Robin Thicke

“PAULA”

Interscope Records

Everything about Robin Thicke’s album “Paula” is a bad idea.

Thicke has decided to follow up all his “Blurred Lines” success with an album of oddly personal love songs designed to win back his high school sweetheart and wife of nine years, actress Paula Patton. To make matters worse, the first single, “Get Her Back” — a genuine-sounding love ballad/mea culpa that is really the only strong song on this strangely haphazard album — has a ridiculous video that features what may or may not be text messages exchanged by the couple during their breakup. Because nothing makes a celebrity relationship, especially one that includes a 4-year-old son, stronger than airing your fights in public, right?

The video makes the whole “concept” of “Paula” feel like a marketing ploy for a lackluster album, which may or may not be the case. “I thought everyone was going to eat the chip, turns out I’m the only one who double-dipped” is a terrible line, regardless of the context. When placed in the middle of “Black Tar Cloud,” where Thicke alleges threatening fights and a fake suicide attempt in their relationship, it makes the whole song and its faux-soul call-and-response almost laughable.

“Paula” is a wasted opportunity for the talented Thicke on basically every level. He should plot out his next moves much more carefully.

— Glenn Gamboa,

Newsday

Trey Songz

“TRIGGA”

Atlantic Records

“I’d like to have dessert for starters,” Trey Songz sings on “Cake,” the first song from his new album, “Trigga.” Of course, it is the first song — Trey Songz isn’t much given to subtlety, nuance or skipping the lurid details.

With R. Kelly’s libido largely silenced because of scandal fallout, the lane is clear for Trey Songz to achieve peak raunch. “Trigga” is this R&B Lothario’s sixth album, and his commitment remains whole. “Cake” is familiar turf, a lascivious thumper that’s heavy on extremely thin metaphor. That’s followed immediately by “Foreign,” a brawny boast about the women of the world that’s the album’s high point. (A strong remix of the song, featuring Justin Bieber, is dropped, bizarrely, midway into the album.) “Touchin, Lovin” features a naughty Nicki Minaj verse, and “Disrespectful,” a duet with Mila J, is an unapologetic ode from one cheater to another. For Trey Songz, feelings are mere inconveniences.

Trey Songz has long occupied a middle ground in R&B: a reliable hitmaker, not a breakout star. That’s starting to change, partly because of “Na Na,” his recent hit. It employs a cheap trick, though, using the same interpolation of Teena Marie’s “Ooo La La La” that the Fugees rode to success in 1996 with “Fu-Gee-La.” Yet, thanks to DJ Mustard’s production, this feels less like a borrowed idea and more like a clever update.

Despite a lovely voice that has real firmness to it, he often lacks texture. When he has shown vulnerability, as on “Can’t Help but Wait,” from 2007, he’s transcended hot-body cliché. On this album, he occasionally slips into emotionally fraught terrain, as on “Y.A.S” and on the almost clever “SmartPhones,” on which an accidental butt-dial reveals his dishonesty to his woman, and he spends the rest of the song trying to dodge his way out of responsibility: “I’m ‘a run to her and lie right to her face.”

There’s more reckoning with feeling, but it’s somewhat hidden. The album’s bonus tracks are uniformly strong and also slightly warmer than his overheated sex romps, as if he wanted only the most dedicated listeners to know that he is capable of breaking a sweat outside the bedroom.

— Jon Caramanica, The New York Times

OOIOO

“GAMEL”

Thrill Jockey Records

OOIOO (pronounced “oh-oh-eye-oh-oh”) is an extraordinary band led by the drummer, singer and guitarist Yoshimio, who has gone by Yoshimi and Yoshimi P-We. Since the ’90s, she has also played drums with the Japanese band the Boredoms, whose cathartic concerts and large-scale concepts — including gatherings of 77 and 88 drummers for outdoor shows in New York on July 7, 2007, and Aug. 8, 2008 — have eclipsed Yoshimi’s own work a bit. That shouldn’t be so.

Over 17 years, OOIOO has tended to shift its goals categorically for each record: “Armonico Hewa” (2009) is more rocking, “Kila Kila Kila” (2003) more groovy, “Gold and Green” (2000, and my favorite) more lovely, immersive and strange. Well, they’re all strange; they may sound informed by West African music, no wave and Asian folk traditions, until they don’t at all. But at the same time, they’re very basic; they get back to how music is made in the first place.

The motivating sound behind “Gamel,” the group’s new record, is gamelan, the Balinese and Javanese tradition involving metallophones struck with mallets. This is a sort of music Yoshimio seems perfectly suited to; it’s all about order, cycles and trance-inducing repetition. She composes in sections, with cyclical chants and overlaid rhythms: simple, powerful and disciplined ideas.

She’s added two gamelan players to her band, Tomoyuki Hamamoto and Koheysai Kawamura; they’ll be included in the band’s rare tour of the United States. Though they may not be playing in the traditional style, they’ve been completely subsumed into the group.

Despite this music’s predetermined composition, these pieces become structurally volatile: The roles of different players and sections might become inverted several times over in a single song, with the gamelan players moving to rhythmic from melodic roles, and with Yoshimio moving to gestural phrases and whoops from chants. It’s rugged, inspired, original music.

— Ben Ratliff, The New York Times