It’s a long slog to get to “Guilty Conscience 2,” but there are moments of genuine inspiration along the way.

The Hamilton Mixtape has managed to drain away the edge and danger from a Broadway show, a curious inversion and just more proof that you can’t Xerox Miranda’s inimitable work.

All this pomp and pap is unfortunate, because the moments on the album where Halsey zeroes in on the concrete realities of her life, as opposed to her own ideas of how others perceive her, are some of her most interesting songs in a long while.

Levine’s voice murmurs and glints in the corners of the arrangement, and the total effect is exactly as pleasingly immaculate and numbing as all soft rock should be.

Raw Data Feel might be the most confident album Everything Everything have ever released, but in a way that feels deeply hubristic. If this album were a person, it’d be that pompous, motormouthed philosophy undergraduate who treats seminars like extended soliloquies.

Even when A Head Full of Dreams hints at experimentation, it inevitably drifts back onto predictable paths.

With Witness’ confounding combination of songwriting sloppiness and sleepiness, broad strokes are the really the best Perry can hope for these days.

The problem lies with the songs themselves, which simply lack outstanding or memorable hooks: Most are content to meander behind a curtain of big rock guitars and bigger rock cliches, infinitely repeating themselves or, in some cases, never saying much of anything at all.

Pinewood Smile has got more jokes than ever, and it’s the first time the Darkness don’t evoke 1974 or 1984 so much as 2003--and they’ve never sounded more dated.

A Complicated Woman’s wide-reaching, mollifying remit feels like Taylor trying to be too much to too many people, to live up to the validation that her last album occasioned. Its best moments are the most personal.

Most of these songs aren’t offensive on their own. .... The cumulative effect, though, is exhausting, a daisy-chain of shaky half-measures that doesn’t even feel particularly committed to being depressing.

The project's shortcomings are even more pronounced this time out since The Dark Leaves sounds like it's striving and somewhat succeeding in being the band's most rhythmically vital record.

4/876 is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises.

The band has... streamlined their songwriting, whittling away the unconventional turns and multiple pre-choruses that made their earlier material more interesting, leaving emotionally aerodynamic compositions free of atonal snags or polyrhythmic left-turns.

Everyone needs to have a doomed romantic stage, but Lloyd's is going on twenty years.... The lyrical juvenilia is a bit of a shame, because this is a solid collection of pop songs otherwise.

Structural over-tinkering is endemic on Neck of the Woods, an album that Silversun Pickups claim was inspired by horror movies; if so, they're the kind of horror movies where you wait a long time for twists you can see coming a mile away, with the visceral impact all but diluted by a glossy CGI sheen.

More than Lightbody’s lack of cogency, the imperious tone burdens Wildness.

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.

This isn't the Latyrx that won over backpackers and Cali-funk fans back in '97--far from it. It's not much of a reunion, that's for sure, and sixteen years is a long time to wait for a sophomore slump.

O.N.I.F.C., his second major label album, is a resounding misstep, and it's the first sign that Khalifa's unwavering focus may be getting swallowed up by the haze.

Try as he may, Tomlinson has not quite progressed from featured voice to solo artist. For all the major changes in his life, his music seems to be stuck in place. You can take the boy out of the boyband, but not the boyband out of the boy.

What truly separates Daybreaker from other Orton efforts is its lack of emotional resonance-- moments where Beth just belts it out or where she actually seems engaged with the songs she's singing.

Whether or not they've produced anything that justifies the time away they could have spent producing something better, more consequential, by themselves? Well, the jury's still out there.

Broder is better at details than broad strokes, and Ditherer contains some excellent ones; they're just buried in the piecemeal and decidedly indelicate songwriting.

Her pop exists to exploit and sand off edges, packaging esotericism for the masses. It’s just that on Madame X, she is not merely dining out on other cultures; she’s whipping around drive-thrus.

It’s hard to imagine the wild-maned early incarnation of Kings of Leon even wanting to listen to a band like this, let alone play in one. In truth, their current iteration doesn’t sound all that thrilled about it, either.

The most successful [alternative versions] are the ones that drastically reinvent their material, recasting, for instance, rock songs as synth-pop songs, synth-pop songs as rock songs, or busy twee-punk as slightly less busy acoustic twee-punk. But Supermoon never takes those kinds of leaps.

Even more denatured and opaque than the soupy Melbourne, Sunshine Redux is self-produced to a gooey, garish, gritty and barely mobile gel.