Shaolin is simply tiresome, a heap of cliches with no animating force beneath its husk-like frame, not so much a follow-up to anything but our long-held anticipation for something better.

Dent May has a firm grasp on his ukulele, debuting his skill through an adept, kitschy, brief, and rarely but sometimes resplendent album, but he’s still forevermore a novelty.

In total--and there is absolutely no other way to absorb this album; if it lets up it will lose itself--the sentiment is hostile, championing a mismatched, bitchy pile of allusions to alienation, dissatisfaction, and indifference that begs for attention and respect but is too passive to amount to anything but a wan wash.

This is a record of a plump stomach, a belch, a bit of acid reflux; the by-product of Kanye’s indulgences? More heartburn than heartbreak.

Fantasies is, rather unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, just another Metric album.

Though the thesis of this remix album restricts remixers to only one album, the remixers limit themselves further, and seem afraid to do too much more than reaffirm certain dance touchstones already done away with by Weber himself. They've missed the sanctity for the structure.

By now, Sage Francis is emo; however populist you cut it, he’s treading familiar paths, rhyming in familiar cadence, arguing with the asshole authority of an artist much too comfortable with his niche.

As with that last Aphex Twin full-length, The Only She Chapters plays to no one's expectations; gutted and reassembled, it will still unfurl like a disassociated string of insular oddities.

Still, as much as the warped good intentions of the album can get exhausting and embarrassing, Nas and Damian's creative side remains pure enough to carry one through the lunkheaded didacticism.

The ethno-tinted dreampop of School of Seven Bells left me stymied and listless and, most crucially for a critic, at a loss for words.

It's to British Sea Power's credit that Valhalla Dancehall seems far less concerned with mainstream sermonizing than their last full length, opting to indulge in the off-kilter charm that drew us to them in the first place

This isn’t progress, it’s pleasant, capable, effortless stagnation; the dream’s already finished and we can’t, for the love of everything, recall what it was about.

Sure, Banhart executes the truncated verse spectacularly, but he doesn't give his listeners enough time to love him.

Sitek’s technique is, successfully, fascinating and unexpected. But so many purposes and conceits, both avoided and embraced, collide over the course of the album’s eleven tracks that technique simply overwhelms melody and Johansson’s voice both, but mostly whatever it is about the song that Waits nailed to the wall in the first place.

They are a talented, enthusiastic and timely band; I feared that it’s ageist of me to suggest that their debut album isn’t great because they’re too young.

Extra Playful is fun in the worst kind of way and, at times, bad in very fun ways, but as a whole it presents rather discouragingly the attempt of an auteur marooning--perhaps on purpose, but hardly with purpose--as an amateur.

Most of that sonic rage is in absentia on It’s Blitz!, which is part OK electro dance record and part atmospheric boredom courtesy of producer nerd David Sitek, who, it’s becoming increasingly clear, saves all of his best ideas for his main squeeze TV On the Radio.

The album is frontloaded with its best numbers, and they seem to descend in quality as the album progresses.

Utilitarian sensibilities typically create better, catchier results, but Little Boots’s producers can’t help flaunting their knob-twiddling abilities, justifying their paychecks while counterintuitively making Hesketh’s music sound all the more amateurish.

Yes, I love Clipse and the Re-Up Gang, but tough love invariably accompanies true love, so there you have it. The relationship is just on the rocks for now; here’s hoping November is like the honeymoon all over again.

LCD Soundsystem is mostly too afraid to be balls-out fun, but too unambitious to make for a really rewarding artistic experience. Essentially, it sits awkwardly in a no-man’s land between artistry and actual dancing fun, like guess-what-demographic.

I’m convinced that Bechtolt and Evans have a ton of potential that’s simply going completely unrealized for all but about nine minutes of See Mystery Lights, which leaves it feeling like a party that never actually gets going for some inexplicable reason as everyone involved tries too hard.

Oh, charm abounds; what the album lacks is direction.

Make no mistake, this is a slight record, but nonetheless one with more than a few enjoyable moments.

Mostly, what made Blackalicious’s last two proper albums so engaging was how Gab chose to reel in the tentacles of his glossolalia, and what makes The Craft such a disappointment is how he forgets that restraint, instead opting to crowd the tracks with ceaseless, pretentious sound.

If only you didn’t spoil these tender moments that seem to make my heart want to burst out my chest by goofing around all the time.

Without making the new sound genuinely old or the old sound refreshingly new, Mason waffles in the flux between.

What’s particularly interesting about Demon Days is not that they have half of a good record--there are plenty of albums that can’t even manage that--it’s that it’s so clearly the first half.

Kala is the sound of a hugely creative, angry, head-strong young artist reaching well beyond her means, both musically and politically, and coming up short, though, to be fair, it still manages to contain a few of the best songs of the year.

An overcooked vanity piece from a band inflated by praise, Odd Blood heads in every direction at once.

Strictly speaking not much has changed since this Japanese trio’s debut EP Neji/Tori washed up on North American shores, but somehow that previous effort had so much charming belligerence and ferocity and Destination Tokyo sounds bored and meandering.

A much more mediocre, boring, phoned-in, lyrically tripe-y batch of tip-toeing Brit-pop snooze-o-rama-fests.

There’s a brilliant EP lurking somewhere in this record, but Mike Skinner is either too ambitious or too fatigued to rescue it.

There's a lot of rappity-rap cliches at work here: overwrought punchlines, vague disses, bitching about the industry. Kweli spends a good chunk of the album acting like a drunk, unemployed superhero, stumbling into supermarkets to aid old ladies whose purses are fully in their possession.

On Cassadaga Bright Eyes sounds like John Mayer.

I have enough faith in this band to presume they’ll eventually see Only By the Night for what it is, as a fourth album hiccup that fails to play to their strengths.

It’s a lot of slickness that adds up to little, though, as a culturally myopic Roots Manuva audibly struggles to feel out the changed face of hip-hop; he sounds unsure of what tone to take and what words to say.

All of this provides a great recipe for exactly one good listen. That one listen is best the volume down though, as Death Magnetic might very well be the most distorted, punishing mastering job since the advent of the CD. After that, the charms of the album become significantly reduced.

The best the band could do is take this folk stance and make it somehow relatable to the sort of listeners like those in Chicago, blessed as they are with one of the most storied and diverse stocks of bands in the country. What Of the Cathmawr Yards ends up instead is a cold catalogue of personal taste and increasingly diminishing scope.

Half of The Sun Awakens is vigorous and wonderful; half is abhorrent and stultifying.

Ruff Draft is subtle, full of muddy melodies, magical synths and crispy snares, all typical of Dilla beats that aren’t on major label releases.

Goldfrapp have shed the sex-Moroder-robot-Bolan-fuck-disco like a used condom and re-tooled themselves as a whimsical psychedelia and pastoral folk outfit for the disappointing Seventh Tree.

They finally hit a hipster-heavy scene with what should have been a maverick heat-seeker of a debut and end up too tiring to interest most of the hipsters who long ago became bored of swapping their “Alice Practice” 7” on Soulseek.

This is as fully realized an example of the Friedberger vision that exists, which is why it’s so frustrating that Winter Women never really gets off the ground, or that Holy Ghost wallows in its creator’s own pique.

The record can get a bit dull or just plain hokey.

Flavorless.

This is the New Year. And there’s plenty of Bedhead in the New Year. Just not enough, unfortunately, in The New Year.

Do It! is about as radical as Clinic seem capable of, which is to say that they finally seem smothered by the borders they’ve set for themselves.

If this is EitS attempting to summarize and compact their three previous albums into one easily consumable package, the results merely drag the listener along through series of “catastrophic” cues that tell them what they should be feeling.

Mother of Curses feels suffocating: it’s experimental but constrained and bleak but not humanistic or relatable.

This is a power-pop album released by the biggest Fall Out Boy-ish band working today, on a major label, but it’s also 50.4 minutes of Fall Out Boy music--an extended, incomprehensible and surprisingly marketable clamor, ambulance siren loud, of contradictory signifiers.

Sad that we have to talk about a member of Black Star making an album without a guiding ideal, dull production, and bad lyrics.

Anything ends with all expectations met, but little else. Martina Topley-Bird has the kind of voice that deserves beautiful and strange accompaniment, and as such, most songs beg for so much more.

+/- have abandoned their bipolarity, which I was willing to call “complexity” or “potential” until just now, for a straightforward record that yields none of the possible benefits of a straightforward record.

I could go song by song and come to the same conclusion with pretty much each one: the dedication to this carefree whimsy of youth ultimately stands as the most impressive thing about Passion Pit, and it wears thin quickly.

Why Vampire Weekend seem uninterested in being a no frills pop band is a mystery. They slather what would sometimes be solid songwriting with such production doodads, intertextual namedrops, wry smirks, and defensive irony that the songs themselves are crushed under the weight

All I hear is vague honesty in place of actual emotion or considered writing, and frail vocals smeared across the whitewashed wall doesn’t compensate for a severe dearth of substance.

I’m convinced that Beck Hansen has a few more good albums in him. One thing’s for sure, though: The Information isn’t one of them.

Although Pressure Chief isn't a bad album, several of its songs come off like b-side compliation fodder rather than a batch of fresh material.

Cansei de Ser Sexy is a catchy, brief, and sweaty romp, but nothing that will wow, nothing that’ll smart, nothing that’ll leave a phone number next to the dildo on the bedside table the morning after.

[Disc 1] is fantastic and worth the price of admission in and of itself.... Sadly, the results [on disc 2] sound more like the soundtrack to a bad '80s cop movie than appropriate or even interesting re-takes of some of the best pop songs ever penned.

Sure, they love the album and want more people to know about it: admirable. But c’mon, why not just get rip-roarin’ drunk, bring in a bunch of friends, and make a legendary album of their own.

Inoffensive, largely listenable, and accessible, the album is still stunted, and so never reaches the peaks of "The Civil War," still their best and most fully formed effort.

Problem is, In Space isn’t a Big Star album. Or particularly good, for that matter.

Magic manages to creep into a flat din, and tact is lost to nostalgia.

It’s entertaining, sure, but also empty and a bit soulless.

If anything, this is an effective teaser for a new Broadcast album, since many of the tracks here could easily be part of great Broadcast songs, but in this form, they aren’t, and it’s clear that we both know that.

In Our Bedroom After the War is half of an above average album, which is unfortunate if only because the band's still clearly capable of gorgeous pop convulsions when they lay off the theatrics and let their rhythm section rev things up.

Beyoncé’s an artist who’s not sure how to sell her full personality and craft in lieu of selling what she thinks we want.

This band simply isn’t the same without a little darkness to balance the overwhelming light, and rarely do the songs pick up the slack.

Year Zero massively benefits from lowered expectations. Reznor channels his anger, focuses it and takes a much-needed breather from his tried-and-true formula of nihilism and the question of self-destruction, but at its core the album has very little to teach us or anything original to say.

Though The Sun has plenty of accomplished performances by a capable and experienced band, it’s not very exciting stuff.

The net effect here is that Super Animal Brothers III is the stem of a great dance record with some irony smeared on it, shit-on-canvass style. Sure, it ends up making a statement, but…why?

Pretty dull.

Whatever its origins, Psychic Chasms extols no actual reasons for being those ways, instead touching on now-expected tropes and empty gestures to fund a handful of ready-made critical anecdotes and popular opinions.

For an album so brazenly loud it leaves little impression; as a record supposedly about statements, it makes very few intelligibly. Most inexcusably, it lacks imagination.

Tiger plays like a huge pastiche of past releases.

This isn’t a bad release, and chances are, if you liked Cross, you could like this just as much. But it’s not going to contain any new revelations, and the extra reverb and applause are not enough to justify the release of a live album.

Zeitgeist isn't a good record, but it is good work.

Begone Dull Care spans eight aimless, meandering slow jams--each averaging a bloated six and a half minutes--and, returning to the pacing issues that threatened to put "So This Is Goodbye" fans to sleep, there’s simply not enough to distinguish one track from the next.

The French Kicks have become too smooth and repetitive; they have been polished featureless and barely resemble four distinct personalities contributing to one idea.

This album simply sounds like their first with inferior production and less-memorable songs.

Kinsella’s unrelenting lack of melody, his horribly self-absorbed and nebulous lyrics, and an overall misuse of timing force the rest of the mix into the periphery for a more numbing, frustrating listen.

"Bait and Switch," the best song on Port of Morrow, recaptures some of this eager, joyful glee; but in my opinion, the rest of the album holds none of these virtues.

Popp sounds as if he's having a ten-year-old argument with himself, and though he's certainly earned the right to make the point that this argument still holds currency, O is less than convincing.

So, um, good? Yeah, but in the same way grilled cheese sandwiches are.

There’s something oddly sweet about how completely out of step Eels are with trends and genres, something nourishing about how secluded their music has become. Shame, then, that it must necessarily also be so exclusive.

Patrick Wolf still engenders a puzzling and sometimes fascinating discussion about romanticism and pretension and authenticity and songwriter worship, but what’s disappointing is that he seems to no longer be a part of that discussion, simply the subject of it.

Their rhythm section (ooh, two drummers!) is serviceable but generally underwhelming, and song by song the record just falls flat.

Songs in A&E retains all of the weight of its self-imposed seriousness, its capital A artistic gravitas, but unfortunately leaves the uplift of invention to the memory of Spiritualized albums it so readily evokes.

Inevitably, most of the studio design on each song is greedy and belabored. Everything is in its right place, but everything is too obvious or too proportionally gaudy to warrant more than a signatory “lo-fi” moniker.

At their best they write strong, clean, melodic rip-offs of classic British indie rock and at their worst they write weak, clean, melodic rip-offs of classic British indie rock.

Even the best songs of Our Love To Admire can’t reach the boggling complexity and honesty of most anything from "Turn On The Bright Lights" (2002).

Doctor’s Advocate is essentially a long album of just okay rhymes, just okay rapping, and (without the benefit of best-of-year sublimity like Cool & Dre’s “Hate It or Love It” production) a lot of just okay beats.

There are hits on Good Girl Gone Bad, big clubfisted ones, but they're wedged in with facsimiles and reductions.

Black Mountain is as mundane, bleak, and hollow as the cover art would suggest.

The strategy is the same: start with a basic, inoffensive and unambitious melody, repeat it over and over again, toss on a few scatting horns (between three and five notes only, please, and let’s keep dissonance to a minimum) and whatever other trinkets are in the studio, and voila! An instantly forgettable pop breeze.

It’s a predictable formula, a majority of the tracks building to a triumphant climax set to an egg timer, peppered with forced witticisms, seemingly culled from Postsecret, that have reached a new apex of laziness.