intriguing as it is unexpected. It's just too bad, then, that the rest of the album continues to ask similar questions, but never again with the same vigor or innovation.

The Stimulus Package would work better as an album if Free had a little more help directing his skills, or if he just decided to rap hard on every song instead of tying himself to concepts. But even the goofiest songs here are still fun listens, and a few tracks come close to capturing his old brilliance.

With Tasty, Kelis has left the roller-rink, returned from outer space, and she's back on her own two feet on terra firma-- unfortunately.

Its twelve songs–the vast majority of which extend well past the five-minute mark–fall into two categories: galloping nods to Ride the Lightning, of which the first disc is primarily composed, and doomier mid-tempo cuts à la Sabbath, which make up the bulk of the second. The LP’s highlights--“Hardwired,” “Moth Into Flame,” “Atlas, Rise!” all fall into the former camp, front-loading the record with fire. The second disc, by contrast, is a slog through nondescript, uniform chug, devoid of dynamics or instrumental nuance.

Everyone on the album sounds engaged and happy to be in the room.

The variety of genres and sounds that emerge within her compositions give Lipstate’s work a multitextured feel, but in moments I found myself wishing for more concision in the way such ideas are digested.

The whole album feels like a good enough time if you throw it on in the background, but as a follow-up to a deeper body of work that rides on fascinating ugliness, why not hope for something that actually commands your attention instead?

Yours Truly is a very safe record. Mostly written by two of R&B's most mawkish hawkers, Babyface and Harmony Samuels, it’s built on cliché and tradition, and written professionally to a fault.

Ferree obviously loves his source material, and the way he weaves in the references throughout is ingenious. But something about the pleasure he takes in his obsession cloisters it away - he can't quite make his subject matter in a way that transcends Bobby Driscoll's life and death.

Wedded to the percussion-and-singer-plus-accompanist format, Barnett sounds marooned. It’s her least interesting album.

Euphoric Recall falters when the band forgets that her voice is the main event. ... Braids may still be searching for a distinct identity. But what Euphoric Recall makes clear is that Standell-Preston knows her voice better than ever before.

The songwriting lives up to the production value, pleasant but lacking much purpose.

Acetone manage to take enough twists and turns on their dusty trail to stave off outright boredom, and they certainly have a talent for doing as much as they can with a fairly limited formula. However, as York Blvd progresses, the album's dreamy torpor becomes stifling, and the songs, while never anything other than pleasant, fail to distinguish themselves from one another.

Despite underwhelming stretches, the album retains enough moments of personality to breathe life into even ordinary lines.

The majority of the tricks, however, come off as cosmetic distractions, attempts to hide that Hawkins' songwriting hasn't grown since Permission to Land.

No single passage lasts very long, which gives even the prettier moments an unstable feeling, like everything might at any moment crumble into a void of distortion and noise. Throughout, her lyrics are venomous and apocalyptic.

On the plus side of the ledger, you can understand what the hell Oberst is talking about most of the time on Upside Down Mountain, which makes it an immediate improvement over Cassadaga and The People’s Key, two albums that somehow managed to be cryptic and pedantic at the same time.... But elsewhere on Upside Down Mountain, he wields populist observation like a politician, trying to utilize his homespun wisdom from an elevated plane.

Watch Me Dance doesn't reconcile the clash between retro and modernism, but at least it does the past a decent amount of justice.

Sometimes he hits pure signal, and sometimes it’s just background noise as he gets to wherever he’s going next.

Cloudy and labyrinthine at times, airy and placid elsewhere, People cuts a pretty wide swath, an approach that feels a bit more mature and confident than the bending over backwards he sometimes had to do to reach the disparate genres on his earlier solo records.

The intimate yet anthemic closer “Price of a Man” sounds like a full realization of the resonance the band reaches for throughout the album, but most of the preceding songs lack the tension or texture needed to make the payoff feel earned.

[Tormenta's] eccentric angles and willingness to take risks show up the slightly humdrum nature of much of Cracker Island, an album that walks a very thin line between playing to the band’s strengths and relying too heavily on old tricks.

Ghost is nowhere near his best, most consistent, or most durable album, but that's ultimately not even the right way to measure its modest accomplishment. Instead, it's a surprisingly upbeat retirement album, one that never stoops to self-pity and very modestly reminds you of past triumphs.

Overall, White Hot Moon is likely to please existing fans of Pity Sex--its 12 tracks largely find the band continuing to leverage what worked on Feast of Love. That said, White Hot Moon isn’t quite as catchy as that record.

It becomes clear that for a distressingly large chunk of Temporary Pleasures, the duo has forgotten to do much of interest with the backing tracks in favor of roping in a rolodex's worth of singers and rappers and hoping the songs write themselves.

Atlantis strives for a patchwork cohesiveness, with equal parts neo-soul, reggae, rap, and rock, bound by a vaguely spiritual message and partially elaborated water-related extended metaphor.

10 tracks of the kind of fierce, instrumental, no-bullshit techno that was as left-field popular in 1988 as 1998 as 2008. It's often witty, with a kind of robots-running-amok charm, and always attention-grabbing, at least in small doses. But friendly it ain't.

Poliça now appear in search of a middle ground that combines their visceral songwriting with Madness’ inventive textures. At their best, these songs offer hints of that forward trajectory.

Living Legend isn't bad, exactly. It's a consistent release with no substantial misfires, full of densely packed verbiage and grand gestures, reminiscent of a time when technique, style, and personality seemed inseparable, interrelated qualities in a rapper's arsenal.

If Bruiser's more straightforward rock turns mostly disappoint (one notable exception: the late-game adrenaline shot "Everybody's Under Your Spell"), the album does find the band showcasing its dynamic range in new and intriguing ways.

In some ways, this feels like a segue, a hint that adult contemporary is the center to which Lovato will ultimately return. But it doesn’t undermine the album’s essential spirit. Planning for forever when every day is a fight—that’s defiance.

The rhythms on HERE represent a departure from her previous efforts and indicate a willingness to experiment with her sound but the lyrics, which rarely betray a sense of adventure, cancel out most of this good work.

Choral sometimes feels staid and a little postcard-y: a pretty gesture that fails to eclipse the experience of actually going somewhere.

Konradsen’s approach skips the groundwork to go for experimentation. It’s folk music untethered from tradition, prioritizing well-crafted production over well-crafted songwriting.

Thing of the Past is a perfectly pleasant, well-produced album that offers an authorized version of what Vetiver fans already unofficially know about the band.

The album tends to get bleached from velvety black to matte beige, all its chrome spikes sanded down to meet public school safety regulations.

Despite its misfires, the ambitious scale of Annual’s song suite is another step forward for a young group evolving at an unnaturally fast rate.

Bainbridge’s production is always tasteful and seldom bad, but is only great when heightened by its guests. On Something like a War, those guests are generally pretty good; sometimes they are very good.

With 12 songs of nearly equal tone, volume, and length, the nearly hour-long As You Please becomes its own endurance test. When As You Please is taken in smaller chunks, the minor variations between the songs where Citizen churn and the ones where they steamroll ever forward become more discernible.

It’s an overridingly pleasant listen, but that pleasantness is too often maintained by featureless production and other manifestations of Misch’s risk-averse instincts.

A collection of balmy dream-pop ballads centering Wolfe’s feathery voice, soft and slow guitar melodies, and spacey synths. It’s striking how conventional it frequently sounds, reminiscent of canonical acts like Beach House.

ENERGY is a manic attempt to relight the fire, as well as a confetti-strewn soundtrack for a world tour that never was.

For YG, an artist we’ve come to expect the unexpected from, someone currently standing at a career-defining intersection, Stay Dangerous is an exercise in predictability.

The gulf between Minaj's public persona and her music here reminds me of the criticism laid at the feet of Lady Gaga -- that for all of her high-culture namedropping, wearable art, and big event videos, Gaga's music rarely reflects the full range of her conceptual constructions.

While his guest vocalists don’t always make the most illuminating guides to Miszczyk’s maze-like terrain—a jumble of non-sequiturs and disconnected images, the lyrics on many songs feel like placeholders for more engaging songwriting—their voices lend texture to his gravelly analog synths, tape-warped effects, and hazy psychedelia, rounding out his retro-futurist universal with a crucial sense of human presence.

For now, Cully's another voice in the crowd in that regard, but his promising talent displayed elsewhere on The New Life suggests that he's one to keep your ears perked up for nonetheless.

Unfortunately, about halfway through the album, the sound wears itself out, as the samey melodies edge towards the too-familiar.

Places Like This proved that Architecture in Helsinki could grow out of their early sound without growing tame, that they could change their voice but keep their charm; Moment Bends too often finds them losing one, the other, or both.

Wolf Parade’s sound was once state of the art, but Thin Mind captures only intermittent reminders of how wild and wonderful their moment was.

While his songwriting remains funny and incisive at 45, ostensibly ballsier numbers like 'Fuckingsong' and 'Angela' veer dangerously close to bar-band boneheadedness.

It’s evident that Walker is talented and brimming with ideas--and there are moments on this record that mark the best music he’s ever made. But he needs to get a better understanding of his strengths if he wants to become more than just another nifty live-guitar throwback.

An acceptably underwhelming, state of the art, guitar-centric pop record.

There are plenty of great tunes here, just not much character. Lollipop's as catchy as your average power-pop record, but still hardly as essential as the band's peaks.

A few awkward moments aside, Fool is at its best when Temple sounds the least like the Here We Go Magic guy; its buoyant, unfussy front half, out of character though it is, is up there with Temple's best work.

The first third of the mix is particularly strong. ... But the back half feels directionless, tugged this way and that across a succession of nervous techno and electro cuts; a shift back toward more atmospheric climes, a few tracks from the end, doesn’t quite gel.

The album preserves their defining qualities: superb lyricism and powerful tension. But it's missing two key elements of Low's last outing. That is, the engaging songs and captivating production.

Hastily assembled, thoughtlessly sequenced minutes of vivid beats and incredible rapping.

Whether you feel Photographing Snowflakes is a true return to form will depend on your reception of its six-minute title track centerpiece, on which Gough drowsily monotones his way through 10 increasingly whimsical verses with no chorus in sight; you'll either find its slow-motion, pedal-steeled sway charmingly wistful or tediously self-satisfied.

He pulls back slightly from the narrative form of writing (sorry, to the “Wet Dreamz” heads but no virginity tales on this one) in favor of more punchlines and wordplay. This switch doesn’t suddenly turn him into a Flint rapper, but it does sound like he’s having fun for once.

Everything could be accepted for what it is and be held to a more manageable standard: how good does a Weezer album have to be before it can be considered actually good? As it turns out, about this good.

The good news about The Digging Remedy is that it’s lovely and listenable for any longtime followers, or for anyone remotely interested in the kind of melodic IDM defined by this piece. However, it is neither an exciting deviation nor a refinement; as such, it’s really just more of an already-good thing, albeit packaged less delicately.

Unfortunately, Hold on Love's more serene moments only weaken the lure of their more intricate and involved songs, ultimately underscoring the group's true strengths.

Anika is shortsighted in the best way: it's a tribute, an exercise, the charming kind.

Whether you end up jumping on board with Performance will depend on the extent of your own predilection for “real music” nostalgia, but those who do find themselves in the passenger seat are likely to have a pretty fun time.

Outside the sagging middle section, the subject matter and production will be nothing new to those familiar with Yela's music; his voice and perspective remain sharp and unique, and he certainly hasn't lost any of his technical skill.

While she can’t always shake the anodyne songwriting that plagued her past work, it’s still her best album to date.

The upside is that it sounds warmly familiar, a reminder of why we missed them in the first place, but the downside is that the album gives very few indications of what Fink and Taylor have learned during their hiatus.

Keepsake is an album filled with small, inspired moments like this, but they don’t add up to much. Sugary but hollow, Keepsake melts like cotton candy, dissolving on impact.

They’ve made a record that captures the tumult of feeling displaced, without abandoning the hyped-up spirit that made them such a spectacle during their party-animal days.

Just as the album looks like it’s about to settle and prosper in this zone, in comes “Piano Interlude,” and the tone of August Greene shifts messily.

The tracks don't sound forced or awkward as they follow well-trod lyrical roads littered with wounded "you"s and "I"s, they sound honest, and an honest love song as always is hard to resist.

It's a placeholder album from a man who has already written 20 songs that are better than the ones here.

This Is Not a Safe Place is not, in the end, the classic Ride Mark 2 release that its first three songs so casually tease. But it has enough joy, verve and invention to suggest that Ride could get there one day.

It's as if a bunch of people have gotten together to try and create a communal experience they don't quite believe in. It's a little depressing here, but elsewhere, the sense of irony serves the album well.

Endless Flowers is Crocodiles' best album and also their most frustrating. They're simply trying to do good enough and no more.

Coldcut acquit themselves well, in the sense that they pull off all of their various generic sleights of hand. But, as per usual, whatever off-hand virtuosity Sound Mirrors displays, there's no center here.

This is all-out openness and clarity, which, for better or for worse, is just a little more grown-up.