Once a means to subvert pop/rock formula, the band's abruptly shifting dynamics have themselves become formulaic. [#67, p.97]

If you're not fanatical about the racket created by unfathomable guitar noise, you'll find songs on Motion Set overly long and veering frequently toward incomprehensible. [No. 138, p.57]

All Rise flitters about like an overly melodramatic actor: it might be pretty, but it offers little more than monotony. [#67, p.97]

Shook Me offers little that doesn't sound like any one of those bands [Vampire Weekend, the Kooks, and fun.] sanded down to their blandest core. [No. 97, p.58]

It's hard to keep this album from simply asking why over and over again. [No.99, p.59]

The duo is only revisiting what made Death From Above faves 13 years ago without realizing how poorly it has aged. [No. 146, p.55]

These tunes would work better if the influences weren't so obvious. [No. 117, p.55]

Four becomes truly trying during its tangent-prone second half. [#70, p.93]

Savor Luke Lalonde's chirpy blurts on "Needle" and "Ocean's Deep;" they're soon replaced by increasingly ironed-out dance pop that goes through unfortunate puberty over 12 tracks, from good to bad to worse. [No. 97, p.53]

A record that plays like just the sort of effort we've come to expect from the Dandy Warhols: an uninspired, over-referential half-nod to the group's heroes. [No.87, p.54]

Two albums in, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros sound just as phony as Ima Robot did. [No.88 p.59]

The Baltimore four-piece has the fuzzy guitar, the screamo vocals, the charging bass lines and an overwhelming sense of doom for stomping, post-Seattle noise punk. But the parts don't fit together. [No.87, p.54]

Krug's non-stop croaking yells get old quickly, and the few highlights are hardly worth sitiing through an hour of Renaissance Faire-y meandering. [Fall 2007, p.108]

The balance of the album is crammed to capacity with placeholders for more fully developed ideas.

Cliched lyrics and predictable musicality make every song here sound the same. [No. 125, p.53]

Sounds like classic overcompensation, a racket on wheels trying to live up to its hype by merely playing over it. [#59, p.98]

What's missing ... is a sense of perspective, or humor, or anything to leaven Buckingham's monochromatic intensity. [No. 81, p.54]

Lucky for Conditions of My Parole, Puscifer has graduated from embarrassingly stupid to simply boring. [#81, p. 59]

Ultimately, this is really only of interest to random member of Teenage Fanclub and die-hard obsessives alike. [No. 103, p.52]

The vocals are random, directionless moans and the open-ended delivery hardly screams, "Listen to me again!" [No. 138, p.53]

The first Wheat album that'll make you cringe through four or five listens before you can tolerate its artificial sweetness. [#61, p.111]

The songs on Sucker aren't the greatest tunes Brock has ever committed to tape... [#51, p.103]

It is, for the most part, a distant shadow of former glories. [No. 98, p.56]

The results are about as bold and memorable as a spent glowstick. [No. 148, p.55]

It's an LP full of computerized, Auto-Tuned dance-pop anthems, perfect to drive the kids at junior prom into a frenzy. [No.90 p.59]

Even at 16 tracks, RKives feels paltry and incomplete. [No. 98, p.59]

Opening slog, "Heaven Is A Gated Community" plods hopelessly beneath its titular destination, setting the pace for a record-long limp. [No. 93, p.57]

Unlike a deadmau5 or Skrillex, Van Dyk can only do his one style, and by the time the album is two-thirds over, you're already ready for him to mix out. [#86, p.59]

Admittedly, it's hard not to respect Patton's creative adventurousness, but sweet Jesus, the gulf between admiration and enjoyment of one of his projects has never been so wide. [No.89, p.57]

Uneven. [#73, p.112]

At its worst (most of it), it's layered synth sounds with beats and vocals smacking of a manufactured sexiness, all designed to hide the gaping void where memorable songwriting should be. [No. 93, p.59]

'War Cry," the album's longest track at more than 11 minutes, sums up the band's problem with its blend of barely audible vocals and meandering guitar solos that go from metallic shredding to simple repeated clusters of notes without building much tension or release. [No. 109, p.59]

Too much of A River, though, doesn't give you enough music to love it. [#68, p.110]

Like a handful of Flinstones Chewables, Velocity is sugary, prehistoric and well-intentioned, but Apples don't make a meal. [#56, p.78]

This laudable open-mindedness [to try anything] may have finally backfired. [No. 122, p.55]

Even as it completely eschews Mohawke's maximalist, hyperkinetic style of old for a newfound soft side, Lantern registers as a limp, populist gesture for how ham-fistedly it attempts to reconcile the two. [No. 122, p.57]

The relationship songs are distressingly generic; she backpedals on her "edgy" (for country) envelope-pushing; and she sings about what's she's not. [No. 122, p.57]

The Monsanto Years is another head-scratcher of an album. [No. 122, p.61]

We're left with a meandering, psychedelic buzz--not a dizzying, mind-expanding head-trip. [#71, p.102]

Magik Markers' simulations are dutiful, but they lack even a hint of the revolutionary spirit, menacing explosiveness, creativity, musicianship, savvy, wit, humor, heart or charm oif their heroes [Sonic Youth]. [Fall 2007, p.101]

Bossy's reformation seems based in penning the dullest platitudes imaginable. [No. 112, p.59]

Last Of Our Kind has heavy and abrasive moments that are heavier and more abrasive than anything in The darkness discography. [No. 121, p.53]

Their latest is another reliably pleasant, if inconsequential offering. [No. 106, p.52]

Queens Of The Stone Age lumbers its way through a series of increasingly skronky, sludge-by-numbers jams and sound. [No. 100, p.57]

Take the fake phone call and run, don't elephant walk, away. [No. 98, p.56]

Strength In Numbers makes you wonder if you ever really liked this band at all. [#75, p.94]

Aside from a handful of tunes, little here is all that memorable, namely because the hooks can’t see their way clear of the repetitive, robotic arrangements.

Shallow and superficial. [#56, p.101]

Oh, big breathy bombast, they name is Sense Field. [#60, p.113]

The truth is, even Angels & Airwaves do this sort of epic-emo thing with more verve, if not more Verve. [#73, p.96]

Despite valiant efforts at punking up "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" and "White Christmas," this is starting to sound like a bad joke. [No. 105, p.52]

Easy listening has never been this painful. [#57, p.106]

He sandbags every song with gigantic, syrupy string arrangements that make John Williams sound like John Cage. [#58, p.82]

Tepid, predictable.... It's sleek and stylized, the spastic, jittery punk replaced by impassioned, searching guitar lines. [#60, p.110]

It's difficult to imagine even a hardcore completist wanting to hear Chilton's interminable orgasmic noises on the title track, long stretches of drunken studio banter or yet another two versions of Third's "Jesus Christ." [No. 144, p.53]

The seventh LP by these Hot Topic/Warped tour faves sees the onetime mainstream screamo success story trying really hard to acclimate itself with whatever constitutes the present mainsteam-music climate. [No. 149, p.61]

It's unlistenable dreck. [No. 126, p.55]

Only a couple of tracks on Nightbird flicker with any sparks of life. [#67, p.96]

Turgid at best. [#57, p.102]

The vocals are on point in Ashcroft's non-plussed yet quintessentially pop-edged delivery, but these arrangements lean more toward boredom and self-servitude. [No. 133, p.53]

After all these years, the band still possesses no originality or musical inventiveness that could distinguish it from the pack. [No. 93, p.58]

Forget Evil Urges entirely; call this one Zzz.

Phillip Ekstrom's vocals echo the tortured moan of Robert Smith with a trace of Ian McCulloch's attitude, but he never manages to find his own voice. Except for the implied reggae pulse on "Blues," neither does the band. [No. 96, p.56]

Paper Gods is an exercise in shamelessly rehashing every tired, vaguely transgressive cliche that's defined Duran Duran's 30-plus-year career. [No. 124, p.55]

Give Up is a record that says, well, nothing. [#58, p.100]

While in his mind, Momus might indeed be a giant, to those of us growing weary of his increasingly tedious shtick, he just might be a weenie. [#50, p.99]

Not even Linkous can prop up this house of cards for long. [#58, p.94]

Dog is Black's safest record in years.... As such, however, the album is a bore. Rollicking American rock and pedal-stell ballads don't suit Black, and the resulting arrangements are both unsurprising and uninspired. [#48, p.78]

Suggests some arcane Canuck payment scheme in which lyricists are compensated by the syllable. [#70, p.106]

Brightblack Morning Light has always been a druggie band; this time, however, the drug of choice is Dramamine.

Occasional exotic loop or surprising flair aside, the rest [aside from three songs] is listenable, charmless and pointless. [No.90, p.58]

Krug's mushy, mixed-down vocals and the lack of dynamic range often sucks all the life out of the music. [No. 132, p.57]

By stripping away the symphonic, avant edge... [Gomez] loses much of what made it unique in the first place. [#64, p.96]

Where 2005's harrowing Frances The Mute strikes the right balance between inspiration and indulgence, the Mars Volta loses its equilibrium with Amputechture. [#73, p.96]

Not only does Bankrupt! propose a big, stadium-ready sound, it offers one that nearly suffocates its creators. [No. 98, p.59]

Sounds like musicians so thoroughly bereft of ideas and energy that they've resorted to lifting melodies from their record collections wholesale while crossing their fingers for luck, hoping no one will notice the difference between inspiration and theft. [#59, p.88]

This time it's insipid, acousti-stomp faux-psych of the down-to-mid-tempo variety, and autopilot riffers that come off like MADtv skits about stoner metal. [No. 104, p.59]

The failing of Plain, however, is its lack of direction and absence of cohesiveness. [No. 98, p.55]

This wet blanket is a sheer bore. [No.89, p.57]

Hideously tedious sounds of the "definitive" Primus lineup drowning in a soupy melange of chocolate and cutesy pretense gone way, way wrong. [No. 114, p.61]

Mercury Rev has talked about reinvention and veering away from its comfort zone, which is only to be commended, but the band has really fallen flat on its face here.

There are seeds of talent in Phox, but this album doesn't let the band flourish. [No. 111, p.59]

What Is This Heart? certainly isn't done any favors by Krell's stock, dejection-by-the-numbers lyricism and the baring of his overextended falsetto against the array of muted synths, strings and drum machines that crop up from song to song, as the album cycles through every tired adult-contemporary R&B trope in the book. [No. 111, p.55]

Rod and Gab's fifth album is bereft of personality. [No. 110, p.59]

In spite of its shortcomings, there's something fascinating about this saccharine new Butthole brew.... Like driving by a head-on collision late at night, it's almost impossible to avert your eyes. [#51, p.88]

This batch of 11 half-baked songs is whiny, lifeless and not even close to stimulating. [#60, p.106]

The unintentionally hilarious Mount Eerie misfires so dramatically, it makes you want to reconsider not the Second Amendment but the First. [#57, p.98]

What had been a fascinating display of aural minimalism has morphed into a haphazard, ill-advised mess. [#75, p.96]

[A] joyless, meticulously crafted trudge. [No. 106, p.52]

On Rehearsing My Choir, the Furnaces are just defiant because they can be, indulging every impulse but neglecting to make any of them even remotely compelling. [#70, p.96]

Tortoise makes like Herbie Hancock wandering through the '80s, all lost at the jazz-fusion supermarket. [#49, p.95]

Seems shambled and unfinished. [No. 85, p.58]

A poor pastiche of Aphex Twin, Spandau Ballet and Gary Numan. [No. 96, p.60]

There are but three words to describe the sixth album from [Nightmares On Wax]... "repetition"... "derivative"... "listless."[#71, p.108]

Halfway applies Cook's fading trademark of playful repetition to similarly crackly sampling and comes up almost wholly unlikable. [#48, p.89]

It's fine that none of this is the least bit subtle. Memorable, or anything other than baseline catchy, is another thing entirely. [#81, p. 56]

Doesn't offer much in the way of anything appealing. [#67, p.90]

How in god's name did Damon Gough fall so far? [#74, p.90]