Love 2, their sixth studio album, continues on this path, though its empty lyrics and overall cheesiness do grate.

Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not is 45 new minutes of Mascis's solid-gold shredding, but there has never been less to hang it on. The hooks that bracket the bouts of soloing are almost instantly unmemorable and the chord structures uninspired.

Cat Power fans who aren’t familiar with the originals might be thrilled, but most everyone else will be left wondering, why bother?

The tunes remain pleasantly unhurried, lush and laid-back but fail to stimulate. His small, fragile voice now seems slightly whiny and affected.

All the more frustrating is the fact that Ghost’s guest verses on the new Raekwon album are stone-cold incredible. Clearly, he can still rap, but only when his audience isn’t looking.

The songs aren’t as lyrically cheesy as Kroeger and Co., not as overtly retro as the Sheepdogs, more fun than Theory of a Deadman and most interesting – by far--when harnessing prog rock, as on The Giant. Too bad the latter only happens once.

The Beasties have neither the musical chops nor the compositional skill... to hold listeners' interest for the length of an album.

After 9/11, it seemed like every North American recording artist scrambled to come out with a political message album. Unfortunately for Sheryl Crow, words that to rhyme with “gasoline” have become painfully redundant in 2008.

While The Fool has clear focus and crafts a particular sound, the music fails to resonate emotionally.

He’s a competent emcee, especially when speaking about the struggles of young African Americans, but he’s in need of a good producer to rein him in.

The concept's fine, but the results are more self-indulgent and boring than challenging. For Sonic Youth obsessives only.

Asiatisch mixes repetitive industrial noises, poetry samples, Asian synth motifs and vaguely menacing atmospherics into tepid, listless and melodically bland soundscapes that serve the concept more successfully than they do the listener.

If you were expecting some next-level shit from Pharrell Williams on his self-produced solo debut, you're in for a huge disappointment.

The Miami radio DJ and Terror Squad member takes few stylistic chances, making We The Best Forever a mostly tedious listen despite its flashes of lyrical invention.

They're still making forays into metal (Crash), but most Sum fans will agree that the band just hasn't been the same since guitarist Brownsound left town.

The increased repetition of blurted nonsense phrases and the further dumbing down of their very basic progressions should serve to rid them of numerous long-time fans who hoped the Hives could save rock 'n' roll.

Though deftly orchestrated, Everyday Robots feels deflated and aimless, and the nature-versus-technology theme frequently results in clichés.

His intentions sound pure, but Shaggy's musical moonshine will leave all but the biggest fans with a heavy hangover.

Max Martin wrote the opening track on each of those early records, as he does here on their eighth. But even the anthemic title tune can’t hoist the group out of elevator-music territory.

He's still getting more women than a taping of Ellen, but on Tha Carter IV – his most emo album to date – it sounds like what he really needs is a hug.

Selway sounds like a space-age Badly Drawn Boy, only less lovable. His melodies are simplistic, his lyrics amateurish. If he weren't in the band, it'd be easy to write him off as a Radiohead rip-off.

G-Unit needs to stop remaking Lloyd Banks's first hit, On Fire, from, like, two years ago.

Whereas Chaplin's sharply drawn social comment is rightly considered a modern classic, Dylan's Modern Times -- sung in a strangely affected croak you'd expect to hear from Leon Redbone's grandfather -- comes off like a feeble anachronism in which our man cynically attempts to pass off public-domain blues and folk tunes as his own by changing a few words.

Ultimately, Candylion is more annoying than entertaining.

TBS's main problem is that they write precisely two kinds of songs: energetic pop rock with whiny vocals, and midtempo power rock, again with whiny vocals.

this sounds like the soundtrack to the hell of cheese-ball Las Vegas bottle service clubs.

They're still doing that brooding medieval ambient pop thing, but with less drama and inventiveness.

ew singer William DuVall spends half his time replicating Staley’s nasal misanthropy and the other half buried by Cantrell’s vocals.

The squelchy playfulness in Ewen’s arrangements that marked FBH’s most memorable tunes is now cloistered by cynicism and studiousness.

In the end, Horses is another addition to a catalogue short on standouts.

Isbell shows us his sensitive side in a collection of lightly strummed breakup ballads and weepy slow-dancers you'd expect to get from Ryan Adams. That's not an endorsement.

Ashanti’s still got a decent voice, but she’s badly in need of a better songwriting and production team.

And though her voice is strong enough to carry the tracks, most of the time it’s needlessly strained. Memorable as these songs may be, they could use a good kick of grit to truly set them in motion.

What made the band so charming--their indiscernible vocals, the prickly, overbearing guitars, the lo-fi grittiness of it all--has been lost in the makeover.

The hooks are in short supply, and the production, as on "Flashover," overstuffed and claustrophobic. That cat photo almost saves the day, but not quite.

The only tracks that don't make us cringe are the back-to-basics club bangers likely added to pad out the album, and even those don't contain anything to get excited about. Someone needs to explain to Digitalism that it's way too soon for mid-00s retro.

He composes rich, intimate electronic and acoustic soundscapes that suggest myriad emotions and intriguing songwriting possibilities. As a singer, however, he's maudlin.

Unfortunately, they mostly come across as predictable and chuckle-worthy for the wrong reasons.

Unfortunately, there are none of the ridiculous disses, insane freestyles or wacky interludes that make real mixtapes entertaining.

Unlike Rick Ross, who entertainingly describes his (completely fictitious) exploits in fantastically opulent terms, Joe brags with a dullness that betrays how often he's repeated this story. And the production seems dated all the way down to Kilo, which uses a sample that Ghostface Killah and Raekwon employed to much grimier effect in 2006.

Mopey, twee, orchestral, downbeat--the duo cover all these bases in the flattest, most sophomoric way. Worse, though, is that the album sounds like a bunch of outtakes.

Most of what Barnes throws together here doesn't get beyond annoying pastiche, and he still lacks the chops as a wordsmith to magically transform mediocre jams into memorable songs.

Charlotte Gainsbourg's Beck-produced IRM was a stellar sleeper gem of an album, but this follow-up sounds tossed together.

'Buzzards And Crows' is a natural opener with its whirly fairground sounds, and 'The North' is a pleasant enough ballad, but when Barat croons, “Yeah, I get the fear, but I couldn’t be bothered” (just one of the many incomprehensibly suburban lyrics in this forgettable collection), the sheer laziness says it all.

Rather than risk experimenting with anything radically new, they’ve cautiously tried tweaking their tempos and varying instrumental textures here and there in hopes that listeners won’t notice that they’ve written the same song about romantic frustration in 12 slightly different ways.

Actually, that's the vibe of the whole album: retro mid-90s LL.

Tentacles’ more focused psych punk feels formulaic, underdeveloped and disappointing.

His brilliant, whispery, Gainsbourgh-like vocal delivery is replaced by base shouting, his hilarious wordplay reduced to grating, beat-poet-like observations.

While there are occasional flashes of brilliance on this 10th studio album, the missteps far outnumber the bright points.

It appears that Wilson came up with a couple of tunes about his own troubled life but realized it might be too much of a bummer, so he tacked on a few happy-sappy Beach Boys throwbacks to make for a sunny little song cycle about a magical place filled with sun, sand and surfer girls.

Mechanical Bull is adequate arena rock, a collection of songs fit to play on Guitar Hero.

It comes off like a neutered reprise of the band's decades-old spirit.

Wading through almost an hour of smoky-voiced lonely-heart ballads like You Only Call Me When You're Drunk, Late Night Partner and Until Tomorrow Then is a yawn-inducing exercise that makes you question whether Harcourt's really this sad or if he's just putting on a lugubrious front.

He sticks so closely to the original arrangements that his shortcomings as a vocalist are painfully evident. Had he tried to reinterpret the classics even a little bit, we wouldn't be so quick to compare his singing to the originals.

The Followill boys were experimenting and started leading us somewhere. The fact that Come Around Sundown falls short, then, is all the more disappointing.

A track like 'Weed, Blow, Pills' shamelessly promotes narcotics and, even worse, goes Mike Jones on us to get its redundant point across, ultimately cementing the main problem with this album: nauseating repetition.

This much-anticipated follow-up essentially repeats the foot-stomping, banjo-picking formula, but scrubs away the subtlety.

These directionless, half-baked jams may show a young artist trying to find himself and mature, but he sure isn't there yet.

Lyrics are corny and sometimes funny.

All the reckless abandon the New York Dolls name conjures, the spontaneous handclaps, sloppy guitar-slashing and youthful over-indulgence that made those early Dolls recordings such a kick are sadly nowhere to be found here.

For all the wank and bluster throughout the album’s 14 tracks, the bottom line is that the shit simply doesn’t rock.

If you already didn't like Brown – he would classify you as a "hater" – this album's combination of lewd (Wet The Bed, No Bullshit) and saccharine (Next 2 You, Should've Kissed You) content, delivered in that gross, oozing cadence of his, will only aggravate you further.

Given Grey’s connection to music’s biggest headline-makers, it’s ironic that her own output isn’t all that memorable.

An album that's high on good intentions but low on spark.

Reanimation never sounded so lifeless.

This record finds Winwood on a clichéd existential journey into jazzy world music territory, which should play well with the over-50 soft cock rock set, who for some inexplicable reason don’t seem to mind six-minute sax solos.

Most of the album is moronic Mike Love nostalgia that makes Kokomo sound good in retrospect.

Their well-honed flamboyance has finally given way to full-blown pretension, the lyrics that used to be an afterthought hidden behind a painfully contrived yet musically unimpressive ragtimey veneer of muted trumpets, shoo-bop, shoo-wahs and happily jingling vaudeville pianas.

For diehards only.

Only their radical overhaul of Nine Inch Nails' Hand That Feeds shows any sign of creativity.

Don’t count on hearing any lively back-and-forth exchanges, though, they’re clearly too respectful of each other to risk stepping on any toes in public.

Rae is prepped and, in his own focused, deliberate way, amped, but the production and arrangements are generally uninspired.

Most of Icky Thump's songs sound half-assed, with keyboard parts thrown in ad hoc, but at least they had the good sense to trim the piano bar balladry.

This might be news to the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner, but for every artist there’s a point where aspiration exceeds ability. The Last Shadow Puppets, his new studio dalliance with pal Miles Kane, have way overshot it on The Age Of The Understatement.

Jon King's vocals sound especially diminished, a reality underscored by the occasional electronic manipulation, while the cluttered mix overcompensates for repetitive songwriting. Without the vitality of youth, Gang of Four risk drowning in the sea of bands they inspired.

LaVette has little rapport with Hood, and her uneasiness interpreting his lyrics and the strange cover choices (Elton John's 'Talking Old Soldiers,' Willie Nelson's 'Somebody Pick Up My Pieces') comes through in every vocal performance.

The latest release from former Soul Coughing frontman Mike Doughty isn’t quite as annoying as Matthews’s catalogue, but it comes close.

It’s a much more musically diverse album than the Raconteurs have done before, but there are many more misses than hits among these 14 tracks.

On their fifth album, the Get Up Kids sound like a band who resent what made them popular in the first place.

Impressive song construction ruined by heart-wrenching dramatics.

Unfortunately, Coppola hasn’t got Winehouse’s writing or vocal chops and Pallin clearly lacks Ronson’s knowledge of hit song construction.

Drowners prove themselves competent in making a tight indie rock album full of enjoyable melodies, but their strict adherence to formula and professionalism is undermining and can be dull.

Doing lame imitations of other things that are popular seems to be the mission statement for Sounds From Nowhere.

We all love to revel in a real tearjerker (Someone Like You, anyone?), but these whiney odes are heartbreak songs minus the heart.

Sure, her formidable pipes are as strong as ever, but on every song she comes across as a pale imitation of someone else.

Phantom Punch is a wobbly ride through tracks that, for the most part, hiss and snarl with the leather-jacket swagger of his garagey backing band while Lerche either nervously essays a pseudo-rock "growl" over top or reverts to his customary loungey warble, both of which sound equally absurd.

While a couple of catchy turns of phrase compensate for some elementary rhymes, there aren't enough hooks to make the songs memorable.

Billy Bragg’s studio return finds him in his comfort zone provided by the Blokes and producer Grant Showbiz under yet another title copped from novelist Colin MacInnes.

Overall, the gangsta bravado and rabble-rousing sound uninspired and too familiar.

The Nashville band’s ninth studio album is definitely sleepy and nuanced, only Wagner’s halted singing is disintegrating further into the background as the overall sound inches closer to adult contemporary.

The album is bogged down in missteps like Tyga, Lil’ Twist and YG’s limp One Time and uninspired strip club anthem Back It Up.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear Jill Cunniff had crawled under a rock and refused to listen to any music since her old band, Luscious Jackson, split in 99.

You can’t really fault the band for successfully doing much what it did in the 90s, but don’t expect Purple. There’s no Vasoline or Interstate Love Song.

While Lerche could pull off Bacharach's breezy lounge swinger persona, he lacks the pipes, the pain and the maturity to deliver the smooth retro romanticism these jazz-inflected ballads require.

Fun and charming in places, barely listenable in others.

Williams is at his best when he’s being weird, so cheeky title track Swings Both Ways, which finds him examining his fluid sexuality with Rufus Wainwright, is good. But any fresh moments are balanced by too many unlistenable ones.

On Electra Heart, Diamandis trades her cabaret post-punk vocal histrionics and thrift-store chic for an unconvincing Jacqueline Susann bombshell image and more overtly top-40-friendly sound.

Its formulaic songwriting and middling, lite-pop arrangements seem more concerned with top 40 appeal than with maximizing the richness and openness of his voice.