Unveiled and ineffectual, Matthewson’s gripes get boring quickly. The sense that you’ve heard these songs before--or at least their frameworks and tricks--doesn’t help.

One-note? Perhaps, but the note is hypnotic. There is much to be said for an album that is simply exceedingly nice, like a hug or a blanket.

Lantern’s risk-taking is daring and giddy, but its favored mode, and Hudson Mohawke’s best, is hooky, crowded, rap-conscious electropop.

The record isn't the home run Boosie probably needs. It could stand to be trimmed a bit.

The chemistry between the two bands isn't so perfect that a second collaborative album would be preferable to whatever either of them has up its sleeve next. When FFS does click, though, it's a little delight.

Restless Ones establishes Heartless Bastards as a straightforward arena-rock band, one that's grown more refined with time.

Tthese four songs (plus a live rendition of "Tell Me", from the Tramp era) are messier things that fit the unclean nature of long-term severance.

Wild Nights' drab sound might have been saved if the lyrics had some life to them.

For all its blatantly ill-conceived moments, there's something charming about the sheer audacity of Derulo's often bizarre choices. Even when it falls flat, there is character here.

It's ultimately a spotty album from a guy who has released a lot of spotty albums.

Live at Carnegie Hall is the Ryan Adams Ryan Adams, the one who redefined himself at 40 years old as three things no one thought he’d ever be: reliable, consistent and a consummate people pleaser.

Like all of her best work, it finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up.

Whatever pleasure can be generated from Bellamy’s admirable melodic sense and overblown hooks is negated by Muse’s insistence that they’re profound rather than fun.

Rather than feeling stark and severe, there’s an elegant grace in the simplicity. It makes a listener lean in to find an unexpectedly warm embrace.

Chrissybaby is 16 songs long, which might be more of this particular pleasant, low-stakes mood than you need at one uninterrupted stretch.

In spite of their surprising stability, this iteration of the Fall is strangely lacking in audible camaraderie, and on Sub-Lingual Tablet, the distance between frontman and backing band feels more pronounced than ever.

While written with absolute precision and poetic skill that rivals the best rappers currently working, Chance's words tumble from his mouth effortlessly, as if he's already done with the verse by the time he recites it, looking to what's next.

Remember My Name as an album isn’t going to change lives.

Through little fault of Goatsnake’s own, listening to Black Age Blues can sometimes feel like watching wizened blues musicians play the music of their now-distant youth. The style is familiar enough to be comforting, but it’s also inherently trite and redundant.

Romanticism occurs in the distance between what might happen and what does, and listening to Before the World Was Big feels like walking through this exalted liminal space.

Now, she is after a larger quarry: the contemporary chamber ensemble. But she does not quite capture it on The Clearing.

For New Alhambra, his seventh and latest release as Elvis Depressedly, he's crafted a utopian sort of indie-pop, an ecstatic evocation of the second coming, professional wrestling, and radical positivity.

There is no doubt Peace Is the Mission will suffer some criticism from dancehall purists, those exhausted by EDM and people who hate Diplo (a hate that he has certainly worked overtime to earn), but their maturation is palpable across the album's nine tracks.

Full Communism is an album-length exercise of that responsibility. Downtown Boys have two horns and plenty of aggression in their arsenal and, as they play, they force you to acknowledge the world around you.

Much like footwork, you get the impression his music evolved to cater to the demands of athletic dancing bodies. Consequently, it makes a certain sense that attempts here to temper Shangaan Electro’s frenetic pace don’t always come off.

On Carnation, he tries and fails to be something other than himself.

This is a huge, sturdy record, built for arenas and it's richly and carefully enough constructed to endure the extensive exposure Welch's heartache is going to get over the course of this summer.

Like their peers and forebears, Valet create simple music that feels expansive. Only here, the swirl of fuzz and echo isn't an exit from terrestrial woes, just a comfortable place to take stock for a moment.