Both would-be singles, “Fever” and the Bas-featuring “Stealth Mode,” feel like half a record abandoned before being rounded into its ideal shape. (The former is slinking and still mostly effective, especially after it recovers from a clumsy opening line that for a second recalls his infamous, room-clearing verse on Jeremih’s “Planez.”) Elsewhere, attempts at verbal pyrotechnics become indistinct.

The main issue here is a distinct and debilitating lack of craft.

Unfortunately, on Planta, they only seem half-awake.

The Ruby Suns quickly lose their nerve and hooks about halfway through Christopher, and it simply becomes a brighter, albeit favorable, take on Fight Softly's mushier innards.

Yes, the bassline on “Water” is one of the best I’ve heard in a long time, but a moment like this feels like a consolation, not a highlight. Kanye albums used to stretch our perspectives and imaginations. Now they illuminate the contours of his increasingly shrunken world.

In the City is proof that you can co-opt the most retarded aspects of 80s corporate rock and still not be any fun.

Sasha and Digweed appear to be suggesting that, along with setting an NYC club aflame, they can also bore you to tears in your living room.

A casual, slightly-weirder-than-usual release with one very good R&B song (that's reportedly been kicking around in his vault for a while), stranded in the album's penultimate slot.

Dangerous Dreams is plagued by a pervasive feeling of been there/done that, and the album ultimately sounds like the same two or three tracks on repeat.

There’s no emotional throughline on The Black Album, no grand statement that continues from one track to the next. The songs never blur together, but they also don’t tell a story as the sum of their parts. A sense of tonal whiplash ensues, and the album’s highlights are best enjoyed in isolation.

What they lack in self-awareness they more than make up for in rigid self-consciousness, failing to make any fun or campy choices to lift these songs out of a morass of the worst impulses of Rush and Cream. The back half of the album alternates between the ignorable and unforgivable.

With Witness’ confounding combination of songwriting sloppiness and sleepiness, broad strokes are the really the best Perry can hope for these days.

Defiantly sappy, Silence Is Easy survives mostly on Walsh's oddly graceful singing. Unfortunately, the music on the whole is prosaic, even boring at times.

Too much of it is an ill-advised cultural safari that’s too weird to fly but too monied to fail. But where it succeeds, Reincarnated forces you to forget the principal ridiculousness of the enterprise, and that is no small feat.

Business Casual is fierce and competent, and evinces the rippling of powerful musical muscles. But its affectations are so grating that it's tough to make it through it all in a single listen.

Beyond stripping Pop of his personality, the most offensively bad [tracks] on Faith are the ones that have no shame in hiding their financial intentions.

Slim still loves blabbing repetition and dropping yapping vocal samples into the gobs of the dull, and this helps make Palookaville less a reformation than merely his latest and quite bland big beat manifesto.

Where Deacon infuses his day-glo riots with brainy intent, EAR PWR recycle the worst tendencies of electroclash: the lackluster rapping and willful inanity. It's frustrating because there's ample evidence that EAR PWR aren't compensating for being shitty at music, they're just dumbing down.

The debut's boring, not awful, but until the band stops sounding like they have a hundred cooler things to do than be in a studio, it's hard to imagine them as anything more than surf muzak.

Kanye’s tenth album arrives barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.

For All the Dogs caps off a recent persona that sounds like none of it’s fun to him—and he’s dragging us along to be the company of his misery.

Try as he may, Tomlinson has not quite progressed from featured voice to solo artist. For all the major changes in his life, his music seems to be stuck in place. You can take the boy out of the boyband, but not the boyband out of the boy.

Listening to Matinée straight through is exhausting, like being trapped in the kitchen at a college party while someone with curiously wide eyes Explains It All to you.

Outgunned is a mess of unfocused energy and uncomfortably irrelevant sonics, an odd mix of cartoonish immediacy and tired youth-cult ideas that would be the perfect soundtrack to Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie: The Movie.

The machines on 120 Days II are so holographically vivid that the human element can't help but seem wan.

It’s pointedly brief--11 songs, 39 minutes and with a scope every bit as limited.

For all that the band straddles the worlds of dance and guitars, the arrangements on Battle Lines are incredibly tame, as if the duo mistakenly joined the blandest of electronics with the politest of indie rock.

It was a mistake for VHS or Beta to subjugate their dance beat into a perfunctory structure for the guitars to smash against; the riffs sound like they're there for their own sake, biding their time and waiting for a moment of catchiness that never really arrives.