Celebration, Florida doesn't simply reflect the hubbub of America as the Felice Brothers see it. The album becomes a part of the spectacle, which is surely not what the band intended.

Between the carefully plotted reference points and the not-exactly-gripping lyrics, Forever tends to run together over the course of its 39-minute runtime. Still, taken song-for-song, there's no shortage of takeaways.

There’s no emotional throughline on The Black Album, no grand statement that continues from one track to the next. The songs never blur together, but they also don’t tell a story as the sum of their parts. A sense of tonal whiplash ensues, and the album’s highlights are best enjoyed in isolation.

A no-brainer, easy-to-enjoy production slate gets knocked around by its flaws just enough that even the minor, acquired-taste touches seem like just another bad decision.

Even if their whole style is essentially a throwback, there's plenty of room out there for throwback done right. But on too much of Youth and Lightness, they're not the machine they could be.

He’s making songs that sound like catchy Gunna songs of the past—he’s still able to float on these laid-back, skittering ATL trap variants while reading straight off his SSENSE receipt—but they don’t feel like them.

Many of Glow's songs are just-there, but a few manage to be engaging.

There’s a very palatable poppy sheen on all of these tracks: Glitterbug is packed with anthemic hooks and synth pulses that sound like they were composed solely to lure Lexus.

When the recycled smoke clears, Little Barrie could use more songwriting help from their patrons (Moz, [Edwyn] Collins) and less hu-huh inspiration from Ocean Colour Scene's lobotomy-trad bong.

Blue Madonna’s main value over replacement synth-pop is his falsetto, capable of reaching a glam-rock frenzy but constrained in songs that never quite allow him to go there.

A covers album like Jukebox should reveal new facets of a performer in its selection and interpretation of favorite songs. That's how (and why) "The Covers Record" worked. But eight years later, only 'Song for Bobby' tells us anything new about Chan Marshall. The rest of Jukebox doesn't even say much about Cat Power.

For a record so bent on impressing the listener, Culture of Volume somehow never manages to leave a mark.

There's something bold in the smaller scope of The Endless River, but it proves to be one of the few Pink Floyd releases that sounds like a step backwards, with nothing new to say and no new frontiers to explore.

Smile asks less of us. The confessions on this album feel like calculated dodges, every tepid disclosure immediately followed by triumph. ... Despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing proven chart-topping formulas.

If in the past [Fallon] managed to transform similar icons [Ginsberg, Van Morrison] into a communal mythology, here it too often sounds like regurgitation, as though the reference were an end in itself.

But even with 9th's craftsmanship, the melodies, like Buckshot's lyrics are vacuum-sealed. There's a pianissimo modesty that positively sucks the album dry.

At their best, they achieve late-’90s VH1 rock heights, which is not such a bad target to hit. ... At their worst, they’re affected and not in an interesting way. But these are both extremes, on a record otherwise scrupulous to never sound at all extreme.

All he has to back himself up is the production. Yet even that is so safe. He waters down the cutting-edge sounds of the past and, in the process, flattens his Southerness to the point that he feels like he’s from nowhere.

For an EP as flat and, well, just plain stuck as Our Love Is Hurting Us sounds, playing catch-up would've been preferable to taking a promising but not wholly memorable debut and simply offering it up a second time

The quiet-loud-quiet-loud dynamics and turgid crunch taste and feel just like middle school. And even if that weren't the case, it's safe to say we've heard aches like just these before.

DEADLINE achieves the bare minimum, but instead of being a show of style and substance, its music and credits—Diplo, Chris Martin, Dr. Luke—come across more like a demonstration of A-list power.

Every song here sounds expensive, and would play exquisitely on enormous sound systems. But that imbalance, between the level of production and substance, means all the SFX and sonic wizardry of CCCLX can feel a little brainless.

These songs rarely sound lived in or personable; rather, they're more like museum dioramas where he can pose figures like Calamity Jane, Casey Jones, and Casey at the Bat in stiff tableaux.

While this LP is more painstaking than B'Day, the extra effort dulls any emotional wallop; "B'Day," in all its hectic glory, offered a much more vivid peek into the elusive mind of Beyoncé than Sasha Fierce, which often reads more like projection than reality.

Problem is, the more traditionally reflective Grace/Wastelands just manages to make his solipsism double over on itself and your memories of listening to "Up the Bracket" are more rewarding than his memories of making it.

There's a lot of remarkable music on Celebration--the work of an artist who's spent a quarter-century in a passionate body-lock with the question of what exactly makes pop music popular. She deserves a retrospective more interesting than this haphazard piece of contract-filling product.

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.

Despite the overcooked jumble of your typical oft-delayed all-star concept record, it really does fall together as pure music. Just stop paying too much attention to Del's lyrics.