When it's firing on all cylinders, Sirens' Call offers manic pop thrills that either recall the group's heyday, or slyly recalls the noise made by other people that were touched by New Order

They're this close to being a rock band while still sounding like their weird selves, which makes this their most accessible album to date.

Hatfield has nothing new to say besides "You don't know what it's like to be perfect," and it might explain her perfect-person tendency toward carelessness-- guitar solos, grating vocals, overdone crabbiness-- all signs that point to thinly veiled midlife crisis rock.

There's nothing wrong with being down, and Simenon does it well. But what Back to Light boasts in studio acumen it lacks in personality.

An album of tepid and stylistically muddled techno.

While My Dear Melancholy, makes for a slight curio in the Weeknd’s discography, it also feels like an unnecessary step backwards following the down-for-whatever approach of his recent work. There’s nothing wrong with reflecting on the past, but sometimes it’s better to just leave it there.

Son Volt's label debut, American Central Dust, is some of the sleepiest protest music ever made: Every song saunters by at a slow tempo, Farrar's voice sounds increasingly inexpressive, and John Agnello's production makes everything sound real purdy but lifeless.

The cache of "weird" songs on Rape Fantasy is better than the tracks collected on Staying Alive.

Destruction In Yr Soul isn't strikingly original, but it is heartfelt and comforting, and there is plenty of starlit sky here to stretch out beneath for those in search of it.

He struggles to let his guard down, and ironically, operates best when he keeps it up. Tiller comes off not as the passionate lover, but as the sappy everyman—too bland and full of tropes to be the new hero pouring his heart out in a thunderstorm.

Widows’ Weeds contains little in the way of electrifying suspense or carefully-hidden, internalized trinkets—only empty gestures and lazy execution. Nearly 20 years into Silversun Pickups’ existence, we see them for what they are: a little big, a little brooding, but mostly boring.

Perhaps this release is their own way of dispensing with some lingering ghosts before moving on to something new.

It’s a little preachy and confessional, but there’s truth in most of what Nash sings about on Girl Talk, at least for the ladies in the room who are still figuring out how to be capital-A adults.

For an MC whose lyrics don't typically allow much room for narrative scope, easygoing humor, or high-concept weirdness, that's a good way to make a sporadically inventive but otherwise passable-at-best album feel like a total slog.

Unfortunately, their sun-zapped slacker outlook drags them back, miscasting themselves as a modern-day answer to hollow, overly attitude-conscious acts like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

Critcheloe's songs and productions are pleasant and utilitarian-- if any of these came on at the right moment on the right dance floor, you'd wanna dance-- but ultimately insubstantial, fizzing out of one's memory almost as soon as they're finished playing. Still, there are some nice touches.

So far they don’t have those hits, of course, but they’ve come up with enough passable facsimiles to fill a pretty likeable album.

It’s Toliver who sounds like he’s rallying, his voice less like a piece of software and more an instrument of feeling. His singsong verse is one of the few moments on JACKBOYS that isn’t just product.

The earnest California takes plenty of time to sprawl out, from wound-licking power ballads (“Home Is Such a Lonely Place,” “Hey I’m Sorry”) to high-shine navel-gazings that hew closely to past hits.

Cale squanders whatever momentum he accrued on the estimable avant-pop of 2003's HoboSapiens by adorning these new songs with such unflattering, generic alternarock textures that they often render their author unrecognizable at best, and irrelevant at worst.

Although songs like “King of Hearts,” a pummeling Eurodance stomper, or “Castle in the Sky,” another pummeling Eurodance stomper, might allude to urgency in their lyrics and music, they still feel totally anemic and bereft of passion.

Frankly, it could be much worse.

We Are A&C is feckless junk.

Drift is the sound of them trying to figure out what to do next--and compared to the maniacal focus and intensity of previous records, the band can sound oddly rudderless here. But they can still stun you with a radical reinvention.

In between appearances from Drake, Minaj, and Wayne-- who offers lukewarm verses and/or deranged-but-palatable Auto-Tune hooks on most tracks-- a slew of numbskulls, weirdos, and little kids sometimes make things interesting

That’s how Spring feels: a lot of planning, a shrug to finish. Like OK Human, this is a product of the pandemic. Unlike OK Human, it actually sounds like it.

Unless you approach Electronica 1 as a collection of unrelated songs designed to be cherry-picked for playlists--and given the generic title, maybe that's the point--there's little to hold it together.

The duo’s sense of freedom and unwillingness to mimic the tropes of conventional songwriting are to be admired, even if they’re not necessarily traits that will convince anyone but ardent early-Reich fans that drumming records are worthy of a place on their shelf.