Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone seems geared towards introducing a contemporary to the High Priestess of Soul, and how well it does that remains to be seen.

While these songs can sometimes evoke other major players in her genre, she makes Max Martin’s signatures feel personal, making a mature pop record that feels like a natural progression.

A warmed-over stew of scrubbed-up psychedelia, scrubbed-up sunshine pop, scrubbed-up soundtrack music, electrofunk, and lounge that's all produced immaculately, right down to the "messy" parts.

Strangely, pairing with just Mt. Sims on U&I appears to have resulted in less-focused output, with the duo gradually circling a grimy musical plughole, only managing to pull themselves out via less cluttered material in the back half of the record.

So while La La Land may not be the stellar follow-up that Parc Avenue deserved, it does offer something for fans willing to look beyond its tarted-up exterior.

Despite real moments of fun, the project ends up feeling shy of its influences, stopping short of a full buy-in.

If the younger Black Francis might have transformed a cover of the Flying Burrito Brothers' "Wheels" into a cool surf epic rather than a Velvet Underground-inspired reconstruction, the elder delivers an intriguing mix of vitality and cool detachment. It's easy to take those seemingly at-odds qualities for granted, but here Black Francis sounds not just comfortable with that aesthetic but surprisingly and paradoxically in control of it as well.

The songs don’t really go anywhere, but they don’t need to--it’s the psychic tone that matters, not any sort of hooks, and the blissful state they produce comes from simply enjoying them in the moment.

The 87-minute runtime is both ridiculous and somehow necessary; if the redundancies were cut, some of the self-importance would be lost. The extended monotony allows you to get lost in Cudi’s ego and your own head, clearing room amid the nothingness to discover and create meaning.

24K Magic is the rest of the park: rebuilt shinier and glitzier and safer, every element engineered to please more than the real thing, and with a hell of a tour guide. It’s not history, not even historical fiction, but harmless fun.

More so than stoking the band's current commercial prospects, Tonight is an exciting record for what it could potentially spell for Franz Ferdinand's future.

It's when Wasser puts her voice front and center that The Deep Field collapses in on itself.

Mallet percussion, multilingual lyrics, chesty vocal huffs, fumbled acoustics, roundabout vocal harmonies, tentative EDM dipping, Asian monasticism, "Rule Britannia", American gothic: they all get sucked into the vacuum of This Is All Yours without leaving an impression.

While Hypnotized nudges Perro and Chiericozzi out of their established comfort zone, it also has the effect of making you appreciate the tightened-up craft and finely curated song selection they exhibit with the Men.

Martsch misses the opportunity to commune with Johnston’s music, or to do anything with it, really. On the 11 songs here, he resists the urge to plug in his distortion pedals and sail away.

It cribs largely from dancehall, but stops short of adopting any of that form’s humidity; these diaphanous tracks are a long stream of cool appraisal.

The Silver Cord won’t convince every listener to join King Gizzard’s Phish-like fandom, but it stands out as one of their most playful records in recent years.

The lack of any clear direction is the most fascinating aspect of Occlusions.

Together, they have managed to build a livelier, more bustling version of Hauschka's winsome snowglobe universe.

Your tolerance for freeform and frequently harsh-sounding guitar music determines whether A Shaw Deal will make it into your regular rotation or slot into the lesser-played ranks of the band’s catalog. But its funky, egoless spirit is infectious.

To Dreamers is one of Stoltz's most satisfying efforts to date, sounding bolder and more invigorated than nearly anything before it. Yet, when Stoltz sneers "Do you want to rock'n'roll with me?", exactly who's doing the asking gets a little lost in the tune's glammy shuffle.

Scarlet should be a madhouse but instead it’s like a trip to the rap clinic waiting room.

This obsession with connecting and disappearing in rapid succession is fitting for a record that finds Purity Ring trying to stake their claim at pop's center but ultimately retreating within themselves.

One starts to wonder if all the Jesus & Mary Chain comparisons flying around The Raveonettes aren't due to their J&MC-like tendency to write the same song over and over again, as well as their ability to kick up a right good wall of white noise.

They've still got angst to spare, but their wit has been ground down by 'maturity,' or whatever you want to call it, into a bitter thing that saps a lot of that reckless energy.

What All the Saints lack in rhythmic variation, they make up for with absorbing atmosphere--their sound truly is subterranean, a dimly lit, cavernous rumble that gets more suffocating as the album progresses.

Warmth and color fill most of the deluxe edition's (admittedly bloated) 60 minutes, an assortment of bubbly beats forming in gleeful, block party-ready disarray.

Though imperfect, Hill's intensifying sonic clarity presents the Babies as a group that still believes in rock'n'roll as a powerful language, one that can help sort out mortal complexities and say something about the way we live.