With Getting Away With Murder, Papa Roach offer fans of this sound an appropriately hard punch in the face. But there's a hollow sound as the bones collapse, because all that's supporting it is expensive art direction and a big scaffold of clichés.

Mos Def's second solo album is not disastrous, but it's a sprawling, overambitious mess.

Sure, it might be easier to accept if it was called a Damon Albarn solo album, but that's splitting hairs. A lousy album is a lousy album, no matter who gets credit.

One fulfills all of the "faceless" criticisms thrown at them in the past, while alienating whatever fan base they had before.

Jackpot is superior in every aspect.

Her voice is damaged, and there's not a moment where it sounds strong or inviting. That alone would be disturbing, but since the songs are formless and the production bland -- another reason why the hip-hop announces itself, even though it's nowhere near as pronounced as it has been since Butterfly -- her tired voice becomes the only thing to concentrate on, and it's a sad, ugly thing, making an album that would merely have been her worst into something tragic.

Emotive falls flat and fails to raise the bar set so high by the quality of their previous two releases.

Looper drops their bright playfulness for a sophisticated, darker counterpart which uses jazz, R&B, and trip-hop as its foundation.

Human is the sound of an artist painfully trying to sound modern but -- by trying to sound fresh -- sounding older than he ever has.

This rather bizarre disc is something of a self-aggrandizing concept album. In song after song, Josie sings about how off-beat, sensual, and unique she is...

Ultimately, it's hard not to feel that this album is little more than a blatant attempt to ape the Postal Service's Give Up.

Far from being the second coming of Dylan, Oberst is as precious as Paul Simon, but without any sense of rhyme or meter or gift for imagery, puking out lines filled with cheap metaphors and clumsy words that don't scan.

The odd thing about Devil's Playground isn't that Billy pretends Cyberpunk doesn't exist -- frankly, any artist with sense would do that -- it's that he now pretends that he's always been a metalhead, as if his posturing in the '80s was more than an affectation.

Apart from the lovely ambient instrumentals that open and close it, the album is all valley and no peaks.

A major disappointment to say the least, Pretty in Black is such an indifferent and transparent record that it makes one reconsider the quality of the album that preceded it.

Too many of the cuts appear pieced together in the studio, never once capturing the energy of a band playing live.

A meandering drag.

No matter how hard Simpson tries, no matter how foreboding the surface, beneath it all she's still light and frivolous. But that doesn't mean, by any stretch, that this is bubblegum music, since that term implies that this music is frothy, fun, and, most important, hooky, and I Am Me is none of those things.

Since the beats are monotonous, since the songs are insipid and forgettable, since the girls not only can't sing but have no on-record charisma, since there's no sense of style and, most importantly, sense of fun to this whole enterprise, Dangerous and Moving is the worst kind of pop music: the kind that is better to theorize about than to listen to.

Despite all their newly developed relative nuances, Nickelback remain unchanged: they're still unspeakably awful.

A bland, friendly affair that disappears into the ether the moment it's finishing playing.

A joyless experience.

It's the first time Adams has sounded completely worn out and spent, bereaved of either the craft or hucksterism at the core of his work.

Though he's as loud as ever, he has never sounded more tired.

For those listeners who pine for a world when Seven Mary Three received heavy rotation, this will satisfy, but anybody expecting the spark of Jane's Addiction or even a dose of Navarro's campy on-camera charm will be sorely disappointed.

Mildly entertaining but tremendously taxing.

Hoodstar only makes it all the more apparent that the St. Louis MC's overnight popularity was like lightning in a bottle.

That he fails is not the fault of his individual performance; it's the fault of botched execution.