Coldplaya-hatas will loathe Keane; most others will just be insulted.

War Stories is the most unadventurous, most typically rock UNKLE release to date.

Twain’s team of co-writers and producers have past credits with Halsey, Justin Bieber, Pitbull, Fred again.., and Iggy Azalea, and too often the material they’ve assembled for Twain feels like third-tier scraps intended for other clients. Queen of Me’s bland and plasticine arrangements are a far cry from the energy and sizzle of hits like “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.”

The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2 is not only superfluous, it actually erases some of the gains made by its predecessor as it plays into the worst trappings of self-indulgence.

It’s an album that seems to exist primarily to be disliked, and it couldn’t seem prouder of itself for achieving that sad goal. Credit Joan of Arc for this, though: 20 years in, they’re still finding new ways to alienate and infuriate.

With much of Certified Lover Boy, Drake seems to be doing what he thinks Drake would do, and ticking the box is taking its toll.

While some of the album's songs are terrifically cloying, I can't call it a disappointment; it's more a case of diminishing returns.

Shobaleader One's not tuneful enough to pass for pop, not funky enough to satisfy a club, and lacks the wildstyle (if sometimes infuriating) excess of Squarepusher's other records. Whether hard or soft, there's nothing here that you can't hear executed with more joie de vivre by a half-dozen Frenchmen.

Power and Passion is blighted by a rapper who seems too distracted by his woes to sit down and write more than a couple of full songs.

On Sorry 4 the Wait 2, he's enjoying being Lil Wayne again, for better or worse. It also feels like rapping is once more a choice rather than a contractual obligation, which, at this point, might be the single greatest compliment one can pay Lil Wayne.

The edge that sparked Spank Rock's best moments back in the day either isn't there or flails around without direction.

By the end of the album, Tricky returns to acting on his worst impulses, stumbling through hackneyed sonics and wincing lyrics.

With their staid textures, the songs tend to blend into one another, sounding at best like a spiritless hodgepodge of About a Boy's weaker moments.

It works fine as a stopgap or as background music. It sounds like license-free 2010s trap, for which there always seems to be a market. But it is so ordinary, so uniquely uninspiring that it makes it difficult to imagine a solo work from Quavo that would truly grip our attention (or our club nights or car stereos).

So Entertainment might be music for their performances, it might be for others' dance performances, but it's not for the dance floor.

Dead Petz is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can.

Clearly, these boys can't grasp the concept of "say when."

On Thank You, Diana Ross’ musical star shines strong after six decades of inspiration, offering signs of renaissance even as she teases tender farewells.

Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, the debut LP by the London folk-pop quartet, bites its best sensitive-indie forebears and then pukes up all the most superficial chunks.

Listeners looking for lyrical meaning will still be disappointed, searching in vain for hidden significance in these nonsensical love song lines. A word of advice: It's best to just accept his words as conduits for his dreamy voice, and give in to his charming tunes.

Calamity shows Cohen struggling to balance his twee pop tendencies with experimentation, the same thing Deerhoof mastered on The Runners Four.

On all of these songs, Nicki is dartboard focused-- she's rapping harder here than on almost anything from Pink Friday... But much of Roman Reloaded sweats with a too-big-to-fail desperation.

At times, it sounds far less like his beloved Boys of Summer 2009 so much as a simplified homage to Kompakt's more populist acts, electronic's version of a neophyte performing solo acoustic versions of Zeppelin or Radiohead at a college bar.

Explore suggests that while Park can produce listenable songs that do right by their influences, he's still an inexperienced talent in the process of finding his own voice.

The noxious muck on evidence here obscures most of what made his past music so singular.

Argos is still witty, but here his punchlines tend to be predictable, due in part perhaps to the disc's overstretched answer-song conceit.

Where the Big Pink previously sounded invincible, nearly every attempt to intellectualize or streamline their sound makes Future This come off as timid and malnourished.

A darker album, a slightly clumsier album, but an album with a strong unifying themes and a few songs worth stepping away from the bar for.