Take the sophistication out of sophisti-pop, and Lo Moon is just another L.A. indie R&B act who tries to bring us a higher love but can’t take things much further beyond bed and bath.

Overall, it’s hard to see where his strengths are, and on some deeper level, I can’t imagine a situation where listening to this album is appropriate for anything else but falling asleep at your desk.

Their reedy, one-note falsettos barely have the range for dance tracks that ask almost nothing of them, and For Ever’s mopier material is at odds with the very specific, frivolous itch that listeners come to this band to scratch. Jungle fare best when they stick to the grooves.

This album sounds like it was recorded and released as a favor from someone at the label. Truth is, the lighter that ignited All This Sounds Gas is long out of butane.

Desperate Ground is a record that really wants to convey having something to say and Harris has run out of ways to say that something.

Too many songs feel like items on a checklist. The mandatory back-and-forth with Lil Baby proves their chemistry hasn’t waned, but the formula to their joint tracks is due for an update.

Home Wrecking Years feels like a guy just filling in the downtime before he gets back to work with his main band.

At least half of The Blood Album’s songs feel virtually interchangeable and the other half sound like AFI wrote this stuff in the time it takes to play it.

While Eminem’s verbal dexterity has remained intact, his shortcomings have grown more glaring with the passage of time. When he isn’t unleashing his id, he has, at times, veered toward power-ballad treacle.

Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. It’s like you drank a bunch of cough syrup and went to Live Aid: The Vatican.

The rest of Washington Square Serenade ranges from good ('Days Aren't Long Enough,'a duet with wife Allison Moorer) to merely serviceable ('Red Is the Color').

Queen of the Wave just makes you lay prostrate at the feet of Pepe Deluxé in the hopes that you won't mind them relentlessly hammering you with tacky quirks and leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination.

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.

Mendes spends nearly every minute bowled over by the power of love. It’s nice to see his cup overflow so bountifully, but the near-constant awe quickly grows tiresome, especially when conveyed through clichés like, “Your body’s like an ocean, I’m devoted to explore you” and, “You’re my sunlight on a rainy day.”

While Rundanns has all the makings of a late-career triumph, it’s less a new watermark for Rundgren’s sprawling discography than an analog to it: beautiful and baffling in equal measure, all over the map, and beholden to nothing but its own inexplicable logic.

My Morning Jacket is their least adventurous album yet. When they riff, they’re squarely within a July 4th classic rock block; when they vamp, it’s the fog-lit, psychedelic soul that’s invigorated their most recent work. In either form, they occasionally hint at their soaring, festival-ready populism, heady instrumental exploration, or fluency with the American songbook, but never the fusion that once came so organically.

One might suppose that solo album(s) from the chief Furnaces songwriter Matthew Friedberger would magnify his flaws/assets, and in the case of Winter Women and Holy Ghost Language School, one would be correct.

All in all, the sparks are overshadowed by poor choices and general lack of direction.

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

It's all good enough, but how many times, really, do you need to hear the term "rock the mic" in an hour? Not this many.

Foxygen have perpetually raised the question: Do they really mean it? On Seeing Other People, they drop the act and give it to you straight: If you are getting tired of Foxygen, well, they are, too.

The debut album by these producers-turned-trio comes after blog-bait remixes galore, including a nice enough Postal Service-ish Vampire Weekend makeover, but there's little of those fine young Columbians' infectious exuberance here.

There's a weird outdated feel to the album; too many of the songs feel like attempts to cross over to a rap mainstream that barely exists anymore.

Even if every one of these tracks stands as a formal experiment unto itself, after an hour or two these half-formed ideas begin to bleed indistinctly into each other, evolving into puddles of vaguely ominous aural mush.

Death Cab still sound like Death Cab, but Codes and Keys is undoubtedly the least pop record they've made since breaking through to the mainstream with their last indie-situated effort, 2003's Transatlanticism.

With its patchwork (and, as of press time, unknown) 1992 sources, the set's neither particularly representative of Young live nor particularly different from the pleasant Harvest Moon album itself (cheering and lack of backing vocals, strings and session hands aside).

The detached, semi-ironic delivery doesn't play well with the perky club beats.

They remain a surprisingly divisive band, with detractors accusing them of imitating rather than innovating. Desert Skies does absolutely nothing to answer that criticism, but it does provide a useful point against which to measure their later efforts.