Highlights aside, Total's belligerence is as predictable as it is teeth-grinding.

Despite its street-level money, power and respect rhymes, almost all of it feels divorced from reality, free of any kind of narrative grounding or personal disclosure.

Reading his explanations for choosing the guest rappers, it’s clear they moved him, but he might’ve been better off simply ceding them the space and stepping away. With this new tape, the Streets are officially back, but Skinner never convinces us why they should stay.

Green's self-consciously dweeby vocals hang his off-kilter lyrics like a doomed curveball.

The album doesn't have any of the euphorically propulsive standout tracks that held Redman's older albums together.

Hold it by its edges and the experience of this album suffers––the rocky center is where we find personal truths writ well.

From a production standpoint, the record sounds great, but at its core, it comes up empty, lacking a solid foundation of good songs to rest its adventurous studio trickery upon.... It's the most frustrating type of album there is-- one that's full of promise and shining moments, but never fully delivers.

The painstaking introspection here seems to stem from a need to use their success and exposure to deliver some definitive, U2-sized message when really they're so much more relatable when they're awkwardly sorting out their psychological messes on the fly.

If it doesn’t achieve the long-promised outcome of “filler-free” Foals, Life Is Yours unexpectedly thrives when it reintegrates the studio trickery that used to weigh down previous side Bs.

He doesn't exactly break free on Bright Penny, but typical of Hayes, it's not for lack of trying.

Was it really his idea to add the distorted microphones and insectoid buzzing into the overstuffed “Alien Nation” or the lopsided drum panning on “Stuck in my Head”? Aside from those curiously tacky outliers, Lanois’ tasteful ambience dampens the band’s everlasting, pulsating indie rock

In the Lonely Hour comes from a personal place, it doesn't end up feeling like a very personal record.

Divest the Smashing Pumpkins or Hum of their singers, give the bands room to jam, and this album might have ensued. Without vocals, it feels slightly empty.

Taylor writes about big issues—income inequality, political corruption, a society fraying at its edges—but these complex matters are undermined by the rote uplift in his songs, an optimism assumed but never really earned.

Eternal Youth feels like more of a lackluster stopgap than equal-footing sidecar for Merritt's songcraft, a frustrating teaser from the Merritt portfolio of aliases.

The Weavers have no trouble sounding like themselves, but another voice in the room might have helped them flesh out some of the underexplored ideas on Primordial Arcana. Like the still life that adorns its cover, the album can be beautiful, but it’s fundamentally inert.

He’s so dedicated to synthesizing his most obvious influences--channeling Tyler, the Creator and N.E.R.D. down to their throat-clearing ad-libs and neo-New Jack funk--that he hasn’t quite established an identity of his own. That failing doesn’t dull the jams or diminish his evident potential, but it does hold him back.

Nearly everything he raps on Memories Don’t Die is something you’ve heard before, performed more ably elsewhere, and the few lines that aren’t are unbelievably simple-minded or straight-up witless.

As long as British Sea Power continue to exist on their singular plane, it's easy to admire and probably overrate them for their ambition.

I've rooted for these guys because they nearly achieve that fine mix between tackiness and genius perfected by bands like T. Rex and the Darkness. Unfortunately, I can only give them points for effort.

The nuts and bolts of the singsongy rhythms matter. Lil Baby is at his best when he’s using those tricks to switch between moods, but there’s just one on It’s Only Me, and it’s indifference: not in the too-cool-to-care kind of way, but in the way when words have no weight behind them.

While the band once pushed forward with a strength that seemed to surprise even them, So Divided ultimately feels scattered and flaccid.

Writing from the heart does not automatically imbue lyrics with depth. Never is it more apparent that the factory approach is not allowing Cara to fulfill her potential than on “Scars To Your Beautiful.”

It seems now that the band is terrified of change, leaving them to rehash what their first five albums accomplished in lieu of actual progression.

None of Corgan’s definitive qualities as a musician—symphonic grandeur, needling immediacy—translate to his production, which burdens CYR with out-of-the-box anonymity; a Smashing Pumpkins album that sounds like it was handed off to a guy at the Genius Bar. The production’s clinical competency only highlights the assembly-line songwriting of CYR’s back half.

Frustratingly, most songs have great ideas in them, sitting alongside creative dead ends. The overall sound of the record--to be reductionist, rave-rap--is a welcome trend, and it proves they have their ear to the ground.

Ugly sounds like something far less interesting: the sort of generically angsty guitar music that only a ’90s major label executive could love.

While his singing is strained and incompetent, at least he’s going for it. Too much of the album seems satisfied with the small space Lean was able to carve out for himself.