The mix here is guitars to 11, everything else to 6, as the slurring, inebriated Liam is buried under mountains of riffs for better and worse.... Familiar to Millions reheats leftovers of better songs written six years ago and force-feeds them as reminders that Oasis could once write an uplifting song. As for those looking for a compact, two-disc set of Oasis' best, it's called What's the Story Morning Glory? and Definitely Maybe-- available for the low price of $8 at your local used record shop.

Fans of Client will appreciate the more dynamic edge to City... but those without a history with the band may write it off as another limp post-electroclash exercise.

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

Beating Back the Claws of the Cold only offers fleeting glimpses of potential greatness beneath the ho-hum surface.

You get the feeling that Small Black do want to break free of their past, but they’re not always convincing at showing how badly they want it.

Where their earlier records thrived on the tension between Stollsteimer's gut-spilling confessions and the band's raucous, raw-powered attack, on Love, Hate and Then There's You, we get all the pleading, but without the violent, cathartic release.

Vile has mostly left his interest in extreme tape manipulation and soggy lo-fi charm behind him, but the Jamaica Plain EP offers a brief and fitfully pretty glance backwards.

With their harmonies and swooning vocals, they're never quite Troggs-level elemental, but these guys clearly know how to wail.

A few songs are some of Morrissey’s most engaging, exciting work of the 21st century. Other songs get your attention for the wrong reasons. ... His political musings all arrive with a crushing lack of subtlety or nuance.

Despite their best efforts, nothing on Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak is even half as interesting or poignant as the CD casing itself, and musically, the decision to focus on this album's mood and textures largely falls flat.

TRON: Legacy Reconfigured succeeds as much as most remix projects do, which is to say about 50% of the time, and without Daft Punk's name attached to the project it's doubtful it would have attracted much attention.

Now that the veil has been lifted, there’s not much on Tides End worth the price of progress.

Unfortunately, more than mediocre tracks or throaty sexual goofs, what does in Majenta is its scattershot nature. There's no flow to the way the album's sequenced, to the point where it seems purely arbitrary. Furthermore, Edgar seems so concerned about skipping between genres that he neglects to refine any one specific sound; even the strongest cuts rarely rise above "nice try."

There’s plenty Sia could do with an album entirely of Christmas originals, but too many are underwritten; there’s more consistency in the art direction than the songwriting.

Reasonable Woman, the singer’s 10th studio album, continues the trend of inconsistency. Over manicured synth arrangements and beat drops blown up to eye-watering proportions, Sia belts out self-help anthems that stick to formulaic, dated sounds. It’s outsized feel-good music with little worth feeling good about.

Call it mood music for the mindless.

The formula’s limitations are evident on Father of Asahd: There are plenty of voices but no clear message or intention.

Bigger Love is rife with this feel-good energy, buoyed by his stately voice and easygoing charm, but beneath its positive exterior is an emptiness that’s hard to ignore.

After a few tracks, it becomes increasingly more difficult to ignore the pathetic lyrics and boring flows-- even the production seems redundant, bland, and horribly imitative and regressive.

It feels like a pleasant yet unremarkable switch back to the past, the sound of Air staring into a half-empty well of ideas, on the verge of becoming their own tribute band.

Too often, it’s a simulacrum of passion: feel-good house music as daily affirmation. Unlike the broad scope of their videos, their songs feel squashed, like an inspirational message made for Instagram’s tiny window.

Grrr... seems transcribed from a distant memory or read from the pages of a script.

Uncanney Valley seems too bent on interrupting serious moments with corny jokes and bewildering asides to say much of anything about anyone else.

Across the album, his voice is helplessly buried beneath vocal processing and mixed conspicuously low, as if to purposely obscure his lyrics. These effects aren’t new to the Voidz, but on Like All Before You, they dominate, obscuring any humanity in Casablancas’ vocals.

[A] disappointing release.

Toying with sound and rhythm, noise and melody, Square is less minimalist than Hope, more fractured than Second.

This record meanders through a set of passable songs that ultimately decline to move or enthrall you.

Dolphins is both hypnotic and staggering at times, but it lacks the extraordinary stamina that those earlier Mi Ami long-players kept from end to end.