For all the album's lovely sounds, the bulk of the actual songs on Writers Without Homes are not particularly memorable.

What For Stars lack in originality they overcompensate for in emotionality.

Trapped Animal is nothing more than an odds-and-sods record being passed off as "business as usual" by a band that doesn't seem to know what that business is anymore.

Hoyas, sounds like a soundtrack for an ice-slicked, insomniac winter drive. Blending mumbled folk and bleary-eyed blips, lead-off track "Two Angles" sounds like the Postal Service might have if Jimmy Tamborello's tapes had gotten lost in the mail and accidentally ended up on Phil Elverum's doorstep.

The most enjoyable moments feel like controlled chaos. Redd’s songs used to be looser and more free-flowing. He does at least sound more composed. That’s to his credit as a person but it’s not to his advantage as an artist.

This album still falls way short of what it could be, and I have to wonder how this even happened.

Okay, it's not really very good at all.

So, forgive Corgan his infinite lyrical badness, but know that infinity's a lot to forgive.

Their experiments don't always yield useful results-- the downcast, acoustic-guitar-powered "Partners in Crime" comes awkwardly decorated with free-form piano rolls that trip up rather than propel the song's momentum. But there are moments when CSS find a way to successfully evolve without alienating their base.

Make-Up is a Lie shows signs of progress and signs of regression; artful touches and clunking gaffs; soaring tunes and leaden lyrics.

He’s settled into the comfort zone of songs that will haunt weddings for years to come, like “2step,” in which he raps about “Two-steppin’ with the woman I love.” Even at his most passionate, Sheeran sounds as threatening as a meringue peak. ... Sheeran’s reliance on clichés is especially unfortunate during the album’s back half, which is where he placed a majority of the songs about death and fatherhood.

Vig’s masterly production gives the album a seasoned gleam and punch, but his period-specific details only exacerbate the weary undercurrent on Tenterhooks; it makes the album feel stagnant.

No matter what their exteriors, Keane still seem incapable of anything other than the most heavy-handed gestures, peddling the same populist mock uplift that leaves you feeling pushed when it's meant to move.

It's sort of a catch-22 that Editors can write songs sticky enough to be memorable in unfortunate ways.

The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City is too harmless to hate, but it’s hard to feel much of anything about it—which is a fatal flaw for a band that leverages an uncanny ability to rid people of inhibitions against their better judgment.

Interpol might still be an exceptional act, but it’s a chore to have to squint this hard to see it.

A few good hooks, in fact, would go a considerable way toward redeeming Blank's largely forgettable debut, I Love You.

If Liam seems hamstrung as a rocker on BE, at least he’s showing more promise as a balladeer.

Certainly there's more to Costa than a one-man acoustical jam, even if his pleasure zone isn't far from the AM Gold dial.

The band's music is spot-on for soundtrack work precisely because it's moody yet unobtrusive, evocative of something, yet noncommittal enough to conceivably fit any emotional tableaux.

There is a very good album here-- you just have to work for it.

If Never Gonna Touch the Ground is less a party album and more an album as party--self-contained, relentlessly upbeat, rowdy, self-celebratory--too many of these songs come across as kegs of near beer.

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.