Granted, Buzzcocks sounds very '77/'78, albeit with better production, but it's largely devoid of the hooks, the melodies, and the anxious, deconstructed bubblegum pop feel that made the band's early material so memorable.

The most interesting tracks on this album sound like music for the great Pier 1 Imports in the sky, suggesting an infinity of pure, terrifying stasis.

The songs here are mostly ponderous, nine-minute long epics with very little in the way of song form, melody, or musical interest.

Pretty Ugly is neither very pretty nor particularly ugly, rather a lumpen, unengaging mess.

It is unremarkable to the point of being enraging.

Uncanney Valley looks like a Dismemberment Plan record and largely sounds like a Dismemberment Plan record. But yet, it’s not a Dismemberment Plan record. Not a very good one, anyway.

Pop chanteuse lets the sunshine back in.

It's unlikely that you'll want to hear any of these remixes, even the better ones, more than once or twice.

Yet for all its surface appeal, the record has a curiously soulless quality, a lack of vulnerability and humanity that undercuts most of its songs.

On All Aboard Future, These Are Powers’ songs distract from the music. Consequently, the record sputters.

False Idols could have been impressive and believable at fewer than a dozen tracks, but nine of the 15 seem insufferably lazy.

More like faithful reiterations of soul cliches than anything fresh or interesting, nearly every track will remind you of someone else.

The lyrics lack the indirectness of so much of The Blackened Air and Road to Ruin, just as the piano-embroidered instrumentation skims the surface of what the singer’s band once plumbed with all of its clawing and scraping.

The album clearly fails to find the equilibrium or comfortable midway point between Espers’s debut and II that it seems to be seeking, nor does it make a strong case that such equilibrium is even desirable. At best, it’s a strong set of tracks that ultimately lack the cumulative force of those of the band’s previous two full-lengths.

The band falls apart attempting to sound like the whole of the late ’60s and the start of the early ’70s all at once, like listening to The Notorious Byrd Brothers, American Beauty, Moby Grape’s self-titled, the Hollies’ Stop! Stop! Stop! , and a Sloan record played simultaneously; a tepid mash of classic styles all fine on their own that cancel each other out when played together.

A puny, ill-conceived record in comparison to both Alphabetical and its predecessor United.

Only “Travel Fox” and “RocMarcable” in the second half come close to the usual Marci in his macking mode. But even they won’t warrant revisiting this EP in a couple of years.

The CD is bound to attract some fans for its unwavering dedication to psychedelic textures, not to mention the number of bodies involved in the logistics of their live show, but this is energy that should have been expended in searching for better sheet music.

Goblin is the messy schizoid splatter painting of the child we've raised and ruined, and it's coherent only as a hopeless plea for us to expect nothing from him again.

It’s an ambitious album, but only in the sense that most of the songs are outrageously long and feature approximately eighteen gratuitous time signatures each.

Puzzles Like You... is not at all Halstead's best work, and what has sounded simple and subtle before begins to feel simplistic and blunt; the songs here move with an energy that seems either forced or mocking, and on the whole embrace the kind of triteness they used to offset.

Thoroughly boring.

The kids will tolerate Maladroit, and probably many more dull records just like it, because it’s a product of Weezer.

Over rudimentary, skiffle-derived hooks, a kitchen-sink orchestra creates an aura of portent. Then in steps Meloy, doping up the whole affair with empty melancholy until it has to breathe through a tube, wailing big words in a forced accent that conveys despair but fails to signify its cause, fails to signify anything.

Their efforts at stretching boundaries falter because they have inscribed themselves within such narrow aesthetic parameters, hitting a fourth chord feels like a massive achievement.

Scheidt is a capable acoustic guitarist with a flair for ornamentation, but well-wrought filigree does not an album make. Confronted with the choice between hearing this record again and taking a nap, I'd opt for the snooze.

Promise Of Love would be a good joint, by indie rock standards, if the passive-aggressive everyschmuck ex-girlfriend mixed-tape staples on the latter half didn’t suck so badly.

Despite a few quality tracks, the album feels wholly uninventive and listless.

Everything about this record, from its goopy over-production to its brooding, listless demeanor, suffers from a one-dimensionality that completely prevents connections to the listening audience.

The problem is that the 11-song album is exactly 10/11ths forgettable.

Thirty minutes of METZ feels more like hard work than fun playtimes, and the sameness of the venture underscores the futility of whatever it is they're trying to accomplish, which falls somewhere between "artist defending bowel movement on a gallery floor" and "third demo tape by an up-and-coming new band."

I ultimately found Solo Electric Bass 1 as dull as it must have been difficult to play.

It’s frustrating to hear them in this context – sounding jaded and uninspired, a slump they haven’t been in since the late ‘80s.

A love of/obsession with antiquity can, at some point, become unbearable. To my ears, The Repulsion Box is one such ridiculous period piece.

For the most part, what hampers the recording is a reliance on a single type of musical form: the vamp. Over simple (and endlessly repetitive) chordal structures, the players just noodle.

Besides their inability to meet the very aims they set out for themselves, Clean and Zegon fail to do much of anything exciting with their all-star cast.

They have built up a group of songs so restless and unsatisfying that a group of teenagers with the proper training could have made them, or likely something better.

TMV’s latest major-label misfire is called The Bedlam in Goliath

What we do get is delay-drenched college rock, circa 1983.

Unfortunately, Adem’s efforts to take his music to new places result in the abandonment of much of what made Homesongs so appealing.

To wit, what irritates most about Compass is the way it assaults the listener with wave after wave of sonic winks, of moments intended to be witty or clever that instead fall flat. Busy and fussily filtered at every turn, I guess it’s ‘crazy’ sounding or something, but there’s nothing communicated in the slightest.

If whining and wishing that your cat could talk is your bag, well, here's Best Coast. Now let's get burritos.

Anywhere I Lay My Head falters on Johansson’s vocals, or lack of a distinctive voice.

The songs can't go anywhere due to the length of the loops and the conceit of assembling them, so Huifang hisses over the "music" in this hiccuping, Fonzi-fied affectation that is one of the most blatant and unoriginal guises to come down yet in our lazy, near-sighted approximation of what we construe as challenging or worthwhile music in 2011.

Easily 30 minutes too long and four symphony orchestras too many, Human Conditions feels like a soundtrack to Barnum and Bailey, with Ashcroft’s earnest vocals drowned out by a cast of thousands.

A messy, disappointing record that would be a miss from any artist, but from an artist of Mos Def’s talents, it’s a minor disaster.

What a disappointment.

If you took away the melodica, the masks and the mystery of a band like Clinic, you’d be left with a Brakes; competent, middle-of-the-road, going nowhere fast.

The fact that the middle of the album is easier to swallow than the beginning is not an indication of any real improvement, but a sign that you become habituated, or at least desensitized, to its utter lack of creativity or soul.