The Strokes match their innate catchiness with a new found intensity that makes First Impressions of Earth sound like a band hungry for blood.

So, yes, these songs have melodies and choruses, but they are so trite and played-out that even the fifteen-year-olds that this is written for will smell something fishy in their neatly packaged emotional escapism.

Granted, Kweller is still searching for an unique voice, as his music still wears its roots a little too blatantly, but he’s definitely on the right track.

They’re not trying to pass this off as original, and it’s not by any means. But it is clearly catchy as hell, if almost annoyingly so.

The weird thing is, without Hawkin's ridiculous vocals, most of these songs would have been sure-fire hits, if only they'd been released twenty years ago.

A strange and somewhat inconsistent release.

The album definitely has a few remarkable moments, but it’s really just not very good.

On Worlds Apart Trail of Dead sounds utterly reinvigorated yet dangerously reinvented.

In small doses casual, uninformed listeners could mistake this for vintage Pink Floyd, but it lacks the tension of Pink Floyd’s passive aggressive rumble.

It’s far from the level of a Magnetic Fields release – or even The 6ths for that matter – and, therefore, won’t appeal to casual fans.

It’s frustrating to listen to a band run in place, especially when the expectations are so much higher.

An album packed with as many irresistible hooks as Whenever You’re Ready deserves to be heard.

Kathleen Hanna’s girlish yelp grates more than usual, practically bereft of charm, and her bandmates can barely write a functional song much less play one.

Plans is ultimately a pretty boring album, and the primary reason is its lack of diversity.

It’s safe, unobtrusive, and ubiquitously “indie”, if well produced and memorably melodic, at times.

Where melody, mood, and technique dominated Logic, Without Feathers sinks into a tuneless no man’s land.

It’s pleasant enough music if you’re having a Caribbean-themed barbecue in your backyard, I guess, but little here will challenge your musical senses or move you in any way.

Mediocre melodies ride atop formulaic songwriting.

It’s trite rehash after trite rehash followed by pointless filler.

Nowhere near as affecting as even latter day Sebadoh records like Harmacy, Emoh shows Barlow in a typically maudlin frame of mind, but the starkness of his voice is smoothed over with pointless overdubs

For the life of me I cannot fathom how people can claim this album is any sort of return to form.

A sad stab at gimmicky duets with Justin Timberlake and obnoxious production by The Neptunes.

With each successive song, the vocal shortcomings become more and more apparent.

Moby continues to do on 18 what he’s always done best, and that is to fuse disparate musical styles with a pop sensibility, while maintaining a moody, almost gothic theme.

A pompous, painfully tacky string of infomercial rock.

The downside of Counterfeit2 is its uniformity.

This is just an awful display of gratuitous self-indulgence.

Despite Hamilton's grittiest vocals to date, Size Matters is inarguably watered-down and bland.