The album updates the trio's sound without the forced experimental quality of some of the weaker material on Yes or the unsuccessful lounge-pop sleeper, Like Swimming.

Forever a slave to rock history, Gallagher feels like he's biding his time for the third act reunion rather than breaking from the well-trod path.

ll We Are makes a stylish first impression, showing up so impeccably tailored that you wonder if it secretly fears all of that fumbling human contact that could mess things up.... Meanwhile, the back half of All We Are is filled with slow jams that barely stir from a post-coital heap.

Beating Back the Claws of the Cold only offers fleeting glimpses of potential greatness beneath the ho-hum surface.

Before Wild Things, Brown scrapped an entire album that, from press indications, probably sounded a lot like Anxiety; neither she nor the people she said heard it was happy with the results, but one wonders if it was really that bad, or just not commercial and crowd-pleasing enough. Wild Things collapses over the strain to be both.

Replace crackling vinyl and subwoofer bass with somber piano and mournful cello, and all you're left with is... well, a pretty goddamn miserable woman who happens to have a great voice.

It is a wearying listen, overcrowded and too loud and too harsh, and to engage actively with it is to feel your knuckles whiten with effort.

Between Two Shores was cobbled together out of songs left over from past sessions and home demos. This helps explain the album’s lack of focus. What’s missing is a singular idea for a listener to rest her headphones on. Instead, we get a hodgepodge of sentimental tunes that aren’t quite parallel, perpendicular, or adjacent to each other.

Too often, Be the Void finds Dr. Dog unleashed, letting their wilder ideas get the better of them.

Walking with the Beggar Boys sounds askew, a puzzle whose pieces don't fit properly. This sort of disjointedness can sometimes make for intriguing work, but here it just feels obligatory and slightly stunted.

For all its faults, The New Abnormal might capture how the Strokes are feeling: not ready to fade out, not primed for a comeback. Right now, they’re just way too tired.

Where Deacon infuses his day-glo riots with brainy intent, EAR PWR recycle the worst tendencies of electroclash: the lackluster rapping and willful inanity. It's frustrating because there's ample evidence that EAR PWR aren't compensating for being shitty at music, they're just dumbing down.

Lonesome Dreams' instant knock of familiarity will prove comforting for some, but it gives these tracks something of a plug-and-play feel. Many songs are dramatically assembled, and all of them move, but when they move in pretty much the same ways as another, spryer band, it's that much harder to get caught up in their attendant drama.

That A Quiet Darkness doesn’t offer much in the way of immediate pleasure shouldn’t be entirely to its detriment, but this album doesn’t grow on you; it wears on you.

While bidding for timeless and universal appeal, Finneas sometimes comes up with hollow platitudes. ... Occasionally, he hits on something more stirring, like on “Love Is Pain” when he recalls waking in tears from a dream about his parents’ death—demonstrating the very real consequences of getting older rather than vaguely fretting about them. Finneas’ exercise in restraint has its limits: These subdued songs are surrounded by highly produced, pointedly topical ones.

Their stuff floats off, and the synths carry the whiff not of a beach breeze but of a department-store escalator.

Lyrically, Wolf is convincing when sticking to the grief-stricken script. It's when he goes off-book that things start to get awkward.

Sonically, at least, Son of Spergy, is in the same ballpark as a SAULT or L’Rain record, its negative space, vocals, and instruments in stunning harmony. But that prettiness can’t save the sophomoric songwriting.

Cronin’s music has always been ingratiating, but that quality works against his material here, which yearns for something deeper or darker. There are clear limits to the affability that makes some of his previous singles so winsome.

Luna is enjoyable enough to listen to, and a lot of Beta Band followers will find plenty to enjoy here, but it's ultimately an album I didn't like as much as I wanted to, and one that doesn't really find its footing until it's almost over.

Rapor should be a display of Grossi’s adaptability, but it just ends up leaving you to wonder what he actually stands for as an artist.

The voice is willing, but the musical backdrop is weak.

Wilson’s chipper duets never reach equilibrium. Either his presence feels underutilized--the syrupy "On the Island" with She & Him, in which his vocals are scant--or the guests feel shoehorned into musty production that undermines their own charisma.

Milk Famous falters by creating an Uncanny Valley effect by adopting the most easily replicable aspects [of Spoon's sound] without maintaining any sort of human element or offering anything that's identifiable as their own.

Iggy's delivery is too wry to exude rage, the songs rarely rise above a mid-tempo chug, and Mackay's jovial sax blurts are way more roadhouse than Funhouse.

Seefeel is a thorny album, a thicket of crackling guitars and faltering rhythms.

Sella once stood out for a demeanor that was both wide-eyed and jaded, torn between a yelp and a sigh. In Sickness & In Flames tilts too far toward the former; the Front Bottoms have lost their bite.

Without a razor-sharp point of view, mgk far too often fails to synthesize his very real pain into something truly artful, instead falling back on the crude tools of rote songwriting and borrowed melodies, which he occasionally manages to build out into something arresting thanks to his instinct for what resonates with his audience.