This quartet's assured sound-and-fury is perplexingly difficult to care about.

Despite its apparent intricacies, Evangelic Girl is a Gun feels oddly flat.

Let the Festivities Begin! is music to dance to, to roll a joint to, to solve a decades-old mystery to, but it isn’t a masterwork that unfolds with multiple listens. It’s exactly what it promises, and that’s a party.

The five tracks here differ from their predecessors only by degrees, so if you liked the previous records there's little here to find too upsetting, but as an EP it feels like a stopgap ahead of the next Com Truise album.

Windy City never quite reconciles her genre history with her populist ambitions, creating an album that toggles back and forth between the two poles and then ends abruptly.

Trickfinger often provokes an engaging anxiety, but when Frusciante's not pushing at the edges of the form it can lack the magic of his otherwise unapologetically experimental solo work.

Although Good Arrows is aimed in the direction of a synthesis between the band's two predominant elements, the result misses the target by just a bit.

When they play it safer, like on their workmanlike strum through Joni Mitchell’s “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” or the easy-listening wistfulness of their take on Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over,” the results are less remarkable. And while it’s a relief to be spared Morrissey’s bitterness, sometimes California Son feels too frothy, and he sounds like he doesn’t have any skin in the game at all.

Z's biggest problem is that, despite choosing a sound that is soft and somnolent, SZA is too often overpowered by the music.

Jacuzzi Boys is a collection of well-recorded, well-constructed, boring songs.

It displays the boundlessness of her vocal talent but finds her tethered to a frustratingly limited aesthetic.

Taken together with her other albums, it’s a part of a motley crew of modes that is shaping Princess Nokia into a great experimentalist. On its own, it lacks the completeness of a coherent project of genre hybridization, and lacks a standout single on the level of, say, “Tomboy” or “Kitana.”

In retrospect, it seems Giant will function less as a career highpoint for either artist, and more as a historical marker of the career trajectories of each participant.

On Heaven Upside Down, his 10th album, Manson embraces the tropes that made him a menace and a rock star and a stalwart of goth.

As the band churn up sound and fury, we can hear the strident strains of Balliet’s cello, scribbling suicide notes in the background and lending some gravity to an album that sounds, tragically, weightless.

The album's best songs ("Tough Towns," "Fame II the Wreckoning," "Treat Em Right") temper the stream-of-consciousness and ramp up the atmosphere instead. When they resist the urge to troll (tell me a sardonic chorus that goes "Just like a tactical maniac/ I WANNA SHOOT YOUU" isn't trolling), Nevermen possess a deadly grace befitting Doseone's beloved hydra metaphor; for now, those necks are tangled.

Guillemots cram themselves into awkward fits, and Dangerfield has to squeeze the hardest--whether he's tying himself to a straightforward ballad instead of clamoring for the rooftops, or standing up for a fight when he's so much more comfortable slipping into a dream.

All together, it sounds like a poorly organized collection of demos and ideas.

Mordechai doesn’t quite commit to delivering fleshed-out songs, or to synthesizing Khruangbin’s influences into something new. It’s too busy to settle fully into your subconscious like the intercontinental ambience of Khruangbin’s 2018 breakout Con Todo El Mundo, but not substantial enough to satisfy more active listening.

With Coolaid, arguably Snoop’s first real hip-hop album in half a decade, we find his reinvention back into “Rapper Snoop” to be a bit wobbly.

Deliverance might work best as something else entirely, perhaps as a beat tape filled with reference vocals for the sort of stadium-status UK indie stars that know how to squeeze the maximum amount of drama out of the minimum amount of wordplay.

The constant malaise keeps these songs from generating the ridiculous, heart-swelling feeling of transcendence that the best big-room dance music can achieve, while the duo’s relentless approach keeps the music from feeling particularly intimate.

Too often, it tries to get by on what it's opposed to instead of what it stands for, a gambit with little margin for error if you don't have a viably exciting alternative, or enough trust in the taste of the listener.

Throw Haerts on shuffle and it’s uniformly accessible and uniform, period.

There's nothing wrong with tempering one's stance or mellowing out--and to We Are Wolves' credit, the slowest, spaciest numbers here are the most unexpected and most satisfying--but the driving momentum and risky harshness of past efforts are missed.

The album’s interstellar concept is interesting enough to get it off the ground, but too quickly Jonas retreats to his domestic comforts, without really probing the relationship that so inspires him, or charting any new territory in the pop universe.

The common threads celebrities try to establish with civilians have proven to be pretty flimsy throughout the past year, but they’re enough to give OK Human an emotional binding missing from nearly every album they’ve made in the past 20 years.

Is a Woman is a disappointment.