Sure, Alexander is an unsteady and uncertain release, but it's also a trial run by someone who has already made it.

For Smith's first four albums, Outside Society is an abridgement that doesn't really do her justice.

The Kooks take elements from their up-and-coming peers and a name from Hunky Dory, achieving an adolescent universality that's at once their strongest pitch and greatest failing.

Brass is certainly an easier record to wrap your mind around than Flux Outside. But, with one too many good-not-great melodies and that nagging sense that these guys are holding something back, it's also a whole lot less likely to get itself lodged in your skull.

Too many of these songs are just bluster in search of a purpose. Casualties of the duo’s noncommittal approach, they fall into a thankless gray area, too tinkered-over to function as punk, yet too haphazard to be great pop.

Even when Beer herself sounds lovely, her explorations of vulnerability and self-definition tangle in stiff, obvious metaphors. The writing relies on flimsy framing devices, shoehorning a delicate narrative about hiding and healing into simplistic slogans.

Rather than delving further into experimentation or exploring their strengths, Tool have made an...A Perfect Circle record.

There's potential in The Visitor's mix of electro, new wave, and pop, but it's obscuring or distorting Aguayo's personality, which is the engine that has driven his songs for so long.

Despite capable guest vocalists, including Robyn herself, it's generally devoted to glossy, bittersweet electronic drifts that are too slow, too long, or too bland to hold interest for 60 minutes, though often unobjectionable in smaller servings.

UR FUN—a confection, a distraction, a collection of competent and sparkling pop songs—doesn’t open itself to the world as it stands in this moment.

The production isn't a disaster, but most of the stylistic flourishes can feel gimmicky or, at worst, like dry history lessons... There's also the tugging sense that Springsteen and Aniello are trying to cover up some of the album's lackluster songwriting.

There’s no question that van den Broek is an energetic and capable musician, but those qualities feel irrelevant when they show up in songs that might appear on a bad Shuggie Otis covers album. Anyone can make music that sounds like soul, but not all music has one.

Grapetooth’s low-effort operation is part and parcel of their overall charm, but effortlessness doesn’t have to mean insincerity. During these 10 tracks, those feelings often seem inseparable.

Their latest record has more instruments and lyrical or melodic turns than hooks to hold onto, but its problem is more like an excess of ideas than a lack of them.

It's to the Weakerthans' credit that their lyric-driven songs can be, in a way, useful, at least by helping reassure the sentimental souls with whom Samson's deftly told stories resonate. Still, they're rarely as striking here as on the groups' previous albums.

The pacing is so languid, the dynamics so muted that I doubt this iteration of Son Volt would last very long in a real honkytonk.

Rather than excavating weird, uncommercial offcuts from the Ray of Light sessions, this is a slight release that collects seven remixes, most widely available, as well as one demo left off the 1998 album.

There's the potential for something here; as of If Songs Could Be Held, it's yet unrealized.

If Out-of-State Plates is about as revelatory as your typical garage sale, it's not because these are necessarily bad songs (except for their lamentable cover of "...Baby One More Time")-- it's just that most of them seem somehow defective, one element overpower-popping the others.

Though a mixed bag, Blues Funeral does have its moments.

The album feels just pop enough in intention that its pleasures seem noticeably absent; with a few strong exceptions, the album could be a folder of songs waiting for someone else to bring them to life.

And though their passable guitar parts-- all choppy downstrokes and wiry, insistent clangs-- lose their exuberance as the record stretches on, for at least the album’s first six tracks, they are played with such adolescent gusto that it's hard not to be won over.

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

Lacking compelling hooks, a unifying mood, or a clear narrative, his debut is oddly inflexible and over-calculated.

Expecting KONNAKOL to break the pattern of underwhelming, moody R&B-pop albums, or to make Zayn as interesting as he’s tried to signal he is for over a decade, will disappoint anyone not already committed to loving him.

The group's first album since 1996 just sounds like the one they would've churned out in 1998.

Though often disjointed, when some of these fragments manage to really connect, it's hard not to imagine Supreme Cuts as being able to hit a decent stride in the future.

For the wary or outright dismissive, however, The Resistance is also a very smartly sequenced album.