[50's] rhymes are as stupid as ever.

At least 45 of X&Y’s 63 minutes finds Coldplay overdosing on pointless synthesizers in the name of “expanding their sound” while forgetting to write anything reflecting a decent hook.

You wanna hear a mediocre hip hop album with a few decent songs? That’s the T.I. I’ve come to know and love.

The Odd Couple from its superior predecessor (just: the writing is a bit weaker, the arrangements sleepier, the production effects a bit thicker) and so its most glaring flaw is that it simply lacks St. Elsewhere‘s invigorated tone, following the same blueprint with cheaper components, producing off-putting retreads whose only appeal lies in their similarity to more effective tracks on Gnarls’s former effort

Ludacris has created the most uneven album of his career, so frontloaded it might as well be an EP.

You Can Have What You Want is like "Turn on the Bright Lights" (2002) without the drama, without a voice as deep or distinct as Paul Banks’, and without the hooks. Instead of all that, Papercuts opt for a vague, beige production and generally indecipherable lyrics that may or may not be about some kind of futuristic utopia/dystopia.

It is his fourth record to be titled Finally Famous, which is preposterous for a lot of reasons, the largest of which being that he is still not famous.

The schizophrenia on display here is not of the dramatic sort that intrigues or interests; it’s a very real disorder that befuddles and annoys the listener.

The lyrics and musicianship are of the quality to be expected from Hayden, but something’s a little... boring about Elk Lake Serenade.

He establishes grand lyrical arches, overworked symbols, and Deep Meaning. Problem is, he forgets any of the emotion, realism, or originality that would make anyone care.

While the best of it is good enough to promise a fruitful and substantive future, the worst of it suggests that in a few years time, Mr. Mathers may be little beyond a slightly intimidating class clown.

DeLaughter needs to be more personal; already having a dozen people yelling at you distances the ideas they express, but emptying those ideas of any meaning isn’t the answer.

If this record had come out in ’94 it would have been groundbreaking. ’98 and it would have been good. But it’s ’05 now, and there aren’t many reasons to be impressed.

Rising Down is pretty much same old same old.

It’s Not Me It’s You is neither grating or annoying. It’s merely boring.

Whatever thematic consistency existed on Yoshimi or Soft Bulletin is completely absent here. Or just so vague and bloated that the sentiment’s useless.

Let it be said here first: Kasabian is indisputably one of the most important albums of 1997. Unfortunately, it’s 2005, and we’re left wondering just what the hell they're trying to pull.

Let Us Never Speak of it Again is bor-ing.

Golden Delicious confronts, rejects, and reinterprets his own past, which simply leaves me longing for a return to it.

Volume Two is a record, of occasional charm, that comes off all-too-aware of how cranky a response to it other than “charming” will seem.

G I R L is safe, universal, and unforgivably dull. It should be a huge hit.

Although there are a few individual moments where those qualities round-off and transcend any qualms anybody might have about Lekman's style, that style on its own, minus a map or even the faint corners of a box, can only elicit the slow smile of admiration, not genuine, passionate interest.

Clearly, this record is boring. Whether or not that’s a good thing remains up to your discretion.

The hook aspires to nothing, and so its nothingness is an anthem for do-nothing/think-nothing slacker types we like to imagine were listening to the Beastie Boys and Nirvana in 1994, but were probably listening to the aforementioned Dave Matthews.

Pretty much nothing from Dear Heather is without some kind of significant flaw, and the only thing saving it from being below average---at least in a general sense, and not kept strictly to his own discography----are the few moments that Cohen is kept solitary with as little outside interference as possible.

The latest Dashboard Confessional album is extremely front-loaded, it should have been an EP, etc.

It’s a counterfactual, of course, but I’ve got to think that Monsters of Folk circa 2005 would have come up with something a bit more substantive than this.

White people shouldn’t try to be funky.

This is Beach Slang’s core problem: they are constantly telling, never showing.

Weirdly, while each of the songs is too short, the album itself is too long.

With never any hurry or need to their lyrics or their vocals, with only dreamy soulfulness that sounds too content and comfortable wallowing in grief to want for much else-I just don't see what's very necessary about this album.

Her multitudinous influences, free from the collagen that an omnipresent production team offered, have dissolved and separated out of their former matrix, the subsequent runny blotches of genre-hashing burbling up to fill Kelis Was Here with rubbish that has no discernible order.

The record attempts to fuse dance music and complexity, but doesn’t quite reconcile the two; instead, its mindless thrills butt up against impenetrable baths of sound.

His delivery's certainly interesting, but lacking the nuances of and empathy of, say, Mike Skinner, it's best deployed when not framed by anachronistic loops.

Despite somber interludes like the Shatner-only confession of his third wife’s death, “What Have You Done?” or the subtly rich “Together,” Has Been does little to rescue the Priceline spokesman from the novelty bin.

The problem here being that the clean production values are themselves another veil masking Williams' fundamental badness--and so this album becomes, like its predecessors, an exercise in misdirection and deceit.

Hip Hop Is Dead’s fruitless and one-dimensional rhetoric is sure to depress the Nas fan more than any of his didactics.

It’s inoffensive, painfully so, with the smell of something run through focus groups from the get go, written and produced by committee to sell the greatest number of copies.

Forgiveness Rock Record doesn't provide anything interesting to talk about in and of itself. Its actual thematic talking points, as far as I can tell, tend toward political pedantry.

Though, technically, the production is much “improved” here, meaning that the album is louder and clearer, it’s still not a very enjoyable listen when the listener can’t shake the idea that something’s amiss.

It is familiar. It is, despite whatever priggishness keeps some publications from printing the band’s name in full, safe.

Motion Sickness is an unnecessary document that is almost disquieting in its puppet-like manipulation of the facts. It’s a live album masquerading as a bunch of inferior studio cuts.

His constant assurances across Goblin that he doesn't really mean any of the hateful shit that he continues to say, including this disclaimer's attempt to dissuade listeners from actually doing anything Tyler raps about and the title track's assertion that because Goblin is a work of "fiction" Tyler himself shouldn't be blamed for anything bad that results, undermines any of the resonance Goblin might have otherwise had as a, well, purer document of depravity and, at his most extreme, a certain kind of madness.

This loosely associated collection of songs isn't even the logical extension of some of the more unwise artistic wanderings of Worlds Apart (2005).

An album of pasty songs, severe missteps and bizarre overreaches, but an album nevertheless shimmering occasionally with the inherent sometime-genius of its creator, Volta is one of those pretty-bad records that may stick around, may sound better in a few years.

March of the Zapotec is a serviceable, if less than memorable, expansion of Beirut’s already established sound via the Jiminez Band, a 19-piece band from Mexico. Realpeople Holland is fucking awful techno music that is desert-bereft, wholly disposable, and somehow makes Condon’s crooner’s dollop seem alien and unlistenable for the first time. If

Here we see the often-resourceful Deacon approaching a big canvas with too little paint, and the result is a record which feels bloated, overlong, and ultimately empty.

The album fails mainly in its inability to set itself apart; for a Warp release it’s dull, Beans isn’t enough of a rapper to carry the show by himself, and the beats feel like they would have been interesting if they didn’t just remain stagnant through pretty much every track.

The lack of variety here is as unsurprising as the rehashed chord progressions between songs.

Humbled by a silenced rhythm section and bafflingly reverberated guitars, the majority of Interpol is little more than background static. Maybe it's time for an intervention.

What keeps Consolers of the Lonely from being an outright shit affair is, predictably, the assembled chops of its musicians, a group never so much fussy as amicable, wide-eyed about the righteous licks and insensitive tempo shifts they solder together so tightly.

One of the most cluttered, awkward, and unfocused albums in recent memory.

What actually lies inside Prince’s twenty-somethingth album is more than disappointing; it’s thinly if grandly produced, tapped with a veneer so dumbly decades behind any sense of interesting or intriguing taste that one can’t help but sit back and swallow the benign whole, thinking all along, Who the fuck even makes music like this anymore?

The problem lies in the fact that it’s extremely accomplished, but ultimately boring; there's just no emotional or musical development.

Its problems are both wide-reaching and acute, an album full of tiny misfired rhymes and shiny-dildo drum hits that add up to what I’ll go ahead and label Jigga’s second worst record, after 2002’s abysmal The Blueprint 2.0.

Each of these eight leftovers can be divided into rote, by-the-numbers Modest Mouse rock jams and meandering pseudo-experiments that feel, uncharacteristically and disappointingly, like nothing more than filler.

This might sound like a blunder, but Diplo can never be criticized for not being adventurous enough; though he can be criticized, magnanimously, for Major Lazer.

Feed The Animals isn’t much of anything at all. It’s just another clip show of all your favorite records.

Surfing does not serve a discussion of any of these things; it is, considering all ephemeral connotations, a side project. And an obnoxious one at that.

It's well-produced with some nice drums, but it simply has no reason to exist.

I have the distinct feeling I’ve heard most of the songs on this album before. Nothing here is particularly original, and nothing moves me in the way that Gough’s earlier work so did.

There is nothing here but a band very awkwardly trying to have a good time, and that’s the kind of party you always leave early.

Yes, the beats are big and the sound is mainstream and commercial; however, the band sound restrained and uncomfortable.

LotusFlow3r achieves nothing so much as reliving the glory and joy of emulation, which is saddened by the image of Prince nudging our shoulders, urging us to relive with him.

These songs contain all the accoutrements of anguish and despair: he sings the words, he screams the words. So why does it all sound so fake?

Plans is a shameless and famished record, the sound of pop slurping itself empty.

Ultimately, this is nothing more than workaday feel good bar music, technically well executed with the peaks and troughs in all the right places.

What it lacks is Agaetis’ singularity of purpose, as well as its understanding that atmosphere should be an aesthetic by-product of songcraft and not the other way around.

It is logically a bloated, uncomfortable, saturated throwback to no genre, time period, or movement in particular.

Like a professor spewing a semi-clever lecture on civil rights and contemporary left politics where he’s pretty good at rhyming his facts but acts like rhyming is all the sinew that his presentation needs to connect the bones of his argument.

This Youth Group record is a diluted version of already watered-down music; not only is it not as good as their first album, I’m not sure it’s as good as Keane’s first album.

It regresses to the essence of an increasingly stale sound with a series of second-rate tracks and bored performances. This is co-option at its base; you were a few years too early, Nick.

From admittedly unsympathetic ears, it’s a fruitless mess caked with vanity and smothered by its own insular delusions of prosperity.

The vast majority of the new Roots album lacks what has made their earlier albums so exciting: spontaneity, originality, musical chops, and a sense of purpose.

Welcome to Condale is a study in tactless excess, the sheer volume of inebriating nostalgic moments intended to overwhelm the lukewarm medium by which they're delivered.

The Dead Weather makes smegma rock. It’s a squirming, nauseating label no doubt, but so is Horehound, convinced that skuzzed-up guitars and swamp blues roots demand sleaze, humidity, and grime.

The Dead Weather have released another quickly recorded batch of entirely unmemorable, unpleasantly limp rock music showcasing Jack White’s increasingly irrelevant take on garage, blues, post-punk, and guitar refuse.

While it’s very good at what the Band of Horses does best--providing a soundtrack to whistful moments or memories--unlike Everything all the Time there’s nothing here to grab onto, its songs merge together, and it’s so innocuous in the band’s trademark comfort that it can pass almost undetected.

I’ll be as straightforward in my assessment of his Trouble in Dreams as I can: this is his tenth solo album of the same old shit.

There’s nothing outstandingly terrible about Seaside Rock, but that’s what ultimately makes it kind of boring.

Whether or not Human After All - which of course, has not a single purely human voice in its midst - is supposed to be some great stroke of pop irony or self-reflexive wink is irrelevant. Boring, empty music that thinks it’s making a point is condescending and pedantic.

The point being that this album isn’t “terrible,” just sort of dull and boring.

It shouldn't come as a shock that Bionic is not a very good record. What should is that the conversation about how bad it is has become one of the most vitriolic and fascinating conversations pop music has recently provoked.

Every song seems like it all went through a grime factory conveyor belt, and at the expense of being cohesive, Public Warning grows a bit repetitive.

As formulaic and boring a rock album as you’re likely to hear in 2005.

As bland and timid a record as likely to come out in the strikingly boring year of 2006.

[Producer] Gil Norton... [has] an enviable track record, but he’s not doing Maxïmo Park any favours with this soft soak finish.

It’s sad when a band runs out of ideas.

Even with their glut of talent (Bejar not included), the band is sputtering for ideas.

Nothing on this album surprises me because anyone who has listened to this band regularly has become so steeped in pointless oddity that they have moved past surprise into the realm of mild annoyance.

It has more than enough moments to make it a solid album, had Joel Petersen stayed with instrumental electroclash. It’s just that the lyrics are god-awful strands of post-teen angst monotonously spoken with the rhythm.

Even when the songs work (rarely), the band doesn’t; even when the lyrics work (read: never), the music doesn’t; even when guitars aren’t processed to sound like a cat in a dishwasher, the riffs suck.

The songs themselves aren’t so much unlistenable as just a little sad, highlighting the fact that Iggy Pop is less-than-scary nowadays, and his voice is shot to hell.

The result is a series of boring romances and half-assed torch songs that drag their feet in a way that’s exhausting to listen to.

Okereke now sings instead of barking, and, well, oops on him.

Every track on this record grows into some such perfectly orchestrated climax, surging as a function of the production alone and with nary a hook or clever turn of phrase or structural complication in sight.

As quiet strings and stupid whizzing noises pull the curtain on LP4, all I imagine is Ratatat going, "Alright, party's over, guys" and all I can think is "wait, is that what was happening for the past 43 minutes?"

It’s a middling album that managed to get the best of collective consciousness.