Stocked with leftovers and ornery jabs at the status quo.

With their frantic, rushed rhymes, and beats which are a bit too eager to please, the Kidz may be popular. But if they want to any cred they're going to have to learn to be themselves.

When I take The Loud Wars as a justifiably forgotten but enjoyable enough record from a bygone era, I'm soothed; it's a little better than, oh, Fake French or something, and I'm sure as hell not going to dig around to find that one with this thing floating around.

At its best, the casual atmosphere makes for one of Kozelek’s loosest, lightest collections to date: something to throw on when you don’t have the emotional capacity for his more distinctive albums.

That's the trouble with Sunlight on the Moon; things are just fine, but 12 albums in, just fine's not quite fine enough.

A little bit of retrospective absurdity goes a long way--if only the rest of Internationally Unknown wasn’t so pale and redundant.

Their mistake is in forcing too many ideas into every possible second.

One of Excuses for Travelers' greatest weaknesses is that the album is too uniformly boring to be affecting in the least.

Across the album, his voice is helplessly buried beneath vocal processing and mixed conspicuously low, as if to purposely obscure his lyrics. These effects aren’t new to the Voidz, but on Like All Before You, they dominate, obscuring any humanity in Casablancas’ vocals.

These are longstanding punk tropes boiled down and Vig-ed up, removed of their typical dirt sheen and bolstered by a couple extra guitar tracks.

At its best, Ca$ino is the most reflective Keem’s ever been. He parses through how California and the Vegas Strip have poisoned him and his circle, but his warring pop star and rapper sensibilities leave his reckoning in a garbled tonal mess.

It’s hard to believe that the bulk of the project was inspired by anything that Hampton said. Instead, it exploits his image to peddle liberation-lite Billboard hits over anything remotely revolutionary. It’s not all terrible. The most memorable track, out of a whopping 22, comes from relative unknown Nardo Wick.

While Demolition forgoes the overproduction and even much of the shameless rock-god posturing that plagued Gold, Adams hasn't yet found his way out of his songwriting rut.

When you're operating within a strict template, you have to find some distinctive way to fill it out--a felicitous phrasing here, an unexpected chord change there. Without those elements, there's little on Sun Structures to remind you that you are, in fact, listening to a new band called Temples.

For some reason—fear of boring his fans, obedience to the preferences of the streaming services, a career focused on club bangers—Malone won’t let these songs breathe. The result is an album that’s overstuffed and undercooked.

Those who are coming into Transfixiation blind might just hear a notable band boasting a currently rare commitment to an '80s kind of noise-rock rather than the '90s iterations of shoegaze, goth, or industrial that’s more prominent in 2015. Then again, APTBS’ progress as a band only serves to expose the underlying one-dimensionality of their actual songwriting.

[The] Fratellis aren't so much the sound of young Britain as the sound of dad's old record collection.

The perfectly pleasant Rat Farm [feels] strangely wanting.

A slight and unwaveringly safe 30 minutes, it goes down easier than anything the band has ever done, while making less of an impression.

The irony is that Phrazes for the Young is so smoothed over--nearly all of Casablancas' trademark vocal roughness is airbrushed into oblivion--it instantly sounds like a plexiglass-covered museum piece.

There’s much to admire about When Saints Go Machine’s effort to move their synth-powered pop music away from the dancefloor into more cerebral realms. But like the band name itself, their attempts at cleverness can come off sounding clunky.

On several songs, Johansson gets lost in Sitek's swelling production, which may suggest a weak interpreter or a dearth of vocal personality but adds to the album's pervading dreaminess.

Living Thing sounds like a noble but flawed attempt by Peter Bjorn and John to test the fortitude of their songwriting using the most barren and broken of arrangements. But more often that not, it sounds like they settled on the drum-machine presets first, with the lyrics and melodies thrown on top as afterthoughts.

At just less than 30 minutes, Highway Hypnosis is in fact her longest record, and it feels longer still.

Entire swaths of music are cut from Persson’s cloth; she is a known quantity. For better or worse, this lets Persson get away with an album like Animal Heart, one that isn’t much of a statement.

Ultra Mono charges into the discourse like a hobbyist at a rally. It’s not listening, just shouting. Not radical but restless. Not bad, just unnecessary.

With all the work to try and incorporate these far-afield guest vocalists aside, it's worth noting that the production itself is more reliant on them than ever. Underneath them, the music is often flat and unadventurous, tasteful where it could stand to be raucous and rigid where it needs to be limber.

For an album called The Time Is Now, David spends too much of his time looking like he's trying to catch up.