It's wide-eyed pop minus the fizz, demonstrating that sizzle can still be subtle.

The arrangements stick to an effective coast-and-surge model of development: The tracks skim low and then tilt upward with the addition of a drum or synth part. It's a stock trick that works well, and Lali Puna use it with unusual tact.

She is at her most winning when she sounds like she is having fun.

Lamb of God's general lack of adventurousness makes them mostly indistinguishable from their heroes and, budget excepted, the bulk of their contemporaries.

Edwards often sounds lost in these new songs.

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.

For all the dust O’Donovan kicks up, the point is neither the destination nor the journey. It’s the leaving.

Not only are there scattered moments of lyrical brilliance on The Hardest Way, but from a producerly standpoint, it's probably Skinner's most accomplished and interesting record yet.

The sounds he pursues here as Blood Orange might be more hip than his work as Lightspeed Champion, but the end results are less satisfying.

Merritt's songs are as delicate and meticulous as porcelain miniatures. Unfortunately, Realism holds more tchotchkes than museum pieces.

A top-heavy album, with his best material-- the more operatic and unconstrained works-- all unfolded within the album's first half hour.

The most disappointing aspect of Probot is that many of the songs sound more like Foo Fighters turned to eleven than actual metal.

If few of these tracks could be called great, there aren't any terrible ones either-- the entire thing floats along nicely on a snug bed of cotton.

Occasionally plodding, and too ruminative by half, Anarchic Breezes is a journey in need of a destination, stuck between staring at the sun and gazing thoughtfully at its own navel.

While bidding for timeless and universal appeal, Finneas sometimes comes up with hollow platitudes. ... Occasionally, he hits on something more stirring, like on “Love Is Pain” when he recalls waking in tears from a dream about his parents’ death—demonstrating the very real consequences of getting older rather than vaguely fretting about them. Finneas’ exercise in restraint has its limits: These subdued songs are surrounded by highly produced, pointedly topical ones.

Tender New Signs makes the listener work a little harder within Tamaryn's framework, but it rewards as much, if not more, than the walls of noise threatening to hem them in just a few years ago.

Such frequent attempts to elevate the banal into the meaningful ultimately keep Release the Stars from achieving any significant momentum and only add weight to the notion that Wainwright's shaky aim-- rather than his lack of talent-- might be his biggest downfall.

It's a success, without doubt.

This is pop music made with synthesizers, but it's not what you'd call normally synth-pop--even when Diamonds builds his minimalist beats into proper grooves, the songs are tense and twitchy.

His music works when every element blends together, and And After That, We Didn't Talk is most interesting when he shares only the most vital details from a moment. It's then that he can wring his experiences for their emotions and convey feelings with more than just words.

There are boring Foo Fighters albums and pretty good ones; C&G is a pretty good one, and in two years there will probably be another.

When, on “The Same Again,” she sings, “Move slow when you speak, so you really get to say what you’re meaning,” sounding as if her face is scrunched into a grimace, she turns a fairly oblique phrase into a razor-sharp barb. These moments, although far between, suggest that A New Reality Mind could have been a more dynamic record if it had zeroed in on Kenney’s intentional, suggestive performances.

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.

Every track here has successful passages, but frustratingly, they too often turn out to be detours or trap doors. In general, the less cluttered and more focused their tracks are, the better they turn out.

At the very least, “End of an Era” is a disturbance to Autodrama’s surface-level shimmer and proof of Puro Instinct making an effort to provide depth.

You half-expect the thing to fall apart under its own weight. But it never does. Mr. Tophat has a gift for this kind of balancing act, and on Trust Me, he manages to share the spotlight with one of his country’s famous pop stars.

Here, Duffy is at their most instrumentally complex and collaboratively generous. The result of this free-for-all cooperation is Hand Habits’ most engrossing project yet.

Too many of these songs are just bluster in search of a purpose. Casualties of the duo’s noncommittal approach, they fall into a thankless gray area, too tinkered-over to function as punk, yet too haphazard to be great pop.