Feed Me Diamonds is best, though, when it gets emotionally heady.

The album is simply not the format for DJ Snake. The conventional song barely is. He makes tracks. Instead of being, at least, a collection of great, standalone singles, the album is riddled with ill-advised rap songs and bad ballads.

It's a singular sound that's as trying as any of the year's scarier noise records, but it's also uncompromising: a pop-music dealbreaker, even for fiscally responsible, architecturally dashing electro-pop.

When Cut Copy take a step back from the small details, forget about their perfect record collections for a few minutes and actually expose themselves as human beings, they hit on a sound that really rings true.

If you’re in the mood for a good-enough orchestral rock album that lifts and falls in all the expected ways, you might as well queue up one you haven’t heard before. Mono are doing their part to keep you in a steady supply of them.

It's hard to actually consider Welcome a bad album, mostly because it has this inexplicable likability: It's bizarrely comic without coming across as cheap irony, and it's pretty clear Pants lays down these semi-instrumental jams because he wants to have fun and make noise with some once-expensive, now-dated (and, subsequently, currently underheard) musical machinery.

While this LP is more painstaking than B'Day, the extra effort dulls any emotional wallop; "B'Day," in all its hectic glory, offered a much more vivid peek into the elusive mind of Beyoncé than Sasha Fierce, which often reads more like projection than reality.

It's jaw-dropping, certainly, and what's more, it actually works.

Their latest record has more instruments and lyrical or melodic turns than hooks to hold onto, but its problem is more like an excess of ideas than a lack of them.

Across the hour, Funeral sounds less like last rites for Wayne and more like a resurrection.

Rave Age makes you wish you were listening to other songs.

Dipping into her lower register, she stuns as a contralto. I found myself rewinding her runs on hymnal parts of “Heart on My Sleeve” and could’ve sworn I was levitating during the awe-inspiring bridge of “Pray It Away” and “Make It Look Easy.” ... The emotionally charged conversational interludes and narrative intros (“Do you ever wonder, like, who else is fucking your man?”) are out of place amid the redundant themes and mind-numbingly online songwriting.

I’d argue that 4L and Up 2 Më are bolder than anything here: Yeat’s older projects threw you into the deep end of his magma flows and fuzzy world-building and asked that you either get it or don’t. An album this safe and familiar will be great for packing out bigger concert venues but only makes his musical identity more nebulous.

It's not innovative, but it's deliberate and economic, with no filler and an inviting dose of Sly Stone-derived soul.

Rado might be derivative, but at least there’s an admirable consistency to his prodigious output.

As with nearly every R. Kelly album, sex is Untitled's raison d'être. But too often here he trips over trends.

A good deal of this album sounds like it could've been recorded by a lone foot-stomping folksinger, carrying over the intimate, around-the-kitchen-table ambience of Ebert's 2011 solo release, Alexander.

The music feels wedged between weight classes--too ridiculous to be indie rock and too ponderous and generic for Top 40 pop.

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

The songs are generally slow, samey, and sleep-inducing, and the lyrics, any language differences notwithstanding, are hard to take seriously, even for a guy who raved about I'm From Barcelona.

With a more imaginative compiler--and fewer Big Names whose fame peaked years ago-- Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited could have turned out so much different.

Like Hardcore, A Wrenched Virile Lore features 10 tracks, though it only references eight of the originals. However, even the mixes that draw from the same songs are different enough in approach and sequenced in such a way that the reappearances feel like purposeful reprises.

Fragments of Freedom is a consistent and predictable stylistic overhaul into hyphenated hipster pop for people who actually liked Cibo Matto's last album. It fits the form to a T, right down to the brief, pointless Biz Markie cameo.

At its worst, this project is just plain retarded.

Future Bible Heroes frontman Chris Ewen just isn't a Merritt-caliber composer, and this EP suffers in comparison to the Magnetic Fields.

Awe is in the ear of the beholder, sure, but after being predictably pounded into the ground for half an hour by Rodriguez-Lopez/Hill et al. and their bag of heavy tricks, it's hard to tell if we're meant to walk away impressed or oppressed.

Much of Happiness Ltd. suffers from one of the cardinal sins of radio-ready rock: stuffing unmemorable verses between overblown choruses.

The aesthetics of her songs with Hershenow remain timid and careful.