Like all of their work, it’s capable and tuneful and reveals a young band of skilled songwriters that put all their faith in their guitars, even if it’s often hard to pinpoint where their own vision begins and their taste ends.

While Violens may know their sonic touchstones inside and out, they're better sticking to the haircut-obsessed sounds showcased on Amoral's standouts.

There is no pretense in their simple arrangements, but you can hear their motor revving, and you know they'll never run out of gas.

Lewis' crisp alto shines on every track... Unfortunately, the songs (and especially the lyrics) don't give Lewis the support she deserves.

Guv IV is a fun summer spin, but doesn’t coalesce into the memorable statement a pop songwriter like Cook could be capable of.

LETHAL is, in spirit, a passion project: Rico Nasty sounds like she’s having a blast. Yet certain moments seem dropped in, as if to meet a rebellion quota. .... The album has highlights if you know where to look.

The Dr Dee soundtrack is a deeply felt but difficult to love entry into Albarn's entirely singular discography.

For better or for worse, Kind is a Slipknot record, one that has more to offer than expected and is still sometimes frustratingly short-sighted.

TOPS are at their best when they keep digging. Elsewhere on the album, though, they’re just chilling. They’re as despondent and nostalgic as ever, but back to the kind of windswept indie rock that is their trademark.

Some moments on Moonbuilding show the Orb, if not regaining their form, then offering up decent ambient music. But elsewhere they revert back to a formlessness that's devoid of their quirky stoner persona.

The compositions are complex, and so fastidiously arranged that you might get sucked into trying to pick out some kind of flaw. Sometimes it’s a little harder to overlook.

Moosebumps will make aging hip-hop fans very happy. But new listeners are unlikely to come running at the good doctor’s call.

If much of it is merely pretty, this is easily the most diverse and wide-ranging Dirty Three record yet, absolutely the right thing for them to be doing at this time.

The band is, if anything, more confident than ever, but the sound's grandiosity too easily verges on melodrama, a too-bold-to-be-believable misery.

The main issue with Songs is that, for an album of "songs," there are too few pop cuts to work well as a whole. It's more of a pick-and-choose affair where the modern ability to fast-forward to your favorite musical moments, down to the second, is crucial.

“True Love,” “Up,” “Everybody’s Saying That,” and “Love Is Enough” bob to the same Chic formula: skanking guitar, twangy bass, canned strings. It’s a solid formula, but the textural sameness makes more idiosyncratic tracks like “Give Me Your Love” stand out.

Personal-feeling moments are the album’s strongest, and Superstar could use more of them. By clinging to the never-ending blank page of the bit, Rose winds up in shallower waters.

At times Davies matures backward, trading the Kinks' tergiversating sophistication for rash generalization.

Even considering all the high points and raw power, II falters under the weight of the band's ambition.

Like their first two records (2013’s Worse Than Dead and the following year’s The Tyranny Of Will), the band’s latest effort doubles as a vehicle for violent, nihilistic escapism. And it’s a compact one at that, clocking in at 18 tracks in 30 minutes.

This is a bedtime record, in both the complementary and dismissive senses of the word: it invites you to relax and soothes like a warm cup of tea, but can cross the line into powerfully soporific territory.

The shadows its shape casts may not always create flattering silhouettes, but there's both comfort and anticipation to be found in knowing that Silver's constantly tweaking the lighting.

On all of these songs, Nicki is dartboard focused-- she's rapping harder here than on almost anything from Pink Friday... But much of Roman Reloaded sweats with a too-big-to-fail desperation.

Come Feel Me Tremble suffers for its lack of cohesion.

Track by track, the disc's a sweet thing, but as a whole it's about as light and wispy.

His greatest strength has always been world-building, using a synth-heavy blitz of candy-colored jazz chords taken straight (sometimes blatantly so) from the Pharrell handbook. Cherry Bomb isn’t exactly a hard left turn from this lane, but it is a quick swerve.

As the Gizzard’s two releases this year respectively prove, they’re not afraid to push their sound to its most playful and punishing extremes. But it’s always been more thrilling to hear them excavate the uncharted territory in between.

Feathers seems less a continuation of Logic than a valuable complement, cheerful and heartfelt as the latter was somber and stylized.