Plumb feels unsure of how ambitious it wants to be, but instead of landing in the middle of the road, the lack of focus and uncertainty create an incoherent mess.

Instead of the dynamic sound Mayer is capable of, he has instead continued along the same nicely-paved road he has ridden his whole studio career, a path that has always elicited the same reaction from this writer – a shrug.

With Cry, the instrumentation has turned into self-parody, the production is a painful slog, and the worst lyrics are impossible to ignore.

What we have here is an album’s worth of incredibly passive, indifferent music-making.

What's also noticeable is how unnecessarily restrained most of the album is.

Shadow's production is wantonly flashy, but it can't mask his lack of flair.

This retro carnival is a trip, but it’s also a downright mess riddled with poor songwriting choices that are disguised as clever.

While I can appreciate their longevity, ironic style and pureness in their sound, I can't admit that this was enjoyable for me.

The record lacks vision, direction, clarity.

They're already halfway to being the world's best My Bloody Valentine cover band.

After a promising opening trio of tracks, Sticks + Stones wanes badly, and begins to sound more and more like it's been focus-grouped by industry executives in pursuit of a quick buck until there's barely any semblance of character left.

Because it's tediously unassuming, people will listen to it in the background once or twice while skimreading blogs and forget about it within a year.

Given how much effort twenty one pilots give into their presentation, it's genuinely surprising how uninteresting Scaled and Icy sounds on the surface. ... The music itself sounds so limiting and faceless.

Lines, Vines and Trying Times isn’t a good record and definitely isn’t the kind of thing you should be looking to investigate further. But if you’re reading this review, the chances are it’s not meant for you, so giving it a thumbs-down is hardly earth-shattering news.

Absolute II doesn't reveal anything on repeated listens, in spite of the densely woven textures. While it's another prime example of Oneida defying expectations and challenging themselves as artists, it's perhaps a step too far. It's a blip in an otherwise solid discography.

What starts out as inviting, quickly becomes a bit irritating and ends up overwhelmingly draining and drab if tackled all at once.

The old tricks have lost their potency, and without them, the rage and Williamson’s endless torrent of expletives sound increasingly tragic.

The real inexcusable thing about The Blueprint 3 is how boring and sterile it all sounds.

[The music] is not exactly bad, but has about as much creativity and passion behind it as a spreadsheet.

Always professional, but rarely memorable, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, much like its fudge of a title, ultimately balances out as a fairly middling work.

Should his solo career continue, this record could stand as an in between point between his teen past and his adult future, but as it stands now, it's just a muddled, occasionally interesting but often baffling pop-rock album.

Despite the amount of effort that appears at the surface, from the several websites to the layered and unique production, Dreamland is a project that’s as momentarily annoying as it is infinitely forgettable.

Each song is tediously nonspecific, the sort of doggerel any other prominent indie-rocker would cringe at the idea of singing out loud.

Continually tedious and far too long for its own good, 25 25 is a almost hour-long endurance test that refuses to let itself out of the duo’s own heads.

Slogging through the whole disc for the few shining moments just isn’t worth it.

Age has its promising moments, but it overall fails to hit the mark. Gibb’s songwriting this time around just doesn't match the range and energy of his previous works.

While the production on this album brings a multifaceted sonic support system into the picture, its own repetitive nature, along with that of Rashad’s lyricism, lead to exhaustive monotony.

There are times in which The Ark Work sounds aimless in spite of its slight technical achievements, yielding a sensory overload of strobing compositions channeled with unrestrained imagination.

What is frustrating about Junior is King's obvious talent. It is clear that this is a woman capable of a level of musicianship most artists can't achieve, yet she seems unable to do anything more with it than repeat a few good ideas with diminishing returns.

For the most part on Carefree Theatre, you’re stuck with hazy textures (In My Mind) and stilted grooves (Carefree Theatre) that are simply boring.

The problem with Hymns is that it chugs along with a series of stilted niceties that lack any kind of rhythm or emotion.

With Runaway, MSTRKRFT find a balance between the antagonistic incursion and electro-funk wizardry, but asides from that standout, the record as a whole is a jarring affair.

One good single does not a great album make, and unfortunately, the rest of the record becomes pretty tedious, pretty quickly.

None of the songs are good enough as growers or deep tracks to hold up the album.

It’s impressive in small doses, but as Culture progresses you get a strong sense of deja vu, where each track upends the next with a petty familiarity that is just frustratingly repetitive.

Bleached have discovered that they have a canny knack for inoffensive rhythms, melodies and harmonies which will immediately appeal. But where this record needed to provide an abrasive counterpoint in the lyrics, they’re more sickly sweet than the music.

More than anything, Big Talk reflects the Vegas background of its middling maestro.

There may be nothing exactly wrong with Good Arrows as a record, and I’m sure that in a different time and situation it would be considered a respectable if shallow pop record.

With Junk of the Heart, the Kooks are completely discarding level-headedness in favor of offbeat trial tests that fail to give any of the tracks any added gravitas.

The real problem is that the best ideas are outvoted by frustrating ones, leaving us with little touches like the short, yelping-like sound in the second verse of More or the distorted vocals that end killing boys. There are some good moments here, but even the best of them can’t help Halsey get out of her own way.

An occasionally fun, occasionally catchy pop record that will log a few hits, move a few units and ultimately be forgotten once this particular pop trend goes the way of Crunk, Snap Music, the Power Ballad and all the other castoffs in the ever-expanding pop graveyard.

One of the most disappointing debut albums I've ever heard.

After half a decade away, If Not Now, When? really does feel like a misstep. Hopefully a little creative control can be wrestled away from Boyd in the future, otherwise a much under-rated band really could be lost forever.

The album aims for Grohl-esque rock anthems, but falls short mostly due to a lack of melodic gifts; given that, it needs many more musical ideas than it has to keep anybody interested.

Beachy summer party/winter bummer wallpaper for your Bohemian café-bar and for the hipsters that frequent it, who like their pop music perfectly pleasant and non-threatening.

The album does have one redeeming aspect preventing its plunge into epic echelons of suck, and that's lead single Party Rock Anthem.

Magic Hour's never exactly bad. It's worse than that. It's boring.

13 songs in 36 minutes is a constrictive ratio for a record with so many proposed ideas, and its brevity makes Rustie’s ideas sound especially half-hearted. It’s bad enough that he doesn’t give the more physical tracks enough time to flex their muscles, but the tracks which suffer most are the briefer, more innocuous pieces.

Unoriginal, haphazardly thrown together and lacking most of what could make it the least bit enjoyable, Places Like This just proves that Architecture in Helsinki is a one trick pony.

It's just painfully mediocre.

Their style fits in between Chvrches and Taylor Swift’s 1989, though not up to that level of craft. Interesting moments, like the echoing guitar of There’s A Honey or the finger-snap rhythm of Loveless Girl, are drowned out by overstuffed songs with unmemorable melodies.

The Future Bites is the worst sounding album he’s ever put out.

here isn't enough variation on here to retain its limited intrigue, as Lortz relies too much on his consistently unremarkable songwriting; ultimately, it's a forgettable record.

There’s barely any turntable work, just vanilla rock that once you’ve heard once you’ve heard it a million times. ... Incubus have un-made themselves.

Given that these songs mostly clock in under two minutes, that should be enough to carry the flat arrangements and melodies, but it's not.

Colonia has an awful lot of ideas, but doesn’t really know what to do with them and the majority of tracks end up sounding messy and--like the rest of us following Christmas--carrying a little too much extra weight.

Into The Diamond Sun is somewhat equivalent to being pelted with macaroons; at first sweet, delicate, even impressively constructed, but soon proving not just boring, but intensely samey, sickly and unsatisfying.

Lyrically it’s weak, and the over-polished studio buffing does nothing to emancipate the blueprint that is, essentially, the same as it was 17 years ago.

There's no debating in my mind that Digitalism have the potential to produce an album even better than Idealism. But sadly, I Love You, Dude is not it.

The band begins to slog through the session--each song sounds like the sonic embodiment of utter indifference, only this time it’s accompanied by electric instruments.

By playing it safe and giving the fans exactly what they want, Coheed & Cambria have successfully delivered two of the most predictable, mundane albums I’ve ever heard.

Fike doesn't make much of an effort to flesh out any of his genre-fluid ideas. Instead, he's content with writing half-written bouncy hip-pop anthems (Cancel Me) and tryhard "indie" jams (Double Negative) in hopes of charming everything and everyone.

Only three tracks are of sufficient quality to have seen the light of day and it means you can't help but question the motives behind the release of such an inessential collection.

Outrage! Is Now is unequivocally uninspired, shelving almost all of the rawness that put the Toronto doublet on the map thirteen years ago. It’s lyrically apathetic, and Jesse F. Keeler’s basslines have lost all of their punishing nature.

Save for a few tracks, you get exactly what you'd expect from a band like Dead Confederate: middle of the road alternative rock music with seemingly little depth and a whole lot of cliches.

It is a meaningless shell of a record with few, if any, redeeming features.

Every solid moment on American Standard is outmatched by a one to ten ratio of awry choices for songs that shouldn’t be hard to ruin. It’s almost impressive to see James Taylor screw up songs that are fundamentally easy to cover.

By attempting to give us what we want, and provide reassurance that the Sonic Youth legacy is in safe hands, Moore has somehow managed to make it look weaker and less appealing than it ever was.

Their live performances are largely improvised around one riff per song, which could make for an interesting show--but on this record, it gets old fast.

Fresh Air and Midnight Snack. Sagar sounds lethargic and detached, which may be the mood that he's going for; but when he sticks to the same tired motifs, it's hard to feel any more excited than him.

Circuital makes it clear that we are dealing with My Morning Jacket post-metamorphosis. From a provocative indie/country/blues band with exceptional vocals, witty lyrics, and a stellar band, MMJ has found prime real estate on the premise of becoming a commercial parody of themselves.

On Flower Lane, Mondanile and the gang stepped out of the bedroom and into the studio, and the result is something just as sterile as every other song by Real Estate.

This record is half as clever as it thinks it is, and utterly inessential.

Quite frankly, it's f**king boring.

Bricolage is as a sometimes fun but mostly ambitionless and unnecessary project.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with something throwaway now and again, but it’s difficult to stomach over the course of eleven tracks.

A miserable buffet of rock ‘n’ roll cliches, from saccharine ballads to off-color glam to bland MTV rock. It’s essentially homeopathic rock muzak.

They are capable of making albums that are big, over the top and fun. The Resistance is over the top, but comes off as boisterous and overblown.

ye doesn’t reward repeat listens. It gives its limited treasures upfront and it’s an album with precious little beneath the surface.

In the end it's hard to fathom just who is going to really love this album.

The bottom line here is that this is a boring album, plain and simple.

The Libertines have tried to recreate the feeling of their halcyon era but have lost their mojo during their extended hiatus, which means that most of the time, this record sounds like someone playing dialogue from outtakes of Steptoe And Son over a recording of an out-of-tune piano being pushed down an old flight of stairs.

From referencing Harold Shipman in a song title to taking a moral high ground to the view of secluding yourself with drugs, Songs for Our Mothers presents an insignificant manifesto.

It's not too hard to imagine the Saunders sisters staring aimlessly while some confused producers shuffle the cards until randomly finding their rhythmic groove. And that's the worst think about this record: constantly thinking of the word studio when you're trying to invest some emotion.

The album suffers some of the worst adjectives any musician can hear: boring, forgettable, and embarrassing.

The girls are solid musicians, and they’ve structured their little songs well enough. The record is pretty short too, clocking in at 24 minutes, which is good, because I was bored already at the 15 minute mark.

While not everything here is awful, the good is often streaked throughout each song like marbled fat in a rubber steak.

Vices & Virtues bucks that somewhat healthy trend in entirely the wrong manner, and represents exactly the kind of the uninspired drudgery of Americana indie rock that has emerged in the wake of the likes of My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy.

Wet feel disconnected from the album's overarching theme, and though they do put some feeling into their maudlin ballads, you'll come off it without remembering a single note.

Every song on here comes from a collaboration from a different source, or a different trend that Legend is hopping on. There’s nothing personal here. ... Bigger Love’s second half has painful trap pop (Don’t Walk Away), plastic soul (Remember Us, Always), and a piano ballad closer with no defining traits or features (Never Break), all in classic John Legend fashion.

Synths take a higher precedence this time round: it’s an indie-pop record, far from their post-hardcore roots; indeed Living in Song sounds like an Architecture in Helsinki knockoff. But even when you can hear the band trying out new things, it simply sounds turgid.

Where this album should be fresh and current, it sounds tired, repetitive and uninspired.

It is, quite frankly, tedious and utterly un-inspiring, lacking any serious ability to convey the emotive forces which I would hope drove the song writing processes. [Review of UK release The Future Is Medieval]

A 55-minute mess called Curtis, undoubtedly one of this year’s worst releases.

The derivativeness quickly overwhelms.

Mostly everything is contrived and cliché, lifted from a stock collection of guitar rock and electro rock of the past ten years.

There is no excuse for accepting this level of mediocrity.