As far as bringing the goods on a sophomore release goes, well, the answer is mostly yeah.

The Messenger won't be included in the body of work that made Marr great, but it's a solid approximation of his strengths.

Cry is a soulless and Styrofoam record as hollow as a booty-call text at 3 a.m. “Hey sexy, you up?” the record seems to beckon. It’s hardly an inviting proposition.

This a pop album, produced like pop and structured to grant instant gratification. And yet, this presentation throws the flaws of Tokyo Police Club’s dullest songs into sharp relief.

Whatever the songs on So Long are actually about is up for debate despite their plainspokenness, but suffice to say, they trigger the exact joy buzzers that leave you usually infatuated, perhaps a bit hopefully lovelorn.

It's unclear from this album what they came back to accomplish.

Feels more like failed market research than soul searching.

Acetone manage to take enough twists and turns on their dusty trail to stave off outright boredom, and they certainly have a talent for doing as much as they can with a fairly limited formula. However, as York Blvd progresses, the album's dreamy torpor becomes stifling, and the songs, while never anything other than pleasant, fail to distinguish themselves from one another.

Self-serious and wildly inconsistent (in both ingenuity and style), 29 is hard to swallow without acknowledging and appreciating the record's overarching storyline: getting through your twenties is way hard.

The first disc of this double album set is evenly split between sketches and absolute gems.

The album moves from infatuation and jealousy to lust and betrayal to real, young love. And it does so with not just the best of intentions-- feminism, anti-homophobia, artistic experimentation-- but also, in the storytelling style of the Streets or Sweden's Hello Saferide, a set of distinctive, well-crafted songs that should strike a chord with self-deprecating teens and twentysomethings.

Freed from the desire to make people move, Joakim put together a record that’s unified in its oddity.

Since Vitriola is meant as a soundtrack to the horror show of daily life, much of it sounds like a second-wave emo band falling down a flight of stairs and hitting every one. And it’s not just the violence of Cursive’s early years that returns—their softer moments have never sounded so beautiful or vulnerable.

Though BLACKPINK can sing and dance with precision, the production of Kill This Love is also weirdly dated, like it was crafted earlier in the decade and then forgotten in a time capsule for five years.

The group is at its best when it balances excess and exuberance, when its sparse snippets of quiet feel like clarity, not compromise.

On Yungblud, Harrison leans almost exclusively into saccharine pop-rock, making this his most monotonous and least distinctive record.

True to form, the other Kens on the soundtrack contribute nothing—doze through Dominic Fike’s noodly, acoustic “Hey Blondie,” which exists halfway between “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” and “Hey Soul Sister,” and the Kid Laroi’s howling emo-trap ballad “Forever & Again.” But the girls often can’t prove they’re worthy of main character status either.

Solar Power sounds more interesting when it bottles the jasmine air of Laurel Canyon folk, less interesting when it emulates that sound’s descendants in early-2000s soft rock (Sheryl Crow, Jewel) without any of the hooks or energy of radio pop.

With the quality and effort put into this release, Def Jux and Aesop Rock have done what every EP should do, provide something of unique value and create anticipation for future releases.

NY's Finest, Pete Rock's fourth proper solo album since 1998, has just enough comfortable tricks for the one of the grand old men of 1990s New York production to maintain warm feelings.

The project still has the feel of an accompanying piece, with titles referencing the dramatization of the Chinese story and plenty of incidental music, but it also works on a satisfying level as an experimental work or as art-pop.

A little bit of retrospective absurdity goes a long way--if only the rest of Internationally Unknown wasn’t so pale and redundant.

So as good as Abandon is, one can't help but think the more he goes through, the richer and more resonant his music will become.

If guitar-based music is still your source of shameless pop, you'll probably enjoy In the Belly more than most records that actually aspire for art.

The EP's lackluster tracklist leaves iTunes Session seeming clunky and unrepresentative--like it's not a full set, but an excerpt from a larger show.

Classics is more varied in texture and tempo and tone than its predecessor. But aside from "Lex", a pretty obvious "Seventeen Years" rehash, and "Wildcat", which samples actual fucking panther roars, there are no curtain raisers, just a whole lot more suggestion.

Oh! Mighty Engine is endlessly pleasant but oddly faceless, a record strangely free of feeling.

The brooding mid-mid-tempo pacing and smoky classic-rock guitar grandeur set a table for some serious moping.