MacFarlane and McNeely don't attempt to ape the pizzazz of Frank's Reprise years, nor do they spend much time with May's snazzy snap, they stick with Riddle and Jenkins, keeping things sentimental and lush even when the words crackle with wit.

What really differentiates the album from its predecessors is that there's almost no trace of tension to be heard. It's all about fooling around and being in love.

Bottom line, this is neither a great nor a poor Ashanti album. It's decent, just like the rest of them.

The rallying choruses are not effective, and he's short on ideas; threatening to steal attached women is a default topic. 5.0 is, by a considerable margin, Nelly's least essential release to date.

Transmission, while marginally stronger than the band's debut, forgets to bring along the same natural pop drive and offers more of the same well-honed faux iconic babble, and regularly stoops to the equivalent of a Love record with improper squelch control.

Combines instantly accessible power pop, synth-pop, glam, grunge, and Brit-pop influences with the resulting songs fitting together so seamlessly to be somewhat indecipherable from each other.

It's not that the Offspring sound behind the times on their eighth album, Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace--it's that they sound disconnected from it.

Kanye has shown the world his unfiltered megalomania, heartbreak, self-obsession, self-contempt, and confusion, and even at its most ghastly, it's always been at least a little bit exciting or provocative. On Vultures 1, he struggles to show much of anything, crafting songs that are loud and shiny, but still largely blank.

A large chunk of the material is second rate compared to his past highlights.

Where Jackson occasionally seemed as if they were in a rush to jam as many styles into their sound as possible, Cunniff digs deeper into her idiosyncrasies, creating music that feels unhurried and flows easily.

Black Swan is a definite sign of progress, though, and the band would do well to follow its path on future releases.

Lush synths, subtle electronics, and pulsing polyrhythms fuel these songs of discovery, transforming them from mere introspection into outright inspiration.

Wildfire is the work of a determined singer/songwriter who prizes craft over poetry or introspection. Platten specializes in skyscraping melodies and big, bombastic surfaces and these are the elements that not only fuel Wildfire, they distinguish it from the singer/songwriter's clear antecedents.

Williams may like to act like a bad boy but at his heart he's a sentimental cornball and, ultimately, he winds up making mawkishness seem merry on The Christmas Present.

This all makes F.A.M.E. the equal of Forever, if not slightly better, and it hints that Brown's best is yet to come.

The album winds up sounding too reserved and heavy-handed, which makes it a disappointment not only compared to what the group has done before, but also to what the girls have achieved outside the group.

The album itself is almost incidental to the self-styled fantasy that Katy Perry sells with this entire project.

A hilarious effort loaded with satirical song parodies and rock & roll spoofs.

Song for song, Rebirth has more energy and better hooks than her other albums.

Funeral for a Friend not only displays an increased sense of ambition on this sweeping great leap forward, they also display a greater sense of accomplishment, as writers and musicians.

If In Flames' last decade of material has been your cup of tea, than Siren Charms is likely to sit well with you, but for those still holding out for a return to the glory of their work from the '90s, the wait continues.

It doesn't surprise but it doesn't seem stuck, which gives the album a mellow appeal.

Yorn and Johannson cut their album long before She & Him, but surfacing in its wake, they can't help but seem a bit like the polished, polite answer to the twee, precious charms of Zooey & M. Ward. Break Up does trump Vol. 1 conceptually, chronicling the dissolution of a romance as a series of duets, and Scarlett is a more-than-worthy foil to Yorn.

This may not be a concept album, but it's structured as a narrative, mirroring the plot of the movie. Unfortunately, this doesn't give The Pick of Destiny the weight or grandeur of a true concept album, because a lot of the music sounds as if it serves the movie, and doesn't stand tall when separated from the film.

Baptize hits hard early on with a trio of nosebleed section-aimed sonic missiles: the pummeling title cut and its equally unrelenting successors "Save Us" and "Underrated." Therein lies the rub. What follows is no better or worse, just largely the same, with Saller delivering post-hardcore banalities with gusto and the band peppering those surface-level maxims with blazing riffage and fist-pumping gang vocals, ad nauseam.

Cobble out the stellar EP inside or consider it a pre-mall mixtape because the puzzling Underground Luxury mixes mack daddy music with mall rat tracks, even if B.o.B's conviction throughout suggests he sees them as equals.

It feels as if this is as calm as a placid lake. Sometimes, the record is as pretty as that, too, a nice, polite collection of adult alternative pop designed for young girls and their moms.

The problem facing New Kids on the Block on their 2008 reunion The Block is the same one they had on their last album, 1994's "Face the Music": the quintet are no longer kids and don't quite know how to be adults.