When it is instrumental, it’s “Get It,” which seems a timid remake of Since We Last Spoke’s title track, or it’s “Murs Beat,” which, tellingly, has no Murs. Some of the rest sounds like a softer, more overproduced, and generally shittier version of the Cars. The rest of the rest sounds like something duller than that.

Thankfully, these are just two misfires, album-cripplingly sandwiched around a triple whammy of floor fillers.

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.

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

This is a record filled with breezy jazz tunes ripe for a dance hall. It’s also music that will give you a headache from thinking, if you take the time to truly appreciate the multi-faceted work of art that it is.

If it’s funny and not unlistenable, we may have a kitsch classic on our hands, right? No. The third way to describe this album is: reprehensible.

Beat-wise, IV doesn't attempt to outdo the top-dollar Carter III production, whose murderer's row of producers and beats is likely to remain unparalleled for some time. But Wayne uses the less showy selection this go-round to deliver a definitively rawer album that only smartens the impact of some of his career's best vocals.

On Rolling Papers, Wiz Khalifa's personality shines through: unobscured, stoned, brilliant.

The saving grace of Uncanney Valley is its resolute tenderness, an emotion the band never coaxed out of their twenty-something gloom.

It’s largely half-baked in its execution.

Baffling production questions aside, In The Dark is still another solid entry into what's becoming a pretty spotless discography for a band with seemingly little aspirations to do anything but be a predictable answer to what a band called "the Whigs" would sound like.

Young Adults Against Suicide comes off as the less talented, R-rated Beastie Boys doing PSAs.

More than any other melodic recording this year, Earth Grid feels truly timeless.

It's nice that Primal Scream attacks these tunes with gusto, but the passionate performance doesn't hide the fact that this album is utterly inessential, little more than a sampler for what amounts to a really swell wedding band.

There was a time when he did these things for our id, for our deeply rooted disgust at our own celebrity culture and so at ourselves. But here he’s not standing in for anyone, working himself into a feverish sweat solely for his own satisfaction.

The tragedy here is not that this is a mid-nineties retread, though, as much as Corgan’s songwriting is Machina level unmemorable.

Coleman's exploring, surely, but he never abandons a sure-footed consistency, and the record works wonderfully as a whole.

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

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.

It’s all so cold and empty and irritating.

It works as an introduction of sorts to this young band, who have a surplus of great ideas (and, hey, it's a free download). But it's little more than a starting point, a segway, an ice-breaker, to the much meatier discussion that Ashes provokes.

Since Ferrari Boyz doesn't mark the reemergence of Gucci, it's best viewed as a warm-up for Flocka's previously-mentioned sophomore effort.

Bloated on the rotting corpses of hackneyed scratching, hackneyed drums, hackneyed sampling technique and hackneyed key work (all that in hackneyed combinations), Feedback makes it difficult to differentiate the acceptable from the tired.

Would be much better if it came with an option to turn the vocals off.

So long as you approach Unkle Dysfunctional as little more than an excuse for Shaun Ryder to head back out on the road, I guess it works fine.

Odditorium has at least a handful of solid tracks.

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.

In all, the languidness of Rules has its own odd charm—since WBA never aspire to be much beyond a wistful dance pop quartet, they don’t fall down the stairs too embarrassingly.