As a chronicle of living with mental illness, Ye is Kanye West’s most unsparing work to date.
With Good Thing, Bridges brings his classicist R&B chops into the current century—with mixed results.
In shedding her science-fiction persona, Janelle Monáe has ended up making a great pop album.
For most of Evil Spirits, the Damned sounds like the same band they were 35 years ago.
Bible of Love is a stultifying two discs of competent but generic Christian platitudes.
Listen closely enough to Both Sides of the Sky, the third Jimi Hendrix collection released this decade, and you may hear the bottom of a barrel being scraped.
American Utopia is the sound of one of pop’s idiosyncratic voices continuing to follow his wayward muse.
For better or worse, Little Dark Age is an album for its time: moody, backward-looking, a little depressed.
Timberlake is more comfortable with airbrushed blue-eyed soul than with anything involving a pedal steel.
Culture II is both bigger and bolder than its predecessor but with an inevitably diminished impact.
War & Leisure is less of a stylistic about-face than it is a subtle and deliberate course correction.
The Visitor finds Neil Young tilting again at the political windmills of the present day.
The Ramones’s Rocket to Russia is a pure punk album, in the late-1977 sense of the word.
The beauty of Jones’s voice projects an optimism that is, in these traumatic times, a balm for the soul.
The band performs the right incantations and brings forth old demons from the abyss.
The album makes one yearn for an era when there seemed to be more room for genuinely ambitious, artful Top 40 pop.
Heartbreak on a Full Moon can only be read as hubris, an inability to edit, or simply poor impulse control.
Sleigh Bells remain both confined and defined by their early novelty as the twee pop group with the loud guitars.
Bootsy Collins’s World Wide Funk delivers pure, unpretentious funk, overflowing with the joy of creation.
Enjoyment of The Saga Continues will depend on one’s tolerance for Wu-Tang at its most generic.