So the production is great, the songbook is varied, and the band is tighter and more ambitious than ever-- the only problem with Louden Up Now is the unfortunate paucity of ideas within the songs themselves.

A madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and The Life of Pablo has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography. Somehow, it comes off as both his most labored-over and unfinished album, full of asterisks and corrections and footnotes.

Folding Time serves as a stopgap for an aging sound without a firm grasp on its bearings. Should Sepalcure continue writing from their fixed point, they'll have to project further and further from its origin.

Weaves’ ambitious song structures used to be too large to wrangle. With Wide Open, they realize the straightforward tentpoles of pop may suit them after all.

Remixes may dominate the 24-track collection, but the group’s original work wins out in spirit.

It’s classic Hornsby: both squirrely and crowd-pleasing, weirder than you’d expect but as traditionally, autobiographically confessional as he’s ever allowed himself.

Lacking the dynamic cohesion that made its predecessor more than the sum of its tracklist, it feels like merely a collection of random tracks, which, despite their common themes, begin to sound haphazard in their arrangements and sequencing.

Cohen will never be able to escape the context surrounding Bloom Forever, but he refuses to let himself be defined by tragedy. His bold, distinctive debut album stands a million miles from the celebrity circus, and will endure far longer than mawkish titillation.

Across the album, Hynes sings, writes, produces, and plays guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, synths. But this is hardly a solo act. In fact, one of the record's greatest strengths lies in its pitch-perfect deployment of guests.

If the sentiments are tough, the music itself is tender, borrowing from Belle & Sebastian and Brill Building pop to create a sound that is both pastoral and urbane, straightforward yet sophisticated.

Martinez may not be able to right the wrongs of the past, but he does Palacio's legacy proud on Laru Beya. And by bringing this music to a world stage, he may also help secure his people's cultural future.

Throughout it all, his arrangements burst with a vitality that belies their modest construction. The sounds may be humble, not that much more hi-fi than his early demos, but their vision of funk as lifeblood is never anything less than radiant.

Certainly Cohen’s music is serious and often melancholy. But there’s a lot of joy in the way her songs illustrate and embody her thoughtful verse.

Whether it was intended or not, White's personality sometimes overwhelms, and makes Consolers sound like a little sibling to Icky Thump--a little less unique, certainly, but another loose, comfortable affirmation of what they do well.

Free Reign II is precisely the sort of risky, rejuvenating album Clinic needed at this point in their career, one that audaciously upends the perception that this band just releases the same album over and over.

A little more editing and pacing might have made the whole album like this, but given enough time, Triangle has moments of clarity to be found.

The resulting sound feels new, to be sure, but mostly in the sense that it’s not fully ripe. Though challenging and, in its best moments, quite exciting, Music for the Long Emergency ultimately resembles a first draft. Its most compelling ideas are knotted up with its worst, and the whole thing could use a thorough edit.

If you have absolutely nowhere to go in the near future, Bitchitronics will make an excellent travel companion.

Like its older sibling, the songs on Cistern exist independently of each other. The nine tracks feel connected only by the fact that they share the same space on record, more like a collection of long takes rather than a movie.

The gripping parts of Legends Never Die come when Juice is speaking from the heart.

Too mushy and indistinguishable to wallop you in the gut and too cheesy to be taken seriously, the album feels, at its worst, like a series of power ballads with the choruses ripped out.

Front Parlour Ballads offers the traditional Thompson mix of lush folk beauty and cruel knife-twisting lyrics.

[The songs] are linked by, of all things, an evangelical urgency: McBean self-consciously blends Satan-fearing Louvin Brothers sentiments with the Velvet Underground's narco-messianism and heavy doses of the 1970s California Jesus Movement's rhetoric/vibe.

ove Lo’s songwriting is unsubtle but not uncomplicated, and while her scenes are well-worn in pop music—bodies tangled in purple lights, morning sun stabbing at hangovers—her best tracks are both blunt and polished enough to sound original. At its worst, the album can slump into fizzy banalities.

Without a lyric sheet on hand, you can still enjoy the pure animality of Mahony’s voice. You’ll only catch an actual word here and there, but her psychodramatic tantrums—imagine Miss Piggy going apeshit on Maury—are a delight in and of themselves.

A homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity.

Tahoe only starts to perk up and run counter to expectations with “MMXIX,” an epic, nine-minute track that utilizes all manner of ambient tropes and then upends them.

Write About Love is a grower -- the sort of record you need to play repeatedly, listening to how it fits together, before it can really ingratiate itself.