If nothing else, with “Mylo Xyloto,” Coldplay may have succeeded in making the least conceptually developed concept album of all time.

Chris Martin and bandmates have described their song cycle as being about two young lovers who come apart and fall back together in the face of the oppressors that perennially conspire to keep youthful romantics down -- like, you know, rock critics and GOOP-bashing player haters.

Sorry, had to go there. No, “Mylo Xyloto” actually appears to be set in some future dystopia, where underdogs in love rage against the machine by… spray-painting.

That...

Here’s one way to cure fan addiction: Make ‘em wait eight years between releases, then return with an album as competent and forgettable as “The Great Escape Artist,” the long-in-coming latest from Jane’s Addiction.

The most remarkable thing about the band’s very belated fourth effort is how much, in songs like “Hit You Back,” they sound like second-tier U2 -- a comparison that wouldn’t have come up back in the group’s more ferocious ‘90s heyday.

Perry Farrell has toned down his formerly banshee-esque wailing for a more measured kind of pleading, and there...

Not too many months ago, a fairly mediocre Buddy Holly tribute album came out, and the only celebrity cover singer who sounded like he had any real affinity for the source material was Chris Isaak.

You might have found yourself wishing the all-star cast idea had been chucked so Isaak could just cut the songs all by his lonesome.

That wish comes to a kind of fruition on Isaak’s new album, “Beyond the Sun,” though Holly doesn’t figure into this oldies set.

Instead, the pop-rockabilly revivalist is paying highly effective homage to the short-lived, eternally influential Sun Records roster of...

Remember when, if you heard someone associated with the Disney Channel extol “the club,” they meant the one where you needed mouse ears to get past the velvet rope?

Latest among the Disney grads hoping to energize the adult dance floor is Joe Jonas, who’s traded rock & roll for club bangers at the same time he’s shed his rocker’s mop-top for a swarthy partial buzzcut.

But "Fastlife," his solo debut, isn’t likely to make it past the club scene’s beefy bouncers into the disco fast lane.

Like Samson before him, Jonas seems to have shed some personality about the time...