A lot of what's here doesn't really demonstrate what they can do to Philip Glass, but what Philip Glass has already done to them.

Generally speaking, the choruses on Rise far outshine the meandering verses, as the band snaps into a more simple and straightforward groove that highlights the trademark Kirkwood drawl.

As good as the record sounds and as capably as he immerses himself in assorted flavors pop, there remains an odd sense of distance to Conn on record.

True to its title, Magic Pony Ride embraces Paradinas’ sugary side. Synths froth and squeak. Kitschy piano riffs ascend to euphoric heights. ... The lower end of these mixes feels less inspired.

It’s a perfectly fine album by a guy who wants to be much more than perfectly fine.

With this album, they stake their claim to a musical inheritance left behind by predecessors who flouted boundaries and bastardized conventional notions of heaviness. Fittingly, they make the best of that inheritance by striking out on their own.

Sure, they're a very raw talent, but a formidable talent nonetheless, and this record's peaks hint at even greater musical epiphanies to come.

What he lacks is a presence that feels definitely Bart Davenport, and after a while, it begins to feel like an album full of someone else’s songs--or, rather, anyone else’s songs. His best moments are breezy and autumnal.

Privilege is an assured, musically accomplished work, but all the aesthetic homework Pennington’s done to refine his persona is still visible, pointing directly back to the influences and forebears he’s inspired by.

One does get the sense of life behind these performances, of private experience refracted through universal sentiment, of hard knocks transubstantiated into easy wisdom, but, as is often the case with Bob Dylan, the drama remains mostly internal.

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.