While tracks like "So Sick" and "Stay" hit a few sweet neosoul spots, this perfectly pleasant disc is lacking that roundhouse kick that floors you.

Even if Keane hasn't completely gone down with Under The Iron Sea, the band is merely treading water here.

A disc packed with so many surefire club-ready hits it'll be impossible to avoid these jams over the next year.

The album quickly unravels into a mess of mumbled vocals, pointless guitar solos and songs that sound suspiciously unfinished.

The album bubbles with climatic ambiance and sophisticated grooves.

Afrodisiac teases more than tantalizes.

The white-boy funk routine wears thin fast, but the overbearing Broadway-style ballads are even worse.

The surprising thing about this retro rock trio is that it can actually rock.

The worst part of Tricky's comeback disc is, well, Tricky himself.

Hoobastank balances heavy riffs with dark existentialism and hooks that closely imitate that of its breakthrough hit.

The band goes a different way now, and it's not necessarily a better one.

Ultimately, like her manufactured pop rivals Ashlee Simpson and Hilary Duff, Lindsay is a little too superficial to sell us angst.

Chesney sticks with what he knows best: drinking ("Beer in Mexico"), driving ("Somebody Take Me Home") and raising his glass to everyday heroes ("Who You'd Be Today").

The album quickly reveals itself to be a muddled effort of overproduction and drab lyrics.

Merely highlights all the weak spots, like the lifeless voice, generic MOR melodies and the highly noticeable lack of Jakob being Bob.

The band's playing is mellow and freer than their tenser past outings, and frontwoman Johnette Napolitano's voice remains pleasantly husky. But some of the band's beautifully gritty venom is missing.

It sounds all too familiar.

And by classics we mean poorly produced electro songs you'll hear once, chuckle and never want to hear again--unless you have a head wound or a Sparks fetish.

This hand-clapping, disco-ball-driven journey sounds like all the other stuff in [Jay Kay's] catalog.

This isn't necessarily the best place to hear the definitive versions of Bo Diddley's "Road Runner" or Big Joe Williams' "Baby, Please Don't Go," but it's definitely the place to hear Aerosmith having the time of its life.

But even if it's only half as good as it used to be, this Call sounds okay to us.

And while it might be difficult to swallow yet another dose of hip-hop-lite and poor-me acoustic pop songs from chick-magnet lead singer Mark McGrath and gang, these Southern California boys make the everyman breeziness work for them.

Walk isn't groundbreaking as much as typical Tori Amos--a dramatic menagerie of atmospheric tracks filled with manic piano, morose characters and so many literary allusions you'll need CliffsNotes to figure 'em out.

Taken as a whole, Souljacker comes off so bleak it overwhelms the album's strengths, like its memorably catchy melodies and sonically brilliant tracks.

Neither as experimental as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot nor as accessible as McCaughey's various forays, nothing on the album really makes an impression other than a couple of throwaway lyrics and the abrupt shift between McCaughey's pinched vocal styling and Wilco singer Jeff Tweedy's coarse whisper.

The Old 97's are a good band, but Drag It Up simply isn't them at their best.

But even a busload of heavyweight producers and guests (P. Diddy, Jermaine Dupri, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the Neptunes and more) can't help this Babyface prodigy from playing it too same-y here.

Kinky, however, gets tangled up when they attempt to rock out in English, and the odd rhymes and dated '80s vibe taint their musical revolution.