While they're still a talented band, you can't help but wonder how much more memorable they'd be if they applied as broad a sense of dynamics to their albums as their labelmates.

Feeding People's energy is abundant and undeniable, but all over the place on Island Universe.

Drillmatic is plagued by the tracklist bloat typical of the streaming era. Neither fun nor profound, the album is almost impressive in the sense of collecting so much talent to create something so mediocre.

Harris reduces pop's limitless possibilities to one-joke self-parody, his youth his most distinguishing characteristic, an unremembered yesterday always more vibrant than today.

Form & Control immediately shows the band's strengths and their weakness: It's a smooth, utterly precise study of the formal elements that make disco and electro-pop tick, but with far too little of the body heat that actually gets that stuff going.

Though Time is never less than competent, its biggest problem is an unfortunate lack of personality.

A cautionary tale of what happens when a "hit record" forgets to actually include hits.

Dead Media works on occasion, but primarily when Hefner revert to the traditional pop trio format of bass, guitar, drums.

There are a few quality tracks among these 16-- enough for a pretty good EP-- but this is an 80-minute album with at least an hour of stuff on it that sounds at best like studio outtakes.

So this record's creative and artistic value is pretty much nil--in fact it only just hits competent.

Far more aggressive than any other record in their catalog - perhaps a preemptive response to charges of getting old and mellow. Unfortunately, that leaves the record rather homogenous.

The Lips’ Fwends are so intent on tripping up the songs’ rhythmic momentum and weirding up the basic melodies with hammy vocals that they ultimately reinforce their sturdiness. They’re trashing all the furniture in the house, but not bulldozing any walls to open up new vantages.

It's all third-rate bar band stuff.

Sounds overproduced and underdeveloped.

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.

On Trágame Tierra, Bates is both audacious and original, two qualities that are hard to fault. But in the absence of focus, listening to Trágame Tierra can feel like looking for dinner in a candy store: there's a lot of brightly-colored packaging to take in but not much you can really sink your teeth into.

Lateness never does much to prove Clare and his producers were on the same page (let alone reading from the same book).

His art is 144,487 times less remarkable than his first week sales numbers would have you believe.

The songs here are serviceable, thanks to 2 Chainz’s ear and charisma. But they’re more like templates than novel creations, far from his days of sampling Hall & Oates or trading verses with Kendrick Lamar over a Pharrell beat seemingly constructed from cutlery and trash cans.

On several songs, Johansson gets lost in Sitek's swelling production, which may suggest a weak interpreter or a dearth of vocal personality but adds to the album's pervading dreaminess.

Despite good intentions, the wincing lyrics border on pandering and even exploitative, revealing little in the way of insight or palpable compassion

In a way, this is representative of the album--it's got all the right moves in place, but MSTRKRFT's handle on content is still slightly lagging behind their facility for tone and form.

He gathers the biggest names in rap, then has them make the same music they’d record on their own anyway. Sometimes staying out of the way works—the album’s first two singles were just Drake solo tracks with Khaled’s name on them. But the returns are never more than the sum of the talent involved.

One senses a massively missed opportunity, a chance for exploration blown by Jarre's insatiable need to make everything bigger, more impressive.

These are pleasant songs, but Twain and Lange’s perfectionism meant even the weakest cuts on The Woman in Me and Come on Over were weapons-grade pop.

There’s a very palatable poppy sheen on all of these tracks: Glitterbug is packed with anthemic hooks and synth pulses that sound like they were composed solely to lure Lexus.

There's something bold in the smaller scope of The Endless River, but it proves to be one of the few Pink Floyd releases that sounds like a step backwards, with nothing new to say and no new frontiers to explore.

The overall stylistic consistency that made Listennn unusual now makes for an exhausting hour.