One Direction, "Four" (SYCO/Columbia)

"Four" is the fourth album by these TV-contest-winners-turned-real-band, and that alone is an accomplishment. Four is also the number of Top 10 hits this group has had in this country. It's a vexing situation — a famous group with not quite enough great, or even very good, songs to hold things together. The misalignment is clear on "Four," which is maybe One Direction's best and most fun album since its debut, and yet still curiously distant.

On the plus side, this quintet remains admirably outside of prevailing pop tides. Instead, it pulls from the pop-rock of the 1970s and early 1980s, anything from Genesis to Journey to Billy Joel — see the cheapo punk of "No Control" or the gut punch piano of "Steal My Girl" — and has also channeled the arena folk of Mumford & Sons and Ed Sheeran. But given how anthemic the reference points are, it's striking how studiously unmemorable many of these songs are. The men sing mostly with small, tender voices, filling in huge canvases with fitful sketches and not much more.

"Ready to Run" is a retread of last year's hit "Story of My Life," though more Lumineers than Mumford this time around. "Fool's Gold" is power-folk, which feels out of step with the teen-shriek-inducing effect this group has on its fans. And what is "18" if not an overproduced Bright Eyes song? The saving grace of this album is "Where Do Broken Hearts Go," an ambitiously scaled rock song about regret. All the pieces line up — the '80s production, the broodiness of the small voices, the smack of lyrical intelligence. It may be the one song that gives this album life, but that's fine: To keep this train moving, it only takes one.

JON CARAMANICA, New York Times

Bryan Ferry, "Avonmore" (BMG)

Ferry has worn many guises during his 40-year career, but "Avonmore" returns him to one of his central idioms: slow, sexy songs of restrained abandon, cloaked in gently pulsing rhythms. Drafting players such as rock guitarists Johnny Marr and Mark Knopfler, funkmaster Nile Rodgers on bass and guitar, and jazz bassist Marcus Miller, he crafts a lush, dense atmosphere that is comforting and familiar. Ferry's voice is deeper and raspier than in his youth (he's now 69), and that adds a vulnerable melancholy to "Lost," "Soldier of Fortune," and other ballads. A few songs risk self-parody: a sleazy "One Night Stand"; a melodramatic cover of Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns." But Ferry can still surprise: With the help of DJ Todd Terje, he turns Robert Palmer's perky "Johnny and Mary" into a song of eerie heartbreak.

Steve Klinge, Philadelphia Inquirer