Take issue with Styles’ taste at your leisure, but there’s no denying his comprehensiveness. His vocal performances are invariably the best parts of these songs.

But where their previous three albums translated that dynamic into emotionally-charged metal, Eat the Elephant assumes the form of a gloomy adult-alternative record flush with grand pianos, classical strings, and slackened tempos.

So much of the album is straining to be more than just an homage to the club sounds of the late 80s that it ends up being a bit less.

It's not terrible, just uninspired, and only goes to show that the disco romance formula is both harder to pull off and more singular than you'd think.

Voyager’s attempts to pay homage to disco ancestors while paring his maximalism way back make it all feel like a dance night in an unfurnished room, all speakers and no lighting.

End of World is hellishly inconsistent, its mid section adrift in ’80s funk-rock sheen, like INXS being harassed by an angry wasp. But when it works, End of World, more than any other recent PiL album, offers the winning combination of instrumental oddity and vocal drama.

The gulf between Minaj's public persona and her music here reminds me of the criticism laid at the feet of Lady Gaga -- that for all of her high-culture namedropping, wearable art, and big event videos, Gaga's music rarely reflects the full range of her conceptual constructions.

As so often when it comes to dance-music full-lengths, Bias' good ideas get lost in the sea of makeweight stuff, and his attempt to please just about everyone results in a frustratingly spotty album.

More unfortunate are the moments when Schnauss and Peters aim for surprising or affecting and veer straight into kitsch.

If every track on the album had the unforced lyrical clarity of "Little Houdini", Sage could have the album of his life on his hands here. But Sage is still the type of guy to name an album Li(f)e and a song "Polterzeitgeist", and the album comes packed with yeesh-inducing lines

As a whole, Fetty Wap adopts the same self-assured stance: Fetty's formula definitely ain't broke, and he doesn't seem in a hurry to fix it.

Rewild is how an average debut album should pan out. It might outstrip its ambition and wear its influences too blatantly, but Amazing Baby could be something special once it all clicks.

In general-- and despite passages of extreme beauty-- something seems amiss on Exchange Session.

It's tough to imagine how The Wizard of Poetry came into existence in the first place.

There’s much to admire about When Saints Go Machine’s effort to move their synth-powered pop music away from the dancefloor into more cerebral realms. But like the band name itself, their attempts at cleverness can come off sounding clunky.

Aside from its appropriate feel for a good time get-down in a surprisingly cheerful cartoon post-apocalypse, it's hard to get any real emotional connection from these cuts.

The second half of Cool Choices can’t match the first in quality or intrigue, but what makes the album as a whole worth listening to is Ghetto’s ability to burrow into a quarry of sentimental abandon and talk about what it feels like to be vulnerable.

They seem to be stretching themselves on this record, searching to create something meaningful in an ugly world, realizing that there are limits to their subgenre-referencing sound and if they are to grow they’ve got to push themselves.

Most of LIVE LIFE FAST plays out with this kind of energy: forced, obvious, its best ideas obscured in a haze of self-satisfaction.

They spent all their daring on concept, with little to spare for execution. Even for a duo as image-conscious and savvy as these guys, there is little style in their reduction.

Musically, Tennis have broadened their horizons just the right amount, adding rock'n'roll muscle and a more purely pop clarity.

Full of serious songs with sunny, heavily polished arrangements.

Magnetic Man's arrangements may proudly flaunt dance-pop's most universal qualities, but their efforts remain mere gestures so long as their beats continue to stare so resentfully in the opposite direction.

So among Forfeit/Fortune's many misses, Bachmann can't help but hit a few.

Wayward Fire continually misses a sweet spot between being lean and dirty enough to aerodynamically groove and being maximalist to the point where it opts out of that mode completely. And as a result, there's always that one last addition to the mix that sticks in your craw.

While 'Bruises' proves that a well-done song that sounds like other songs can make people take brief notice, Inspire mostly proves that recycling isn't the only answer.

As with most of Kasher's work, the main draws of Monogamy aren't really musical--words always get prominence over melody. Simply put, if you get a spark out of idealizing your romantic failures by doing things like drunkenly Googling ex-girlfriends (as he does in great detail on "There Must Be Something I've Lost"), listening to Monogamy as a whole is like dousing yourself in gasoline.

What the title describes is just as ineffable as their sound: you can see it coming down, but somehow it fails to leave any tangible impression.