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.

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.

Tiger plays like a huge pastiche of past releases.

"My December" ends up, curiously enough, a pretty freaking fun summer album.

No matter how smartly sequenced these parts are in Desire’s segmented flow, they remain varying nascent coups without one distinct rallying cry to organize the din.

The Aliens' retro-future, interstellar, ex-Beta Band stylings force the listener backward in time and inward in space, resulting in a weird cosmic navel-gazing that is ultimately the reason this album is only slightly more than moderately successful, and cannot be described under any circumstances as “innovative,” “refreshing” or “a step forward.”

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.

The White Stripes, at the same moment they claim to have finally overcome your entanglements, have provided you the ammunition of a hit-or-miss album.

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

The lowdown: it sounds pretty much the same as "Bang Bang," but not as good. It's not that the record is "bad"--it isn't--but that it, like its title suggests, is less brash, less fuck-all incautious about its rocking.

While it never outshines the alt-country canon that precedes it, The Brag & Cuss is a welcome addition to the genre, an album that understands its influences and rarely oversteps the boundaries they’ve set.

Ultimately, Arthur & Yu’s singing (the moniker adopted from cutesy childhood nicknames) becomes the simple reason to bend over, submit, and love the album, even when whimsy threatens an otherwise wry batch of dirty lyrics.

As a summer stopgap for their new full-length this fall, Friends. works fine. The title track is quality, plus their fanbase eats this shit up.

Josh Homme wants Era Vulgaris to be your summer bonfire record. And with a restored aura of cockiness and predictably massive arsenal of riffage, he’s once again fulfilled his goal.

A surprising record and a mess of contradictions--an okay band making a great record, classic rock songcraft made contemporary through sheer force of will, a quiet and loud album simultaneously, dancing along the lo-fi/hi-fi binary, a fucking record about Appalachia made by dudes from Portland!--that thrillingly, thinly, radiantly congeals.

The songs, sometimes overtly formalist and stylistically unadventurous, are invigorated by the enthusiasm and character of their delivery.

Tromatic Reflexxions is a roaring success for both parties, blowing the fresh air of invention through an increasingly tribalist scene.

This one sees him expanding outward in any number of directions, and succeeding in nearly all of them.

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

If there is one thing that might be wrong with this album -- besides an uneventful last third -- is that the album might be too tailor-made for music critics worn out by music fatigue, hype fatigue, and irony fatigue.

Mirrored is Battles at their most experimental and their most immediate, their most wanky and most focused.

It’s not like everybody’s playing a different song. Everybody’s playing the same song. It’s just that, for great boring swathes, that song sounds stubborn. It sounds like it doesn’t want to be played.

Plague Park is in many ways a darker, less inviting listen than his previous work.

While their particular brand of retro goth garage is obviously built on an extremely derivative foundation of 60s garage, the Cramps, and the Damned, they're infinitely more interesting in practice than the majority of beige-rock being pushed by the UK music press.

Sky Blue Sky’s only ambition is to capture the warm tones of the early '70s rock FM they grew up on and clearly love. The execution is flawless. One can’t help but ask, however, “What’s the point?”

If this album is less immediately impressive than its predecessor it’s because apart from tightening their arrangements the sound is still exactly what you expect.

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

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.