Re-Up Gang is sort of like going out for a nice meal and filling up on bread.

Throughout it's fourteen tracks, there's no doubting The Weakerthans are smart guys who keep up with literature and politics, but over the course of an entire album the band's ambitious literary posturing drowns in the bland songwriting and lack of captivating hooks.

Like all of Mazzy Star's releases, Bavarian Fruit Bread works well as a mood piece and makes good background music, but it doesn't reward close listening.

Yeat’s linguistic flair has kept him from tipping over into the infinitely derivative personalities of Balenciaga-wearing, blank-Instagram-feed-having twentysomethings, but LYFESTYLE sometimes gets awfully close to the edge. Still, his heavy-handed punch-ins are hefty enough to make a couple dents.

Scenic Drive feels like a detour because it is: Khalid announced his next studio album, Everything Is Changing, last summer. For now, though, he seems content to take a step back, sounding like he’s singing and shrugging at the same time.

It's too bad that the majority of The Black Dirt Sessions is so familiar, as the band dutifully strides through the same well-worn territory, perhaps even less palatable in their stubborn sameness.

The band still wants to rub shoulders with the its moody English influences, but dabbling in styles you're ill-equipped for, weaving unnecessarily recurring themes into the songs, or piling on incidental effects-pedal sounds for atmosphere aren't going to inherently elevate your music.

The shame of it is that somewhere in here there's an album that could've done more to revive the mostly moribund idea of 80s pop tropes in contemporary music.

When this sound is done with edge and freakiness, it can be a unique surprise, which is exactly what You Think You Really Know Me was. Electric Endicott is too often the opposite--predictable and numbing, even when it's good.

This turntable of pastiche never allows Grace and the Devouring Mothers to develop an identity beyond Against Me! side project or to scratch much more than the surface of these assorted styles. Owing in part to the trio’s shared experience and chemistry, this feels a lot like rock-band karaoke.

Natalizia recorded Banjo or Freakout with Nic Vernhes at the Rare Book Room in Brooklyn, and Vernhes' naturalistic production style deepens the expanses in Natalizia's sound while maintaining its clean lines and immersive chill.

Too often Favorite Waitress sounds too too clever to accommodate something as visceral as a groove.

While the first half of the record is promising, however, the band loses steam toward the end.

The pop genre is in control of Kiyoko rather than the other way around. Instead of defining a unique sound, Panorama carries the unmistakable metallic tang of reverse engineering.

The seeds of a half-decent album are buried among The Secret of Letting Go’s more experimental tracks. But, in the immortal words of another extremely ’90s act, that don’t impress me much. Modern audiences with no notion of the band’s unusual history are unlikely to be moved by this album’s velvety shrug.

The darkness is where Lortz repeatedly returns, and when he does, the album swoons into a near-stasis.

The lyrics' yearning for something tangible and substantial ultimately feels at odds with what Sweet Sister, promising surface and all, actually brings to the table.

It's just a return to very familiar territory without the urgency and mystery of Luscious Jackson's 90s-era music--the Lollapalooza Nation equivalent of, say, a new Winger or Y&T album. For the most part, it even sounds like it was fun to make; if only it were as much fun to hear.

Given the far sunnier cast of the group's debut, it's fair to say Now or Heaven is a document of growing pains.

There are enough nods on Kiss All the Time to Styles’ stated influences—-a sharp, craggy synth running through “Season 2 Weight Loss”; chattering drum machine on the bittersweet Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix-ish highlight “Taste Back”—that you can at least identify his intention. (This isn’t Dua Lipa talking up a Britpop album before delivering nothing of the sort with Radical Optimism.) But Styles undermines himself every time with moves straight out of the stadium-pop playbook.

City of Refuge seems more like a collection of ideas for three or four different albums than one complete work.

This album still falls way short of what it could be, and I have to wonder how this even happened.

There's little here that couldn't have been on previous albums; the difference is what's gone missing: the in-your-face homosexuality of Rough Trade debut The Smell of Our Own, the perverse grandiosity of 2004's Mississauga Goddam.

The first five songs at least are totally gorgeous, the strings glassy, the tone all understated seduction, the structures fluid and surprising. ... By the Homme-tinged desert rider "Used to Be My Girl," misanthropy has set in.

Though having one good trick in the bag keeps him from becoming a mere oldies jukebox like so many other 40-year rock vets, the sampler platter of Chrome Dreams II suggests his renowned versatility, by comparison to its cult-classic ancestor, ain't what it used to be.

At this point in her career, Thorn shouldn't be courting the middle, and considering the best moments on Out of the Woods, she didn't have to, either.

At times it’s almost impressive how long an album called Beerbongs & Bentleys can go without cracking a smile. It is more assured and impressive than its predecessor, Stoney, but it’s also more exhausting.

It creates an album weighed toward showcasing masterful execution that leaves a pretty muted general impression. Unless you're predisposed toward technical prowess and solo bass recordings, it's probably going to come off as more of a clinic than a collection of great songs.