One of the risks of having faith is becoming deaf to plain truths. The truth in this case is that most of In the Grace of Your Love is lousy.

Its appropriation of G-funk hooks and production is really off-putting, and makes me wonder exactly who this record is for.

The consequences are not always dull, and Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy is as enjoyable at points as the music it’s clearly drawing from.

It's another misfire with a handful of great moments that point to something better.

This is not a one-hit wonder situation, or even an album with only one good song. With King Night, Salem exhausts all its resources in a singular moment, which leaves the rest of the record to suffer through its own paralysis and mediocrity.

From the Valley to the Stars doesn’t have that directness [of her first album]; it gives the persistent feeling that it is nothing but parts.

Throughout this often incoherent hodgepodge of tunes, Baroness has mostly abandoned the contrast that made its previous records work so well.

Its successes -- its pleasing idiosyncrasies, its moments of charm, and so on -- are there, but underneath a veneer of such blandness that finding them seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Given that everything here is a like a jam from musicians suspicious of jamming, the charms and defects are like a whole album of B-sides.

Though excellent in brief parts, much of the album is still worrisome, at times specifically seeming to document a band running out of steam.

Although its influences are strong and well synthesized, and the results are listenable, it falls short of being anything other than used bin fodder.

His songs succeed when they balance on the knife-edge of banality and pathos, and when they succeed in making formula redeem itself and regain a kind of innocent power. For most of Realism, unfortunately, Merritt fails to even remotely strike this balance, abandoning any emotional power as he falls victim his penchant for formula and banality.

It’s stale, predictable, and pedestrian in its fussy perfection.

While pleasant enough on a superficial level, the band's third full-length, Traps, falls short of the kind of coherent, compelling vision that would lift them up from intermittently-engaging mediocrity.

The whole of it seems passive and incomplete.

Falling somewhere between a compilation, a beat CD and a producer showcase, this fails to satisfy on any of those levels.

While Beaus$Eros retains his playfulness and wordplay, and while the songs are without doubt catchy, Farquhar is out of his depth.

Where Beaches blended human touch and electricity to create heart-stopping climaxes and an air of constant expectancy, Broken Ear attempts a streamlined repetition of the formula with much more emphasis on the electricity, and the whole does not equal the sum of the parts.

Anika was apparently recorded in a short time, and it's hard not to wish it felt at once more urgent and more cohesive.

What was once an exciting examination of a seldom-explored corner of rock and roll has become a listless, mechanical affair.

Other than some inoffensive feignings at trying something new, there's not too much else to be heard.

The results, which are generally not very good, fall into the same aesthetic gray area as the majority of mashups everywhere: laudable ambition, misbegotten audacity.

Life Sux, however, shows that laziness is still very much the enemy here. And it comes in many flavors, but none more egregious than the penchant for gimmicks.

Marked by inconsistent, not fully formed songwriting, Here We Go Magic's new tracks also make for an indecisive, if not bipolar, collection.

Deacon is a gifted musician capable of so much more, and that makes Bromst feel like a waste.

I can sense that there's something pretty great going on and even briefly catch glimpses of it. But as an experience, it's a little bit maddening, and eventually I'll want to throw away the glasses and pick up a book.

This is a heavily flawed album, at times frustratingly so. It can feel painfully sentimental: full of sweeping string arrangements, dramatic instrumental surges, and celestial soundscapes.

This is an awkward pairing -- there are a number of nice moments, but many haven't been fully developed, and seams divide them.