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.