Torres takes over production and plays most of the instruments on her fourth studio album, “Silver Tongue” (Merge). It was a good call, her strengths as a songwriter, singer and musician fully realized.

Some of the shaggy verve of old has been sacrificed, and the latter half of the album lacks the emotional specificity of Alex’s best work. A few quieter acoustic tracks, augmented by understated strings and horns, echo the singer’s work in his alter-ego project, Quiet Slang, and provide some welcome textural variety.

Overall, though, the songs don’t measure up. ... And it’s clear why. The master songwriter simply ran out of time.

“Our Pathetic Age” addresses big topics — social media alienation, nefarious government oppression, the suppression of individuality — but refuses to knuckle under. By breaking sounds loose from the strictures of time and genre, DJ Shadow implies that the music still runs free.

Songs melt into one another without losing their identities. Kiwanuka’s narrators drift through a world torn by violence and racism and find purpose. His voice remains plaintive, understated, deeply textured, but there’s a resolve that wasn’t as evident on his earlier work.

The gospel-singer moments (the stirring intro to “God Is”) and the verses by the Clips’ Pusha T and No Malice on “Use This Gospel” provide most of the musical sparks, with West allowing message to trump musicality. ... Otherwise, this sounds like a walk-through to West’s next destination, a tentative step that feels neither accomplished nor particularly memorable.

Though Battles might be viewed from a distance as a potentially daunting listen, “Juice B Crypts” provides multi-faceted kicks, whether on the dance floor, through the headphones, or riding, screaming with joy, on a rollercoaster.

It distills what has made Trupa Trupa a must-see in past years at music conferences such as South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.

The album plays like an extended mood piece that bends and drifts, with a shortage of the crushing hard-rock crescendos and riffs that defined the band’s work on “Lateralus” (2001) and before.

The voices and the hooks can’t easily be denied, and Shires injects some playful sassiness on “Don’t Call Me.” But the potential for what could’ve been a harder-hitting roadhouse-style album largely goes unrealized.

Things inevitably drift, but beneath the surface in the best songs there is a toughness and a newfound resilience.

At a distance, the album can feel like an ambient mood piece with some pretty moments rising from the mist. Listen closely, however, and something changes. The album becomes a meditation on pain and wonder, an apparent duality that Cave’s narrator turns into an acceptance of what it means to live.

Though it encompasses traditional elements, “Ode to Joy” falls on the quirkier side of the Wilco spectrum, an album that prizes subtlety and intimacy over immediacy and dynamics.

Distortion-saturated guitars, synthesizers squealing like tea kettles and tribal drums give country tradition a swift kick in the back side. This carnage doesn’t belong to a genre, it’s more like a feeling: Side 2 of Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s “Rust Never Sleeps,” ZZ Top demos after three cases of Tequila in a Texas roadhouse, a hurricane.

Her solo debut, “Jaime” (ATO), breaks ground sonically and lyrically. It’s both more personal and daring, steeped in ‘60s and ‘70s soul-funk-R&B but with a rules-are-meant-to-be-broken twist.

A breezy immediacy wafts through “Dance Through It,” in which a woman steps through a minefield of turmoil, care-free as long as the music’s on. But the album’s vibe is best captured by “Under a Smile,” a slow-burn beauty in which a drifter finds solace in a world that seems to be unraveling. The gentle refrain builds, and one voice melts into a choir.

Even though the 33-minute album comes off as slight, Pop still manages to reaffirm his gift for integrating seemingly opposed impulses.

The 10 tracks emerge from a web of interlocking melodies, with horns, strings, keyboards and guitar weaving counterpoint lines. It never feels overstuffed, because the rhythm section focuses on subtle swing rather than power.

His subject matter is explicit and personal, the album a song cycle brimming with ghosts – four siblings who died tragically young. ... He narrators in these songs are more like a collection of lost voices, including that of Saadiq himself.

An album where the filler and the nuggets struggle for supremacy. ... Yet even those indifferent to Swift’s charms since she emerged as a teen-pop hitmaker in 2006 would probably acknowledge that she’s got a knack for writing hooks, and there are plenty of them on “Lover.”

Much of “The Center Won’t Hold” doesn’t sound like the old Sleater-Kinney, which is precisely the point. Brownstein and Tucker prefer to go charging into the future, but at the expense of some of the very attributes that made them so compelling in the first place.

These songs conflate his newfound responsibilities as a husband and father with memories of childhood innocence, a mix that humanizes the rapper even as his career transcends music.

There are a couple of less-inspired contributions, notably the glossy country-pop “You’re My Love,” which Kenny Rogers recorded in 1986. But the overriding impression is wonderment: Prince was on such a roll that he was giving away tracks that could’ve provided the backbone for at least another terrific album of his own during this era, music that ranges from the funk mischief of “Jungle Love” to the falsetto tenderness of “Baby, You’re a Trip.”

Help Us Stranger brims with unapologetic rock songs that mine ‘60s and ‘70s signifiers without getting stuck there. Yet it’s the ballads that give the album its unexpected emotional heft.

The large-scale orchestrations rarely complement the mood. Instead, they barge in, a river of syrup that drowns the sense of betrayal in “Stones,” gushes through “The Wayfarer” and inspires some of Springsteen’s most egregious Gene Pitney-style over-emoting in “Sundown” and the disastrously overdone “There Goes My Miracle.”

Their largely instrumental compositions, for all their technical prowess, have always been visceral, less about conjuring air-guitar solos than melodies you can hum a week after hearing them. They double down on that approach on “Nighttime Stories.”

The arrangements only rarely bring out the drama in these interactions. The intimacy becomes wearying, with spoken-word interludes, interstitial pieces and hushed vocals stretching the 16 songs to 64 minutes, an experiment in search of a direction. The most radical album of the National’s career is also its most disappointing.

Just like these artists [poet Nikki Giovanni, singer Eartha Kitt, blues legend Muddy Waters, funk rebel Betty Davis, jazz greats Miles Davis and Sun Ra, literary icons James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Octavia Butler, poet Sonia Sanchez, iconoclastic painter Basquiat] resisted being boxed in, so does Woods’ music. These are songs that elude genre--a blend of trip-hop, rap/spoken word, R&B, gospel.

It revels in pleasantness, peppered with quirky but cheerful touches that veil the mild unease expressed in the lyrics. In many ways, Father of the Bride sounds more like a singer-songwriter album centered on Vampire-in-chief Ezra Koenig rather than the interaction of a band.

With relatively strain-free production that sprinkles orchestral textures across folk-rock arrangements, Bird also shows an affinity for lifting the emotional temperature at lower volume levels.

Over 11 songs in 33 minutes, Lizzo rarely lets up, a relentless assault that favors excess verging on camp over subtlety.

The follow-up amplifies the hooks, widens the scope, deepens the wordplay.

The Mekons thread humor and poignancy through songs that crackle, veer, swoop and combust.

There’s loneliness, heartache and regret mixed with more than a pinch of decadence in these songs. The boozy, druggy indulgences match the haziness of the best songs, the self-medication of a generation of Los Angeles kids raised on broken families and bittersweet relationships.

Nick Waterhouse (Innovative Leisure) occasionally comes off as a little too clean and polite. But when he loosens his tie a bit, Waterhouse brings a spark to his songs that transcends era and genre.

Though the songs are broken up into two- and three-minute arrangements, they seamlessly blend with the interludes to create a continuous mood piece designed to be absorbed in one 38-minute listen. In contrast to the more traditional song structures and insinuating melodies on “A Seat at the Table,” the new album lacks a signature tune. Only the reggae-flavored playfulness of “Binz” cuts through the haze on the first few listens, though shimmering moments of beauty flutter to the surface throughout.

That sense of surprise, the risk-taking of an artist daring to dig for truth, no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable it might be, isn’t something to be taken for granted. That it informs every song suggests that “Crushing” is likely to become one of the year’s enduring albums.

A carefully integrated mood piece, and the mood is bleak.

“Sugar” carved out a path to the dancefloor, but it also made Khan sound like a heavily filtered singer-for-hire as she belted out the hook. The song anchors “Hello Happiness,” and the remaining six tracks are essentially more of the same, with Khan’s voice rarely in the forefront. Her vocals become just another texture in stretches of the title track. ... “Too Hot” provides the sole exception. ... It’s terrific.

Beneath the energetic exterior, a steely resolve informs the songs.

Rather than singing from inside the darkness, he steps back and tries to find glimmers of hope and, dare it be said, happiness. The dozen songs offer a more forgiving perspective on time, memory and the past and how to live with and move beyond it.

Rogers is listed as coproducer throughout, but her distinctiveness only comes through when Kurstin and some of his other high-profile production accomplices (Kid Harpoon, Ricky Reed) take the day off. ... In contrast, Kurstin--with Rogers listed as a co-conspirator--swamps many of the remaining tracks in virtual choirs of wordless backing vocals and squiggling, squirming keyboard and synthesizer textures.

At times in the past, Gunn’s songs felt like they were skimming the surface of multiple genres. On The Unseen in Between, the guitarist more fully submerges himself--and by extension, his listeners--in his most personal songs yet.

The tension between Van Etten’s melodies and Congleton’s sometimes chaotic sonic coloring makes for a bracing listen on the album’s best tracks.

Bowie at his best was both a crowd-pleaser and provocateur, a pop visionary and an avant-garde subversive. The crowd-pleaser is on full-force display at Glastonbury 2000, but the facets of his stage persona that made him the most unsettling of rock stars are nowhere to be found.

He makes the 11 songs on Warm (dBpm Records) sound effortless, sprinkled with Byrds-gone-country twang and touches of ambient dreaminess and acid-tinged atmospherics.

Bedroom jams, cameos and gimmicks pad the album’s second half. Paak resorts to a corny-sounding Jamaican patois on “Left to Right,” a cheesy saxophone disrupts “Cheers,” and Snoop Dogg appears like the avuncular ghost of G-funk’s past on “Anywhere.” After raising the bar with “Malibu,” Paak doesn’t quite reach the same heights this time.

Her first album in four years, the singer navigates the uncertainty of today. It toggles between stark reality and more abstract images, sometimes blending them in ways enhanced by the production.

Though the album is less immediate than “Body Talk,” the choruses not as insistent, it exudes a hypnotic pull nonetheless: this is a gentler brand of body music about absence and need.

Greta Van Fleet now adds its name to the list of Zep disciples who have made albums that sound kinda, sorta and sometimes exactly like its primary influence. If nothing else, the quartet has demonstrated that guitar-rock can still be popular with a young audience that either hasn’t heard of Led Zeppelin, or prefers Greta’s version to their grandparents’ original.

As self-effacing and understated as Noname can appear, the weight of her songs and words eventually can’t be denied.

The vulnerability is one of the album’s most endearing features. It skirts the-great-man-stares-into-the-abyss-of-mortality melodrama that has become a late-career-album cliche for many of McCartney’s peers. Instead it presents a plainspoken realism, an earthiness in keeping with his working-class upbringing.

It’s a microcosm of Brexit England and Trump America, a distillation of pressure points that becomes audible with the ominous clickety-clacking drums and bass that usher in the staggering “Colossus.” And yet Talbot’s narrators find a way to rise above, and the songs turn strangely celebratory just when things seem to be bottoming out.

[“If You Really Love Nothing” is] one of Interpol’s best recent songs, but its standard proves difficult to maintain on what is in many ways a typically hit-and-miss latter-day Interpol album.

Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Fulks wrote the bulk of the songs, sang, played guitar and banjo and produced, all in service to Lewis, who sounds as if she’s having a blast.

Shires’ fifth album, is in some ways an attempt to bust down some of the cliches that inevitably attach themselves to an artist stereotyped in that way (acoustic, folk, introspective, sad). And it does the job well. Shires’ way with words is still very much intact.

About half the album falls into a bland exercise in proficiency for these rock lifers, flavored by horns and saxophone that sound tacked on.

The California quintet is as comfortable submerging itself in cheesy beauty as it is in conjuring mayhem, all in service to the neo-poetic lyrics of singer George Clarke. That boundary-free approach makes the band’s fourth album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (Anti), both a divisive and energizing listen.

If anything, Bon Voyage is even stranger than its predecessor, seven songs splashed in psychedelic colors.

Women as underdogs, history as patriarchy, nature as kindling for civilization’s bonfire--there’s an anger percolating beneath many of these songs, yet the hard medicine goes down smoothly thanks to the ease of the arrangements.

About half the album has West as a role player on tracks that suggest a theater scene, with a handful of voices playing characters (quite possibly all living inside West’s brain). The album moves from spoken-word monologues to more expansive musical settings that try to “take the top off (and) let the sun come in.”

As usual, there’s a lot more going on than first meets the ear.

Barnett isn’t necessarily trying to reinvent rock with her songwriting. Instead, she strives to reveal something about herself within the context of relatively straight-up verse-chorus songs. Her playing is rarely flashy, but it is devastatingly efficient, a procession of riffs, fills and sculpted feedback that stamps her as a--here’s that word again--modest master of rock guitar.

Friedberger’s economical way with language, the way she can pack complex emotions into the space of a few lines, testifies to her craftsmanship. Though its origins are relatively modest--a woman alone with her thoughts and a cheap keyboard--Rebound doesn’t sound like a bedroom record.

It’s a rawer, less elaborate work than its predecessors, yet still hugely ambitious.

This is the kind of record that preschoolers would find catchy enough to sing along with, accompanied by their grandparents. And yet, the wry, trippy humor and image-rich wordplay often feel futuristic, in the way they conflate time and space, sometimes wondrously, sometimes darkly.

In contrast to the North Carolina songwriter’s rushed but rousing 2015 debut album, “Sidelong” (reissued last year by Chicago-based Bloodshot), Years is a more measured but no less bracing listen. Shook’s backing band, the Disarmers, holds a steady flame without letting things get out of hand.

Nashville pros help with the production and songwriting, and they keep this album from becoming quite as radical a statement as it might have been. Tracks such as “Wonder Woman” and “Velvet Elvis” drag “Golden Hour” back toward assembly-line country-pop. The singer is best when she upends convention.

As good as “No Burden” was, Historian is better: songs like short stories; sneakily hard-hitting arrangements; dreaminess and catharsis, often in the space of a few verses.

What a Time to be Alive roars.

Little Dark Age does return to some of the “form” of “Oracular Spectacular” with its greater pop accessibility, but it also embraces a less obvious and more intriguing path on several songs.

Too often, Timberlake sounds adrift.

With 10 tracks spread across a mere 36 minutes, Segall’s self-titled 2017 album functioned as an instant career overview. As the longer, less-focused sequel, Freedom’s Goblin comes off as almost too much of a good but increasingly overfamiliar thing.

The merger of a furrowed-brow intellect and hip-freeing rhythm has been a Tune-Yards constant since Garbus made her 2009 bedroom recording, “Bird-Brains.” I Can Feel you Creep into my Private Life is both more refined and yet more raw.

His most accomplished album yet.

A typically diverse, trippy ride.

Savage Young Du contains nothing less than the foundation of that towering legacy.

It’s tactile and visual as much as aural, a continuation of her richly rewarding collaboration with Venezuelan-U.K. electronic artist and producer Arca.

If anything, the songs are more dramatic than ever, making greater use of near-silence and dynamics to underline hooks and refrains.

But the Swift who used to treat her fans like confidantes instead of a marketing demographic resurfaces only as the album winds down.

On Revelations, he serves notice that his sound and vision have returned intact.

An album that turns its predecessor’s intimacy into something far more ambitious.

She drops some of the emotional armor on her fifth studio album, Masseducation, which comes off as not only one of her most ambitious works, but also her most transparent.

With each album the Detroit quartet retains its deceptively casual air while pulling triumphant moments out of the noise. It can also conjure surprising tenderness when you least expect, or turn darkly comic in one verse, and lash out in the next.

It’s a convivial though seldom revelatory collection of straight-up verse-chorus-bridge pop-rock songs.

The album gets personal, but in a more low-key way than ever before.

An album that makes a virtue of its uneasiness, its unwillingness to settle down. Homme turns his restlessness into a virtue.

The Providence, R.I., group’s third studio album, Cost of Living (Sub Pop), marks a step up in production clarity, with Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto slightly altering the band’s balance of power while retaining its not-having-it attitude.

The 73-year-old songwriter shows no sign of being at a loss for words about the dark comedy known as the human condition. He even puts a new twist on his already unconventional approach to song form.

["Creature Comfort" is] one of the album's strongest moments, matched by "Electric Blue," in which Regine Chassagne's delicate voice floats over a wistful yet hypnotic electro groove. Much of the rest struggles to stay buoyant.

Nothing is Quick in the Desert--its 14th studio recording--flexes the group's stadium-rap muscle. This was an album specifically designed to be played live, and some of the subtlety and nuance that informs Chuck D's most incisive raps is missing.

Most of the songs are not nearly as immediate [as "On Another Ocean (January/June)" and "If You Need to, Keep Time on Me"], with elaborate and often pretty arrangements that hold the listener at arm's length with too-similar tempos and sparing hooks. Pecknold clearly has a lot on his mind, but he pays a price for stuffing all his ideas into suites.

This is a personal singer-songwriter album outfitted in pop colors. Strings swoop, backing vocals become percussion beds, keyboards are smudged and distorted with dance club grime, beats ascend and then dissolve.

The singer goes on autopilot for "Jamaica Moon," a thin rewrite of his Caribbean-flavored '50s composition, "Havana Moon," and "She Still Loves You," a cousin to his forlorn "Memphis." When Berry wanders outside his songwriting safety zone, stranger sides of his personality emerge.

Booker soundtracks his anxiety with music that feels more textured and spacious than any he has made previously.

The bulk of the 14-track album is more than just a rehash of past glories. Notably, this latest incarnation of the Obsessed benefits from the cleanest production on just about any Wino-related project.

Dirty Pictures (Part 1) (Contender) comes close enough often enough to qualify as a worthy substitute for one of the Philadelphia quintet's bar-room blowouts.

As debuts by boy-group alums go, Harry Styles goes bolder than expected. It establishes that Styles can pull off a more mature sound and style, but it lacks the hooks and pop appeal of One Direction's big hits.