Words fail ("I'm dying to be living"). They fail early ("You could say we're changing formats" on opener "Final Broadcast"). They fail often ("Through our cell phones we shout"; "Who are you holding when you're sleeping next to me?"; "Ignorance was so blissful"). They fail spectacularly ("This distance is getting tough"), and best of all they're posted.

Native To is packed with well-executed, hummable stuff, but it wears thin quickly.

Unexpected Victory's sound is too lousy--and its stakes too low--to ever possibly live up to his past glories.

Every song on the album is crafted with clinical meticulousness, its production clean as a whistle, but like a flawlessly constructed garment lacking in inventive design it ultimately falls short.

A 19-minute EP bookended with the Billy Ray Cyrus remix and the original version of “Old Town Road”--he opens himself up to the criticism that “Old Town Road” bypassed. Each new song on 7 is an attempt at stumbling into another lighthearted hit. ... For the entirety of 7, it’s unclear if Lil Nas X actually likes music.

Too much of the album either throws the group into truly unflattering contexts or returns them to the hamster-wheel formalism they’ve been running into the ground for years now.

They have general technical proficiency and a knack for a good riff, but listening to them is nevertheless a chore-- and a boring, repetitive one at that.

Helium moves with the numbing pace of a stubborn hangover, and its drums have the grain and snap of limp celery.

Climb Up is filled with an odd (for indie listeners, at least) brand of stadium-sized rock that can't quite escape the notions of cheese and bloat that accompany that term.

Despite a handful of highlights, Beauty Marks is marred by filler, moving between frothy pop-R&B and stale empowerment anthems that leave Ciara’s talents largely underused.

And while, at times, Momus constructs a bitingly clever post-modern take on folk music, Folktronic has an unfortunate tendency to choke on its own concept, rendering the album a bit hard to swallow.

It’s an enjoyable and subtly diverse listen only if you give it your undivided attention.

What we've gotten instead is a forgettable collection of fairly generic, overproduced rock songs that feel, oddly, like a put-on.

All Velvet Changes creates is a disquieting malaise that deflects any attempt to penetrate its billowy, monochromatic, meaningless contours.

As a whole, Eats Darkness feels haphazard in a way that shades into self-indulgence.

This is a decently crafted, moderately hooky, fairly vacuous power-pop album, and under the right light, you could do a whole lot worse.

Someone clinically extracts whatever trace of messy humanity made it through the first time the Bravery worked the nu-wave shtick, on their debut; Stir the Blood is a parodoxically bloodless listen.

Only the truly earless would mistake this assortment of bloated in-jokes and interminable, sub-song drones for some kind of masterpiece.

The album's bluesy tenor does wonders to mitigate its shortcomings, something that the debut's spacious environs couldn't do. With Fool, the problems mostly reside in the words that Bones sings.

Replicants' problems extend beyond vocal limitations; the real issue is that, at 13 tracks and 40 minutes, this record plays like a shiftlessly uninteresting, self-parodic slab of warm-in-2010 pastiche.

Where the weight of expectation and precedence get to have a say, this feels like not just a failure, but a heartbreaker.

As catchy as much of Rules is, that hesitancy brings about an imbalance of mood.

While the first half of the record is promising, however, the band loses steam toward the end.

Born is his blandest, most non-descript offering yet. Even the so-so Have You Fed the Fish? seems like a masterpiece in comparison to the downtrodden piano banalities that slosh all over this latest nadir.

It's good to hear him still recording, even if he's deeply entrenched himself in his own wheelhouse and barely has a single surprising moment in the album's whole hour. But if the album never existed, nobody's life would be much poorer for it-- possibly even Devin's.

Few releases have been as baldly transparent and destined for ubiquity as No.6, which has all the conspicuous mining of a Drake album, but very little of the finesse or cultural fluency.

Wilson’s chipper duets never reach equilibrium. Either his presence feels underutilized--the syrupy "On the Island" with She & Him, in which his vocals are scant--or the guests feel shoehorned into musty production that undermines their own charisma.

Like Skinner's recent work, instead of woodshedding on the mixtape circuit like smarter and hungrier rappers, we're treated to lightweight albums that are three years in the making and still feel like a rushed jumble of bad ideas that just get worse as they go along.