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.