Ronson lowers Ricky Wilson’s maddeningly limited vocals and amps the bass, but the disc still fails to come alive.

Black Ice may sound like a vintage AC/DC record in a superficial way, thanks to producer Brendan O’Brien and engineer Mike Fraser, but having Brian Johnson squeal dumb cliché phrases--three of the 15 songs have “rock ’n’ roll” in the title while a fourth has “rocking”--over a steady 4/4 thump is going to bore even their most ardent followers.

For the most part the record is a sluggish mess of sweeping guitars and stoner-rock sounds, not unlike what you might hear at a high school talent show.

Even as they cop the slinky white funk of INXS and David Bowie on Love Me and aim for an easily romanced demographic with the electro-tinged ballad A Change Of Heart and the anguished The Ballad Of Me And My Brain, they sound suspiciously like dudes too eager to come off as sensitive and edgy.

Woomble... shows an innate inability to keep pace, vocally and emotionally, with the thrusting guitars, driving drums and push toward intensity the band bids for.

It relies heavily on ambiguous world music tropes, highly melodic, canned inspirational hooks and arena-style arranging.

The ukulele, while a beautiful, serene instrument, is arguably limited, especially as the centrepiece of an album this long. Vedder's distinct baritone complements it, but his chords eventually become repetitive.

The Weirdness does have many of the recognizable sonic and structural traits, but the essential threat of impending doom is missing.

Sure, the beats bang like crazy, but the songs are emotionally hollow, thematically one-dimen­sional and conceptually lifeless.

For everybody else, an album of atmospheric repetitions and meandering jams likely won’t be overly exciting.

The album starts strong with classic Kylie banger Into The Blue, but it suddenly succumbs to faddishness on nondescript disco tune Sexy Love and the weirdly dated dubstep track Sexercize.

If only Steele could keep a lineup together for more than a few months and follow through with his original plan of working with producer Dave Fridmann, Personality might've risen above the level of ho-hum patchwork pastiche.

The outlandish baroque-cubed excess here, from the warbling chorales to the bleating woodwinds, weighs down track after track after track after track.

Now, her newest batch of songs feel overly done up and superficial, with squeaky synths and drum machine beats fabricated for the club.

Protest the Hero have never been short on energy, but their fourth album lacks variety and rarely allows the listener to breathe.

Nothing terribly new or unexpected to report, just a more direct way of expressing not so adventurous ideas.

Rearrange Beds, the duo’s debut full-length, features the five EP tunes plus another five that aren’t as strong. While not bad in small doses, the disc has a cumulative grating effect if you listen from start to finish.

The album revels in the clean, streamlined production elements and beautifully realized nocturnal atmosphere favoured by the OVO camp, but that sonic branding, if you will, swallows up any sort of personal flavour or perspective that might set Majid Jordan apart.

Cutesy lyrics with insipid rhymes like "You can count on me like one, two, three" abound on songs that play out less like a cohesive album and more like no-brainer radio references to Coldplay, U2, Michael Jackson, Sade, Feist and so on.

That said, there are plenty of catchy moments. Beat-wise, Boots & Boys--a song about what brings her joy--is incredibly well constructed. If only the insipid lyrics were left off completely.

The bigger problem is an overall lack of energy; there are only so many mid-tempo middle-of-the-road psych-pop songs you can listen to before starting to watch the clock.

Light, breezy and somewhat snoozy, Christopher has some pleasant moments, but it's not the strongest work in McPhun's discography.

There are moments here, but ultimately Streetlights pales against BlaQKout, the Kurupt/DJ Quik collaboration that dropped last year.

It’s nice to see a seminal, hugely influential band given their dues (and then some) after the fact. But it’s equally disappointing to see them fall short of the hyperbolic over-hype.

Celebrity aside, Speak Now is as hooky as its predecessors but differs in its often angry, spiteful tone.

How poignantly they express their inarticulate messages through Blink-182 rip-offs and recycled versions of their own material.

A handful of songs, like 'Things I'll Do,' find Northern State at their zenith, perfect storms of concept, beat and lyrical cleverness. Others are catchy but inane. Enough are just insipid.

Just when it starts to feel like the album is continuing in a high-powered vein, the Lips start sounding like they’re steering a chuckwagon.

A hardened, firsthand account of the preordained dire straits of the American underclass, and Waka Flocka Flame-indebted boast talk minus the charisma.

Unbearably bland.

Two-thirds of the songs fail to cohere.

This is a dry affair dominated by standard-issue R&B production monotony, and an egregious misuse of resources.

Redundant, needlessly long, Those The Brokes rarely matches the 60s California-dreamin' good-vibes pop of its successful self-titled predecessor.

Most of this over-egged sissy-boy schlock would make James Blunt wince.

Uniformly mediocre.... It leads one to assume he's either lost the ability to discern the padding from the profound or he just didn't give a shit.

A floundering mess that bores you to tears.

The result is exactly what you'd expect: loud and hard garage rock devoid of personality or originality.

So while Yellowcard's hearts may be in the right place, it's clear they're simply incapable of realizing this clumsy faux magnum opus.

Considering the expensive talent involved, this is a colossal disappointment.

Sitek attempts to do Johansson (and us) a favour by burying her monotonous voice deep in the mix, but unfortunately, the musical support isn’t interesting enough to carry the album. Skip it.

Jay proves that, yes, he really has nothing more to say except to state the fact that he's back.

For Mötley Crüe, every new record is a Faustian deal: their former glory as 80s hair-metal badasses in exchange for sustained economic success in a diminished, lame-ified state.

The problems that litter No Line fall into two categories: mind-numbing blandness on the part of the band or embarrassing, face-palm-inducing vocal choices by Bono.

The most listenable song is the Chavril duet Let Me Go, which has zero of either musician’s “edge” and a whole lot of adult contemporary schmaltz.

In lieu of artistry or any semblance of lyrical spark, DST offers monotonous production and relentless chanting.

Past the dancehall signifiers (Paul's increasingly strained lilt and tepid syncopated pulse), the new record is brazenly mediocre.

Songs you'd expect to swell and boil over--which is what Modest Mouse are good at--often end up trudging humourlessly (Ansel, Be Brave), and things get far worse in the moments where humour is actually the goal.

These 14 purpose-punk "anthems" (songs with loud multi-tracked vocals during the choruses) sound like Anti-Flag hastily thawed them out of mid-90s cryogenic stasis in a moment of frenzied conviction that we've never needed them more.

This isn’t music so much as it is economic exploitation of a demographic.

Topping off this overproduced, underwhelming effort are Roberts's over-enunciated lyrics. Even at his best, he comes off like a guy crashing an Of Montreal album.

Authentic is ridiculous right down to the heavy-breathing interludes, which worked for Usher circa 2003.

Rebirth is – without qualification – the most embarrassing album of the last 10 years. Embarrassing for him, for his audience, for rap, for humanity.

He rushes through the tunes, slurring syllables as if enunciating the lyrics would be too much work even if he could remember all of them. And clearly, one day wasn’t enough rehearsal time for his hired band, who are so often in vamp mode while trying to figure out where Morrison’s going that they lose track of the tunes.

Everything on My Bloody Underground suffers from Newcombe’s chronic lack of focus, leaving the entire mess sounding like half-assed sonic sketches farted out in a friend’s basement over a woozy weekend.

The closest this popportunistic foursome comes to satisfying songsmithery is "The Getaway," whose title is sound advice for potential buyers of this album.

A dreary dump of sad sack pop blather that makes poor use of the substantial talent on hand.

This is not an observation about theme--the record is unremarkable in both sound and execution.

It seems as if they've done everything possible to distance themselves from their original, much more interesting sound, opting instead for songs with barely enough hooks and coherent structures.

Though Storch and other heavy hitters do their best to craft reasonable facsimiles of a broad range of Today's Best Dance-Pop Hits, they can't hide the fact that Hilton's a shit singer who can't carry a tune even when the vocal melody is reproduced note-for-note in the arrangements.

A lilting acoustic-y record with ethereal leanings, plenty of canned, overproduced studio gloss and occasional dangerous forays into mild rock.

Try as they might to sound different, or even to touch on issues bigger than their own narcissistic garbage, LP still sound like they're stuck back in 00, which is where they should have stayed.

There seems to be something unsettlingly artifical about the whole Beirut project, as if idea man Zach Condon is playing some strange cultural appropriation game for which he’s the only one privy to the rules.

Over-emoting at every turn, she obliterates otherwise innocuous soul, R&B and reggae-inflected songs with gimmicky vocal histrionics, strident attempts at melisma and the kind of callow self-help lyrics that are apparently mandatory for all young pop stars nowadays.

A deadly dull set of cliché-packed piano ballads probably isn't the best way for aging harmony synchers to prove to their shrinking tween audience that the old Boys (sans Kevin Richardson) have still got it.

The novelty of it all has quickly worn thin.

Without any clever arrangements or production gimmicks to rely on, Keys tries to compensate for the obvious shortcomings by oversinging each syllable in a way that would make Patti LaBelle cringe.

Unfortunately, all the intricately picked little guitar figures don't make his raspy yelping sound any less like a wet cat stuck under a couch.

The Audience's Listening is kinda like a Fatboy Slim B-sides collection circa 1998 without the catchy bits.

If maturing means 14 (regular edition) tracks of footy-stadium-worthy anthemic choruses ad nauseam, I don’t want 1-D to grow up.

A combination of insipid songs and uniformly soulless performances, it deserves high placement among the other legendary Macca misfires Pipes Of Peace, Press To Play, Off The Ground, Tug Of War and Red Rose Speedway.

His flow is generic and instantly forgettable and his lyrics are trite, inconsequential and full of self-importance.

His bored delivery and ridiculous lyrics about peanut butter sandwiches and rich kids make his two-minute tunes on this 20-song binge stretch out painfully into what feels like forever.

The boring beats and throwback rhyme flow (circa 92)--which is weak even by Edmontonian standards--put Afterparty Babies somewhere beneath Don Cash’s home demos and the outtakes from Organized Rhyme’s Huh? Stiffenin’ Against The Wall.

Kroeger’s voice sounds more like a wounded goat than ever before, and their blatantly recycled songs touch on familiar themes like strippers, sex, prostitutes, drugs, sex, drinking and sex.

Now and then you get a glimpse of ideas that could’ve made the album more powerful if they’d been further explored. ... But the songs are so spiritless and phoned-in that those moments are too little, too late.

Will.i.am has to be one of the worst rappers of all time, a fact his solo album doesn't just confirm, but stamps in red.

This album belongs chained up in the vaults.

Unfortunately, Furtado doesn't have the rhyming skills, vocal chops or attitude to pull off any one of her new personae.

It all adds up to a whole that’s somehow less than the sum of its parts.

[An] utterly vacuous, unlistenable album.

All 11 tracks feature painfully predictable song structures and lethargic chord progressions devoid of anything resembling a hook.

The painful White Chalk is either a studio experiment gone horribly wrong or a crafty bit of career self-sabotage by a sensitive artist who'd rather make sculptures in the desert than play pop star.

P.O.D.'s new album sounds exactly like all their other ones.

Sadly, this landfill isn't biodegradable.

As it turns out, Scherzinger’s not interesting enough on her own, so she’s padding out her shtick with four glorified backup singers in tow.

Here I Am concerns itself with the kind of bland, radio-friendly R&B pop that equates sex appeal with self-confidence.

Robert Smith, Franz Ferdinand and Wolfmother offer glimpses of what this project might’ve been, but then along comes 3 Doors Down-clone Shinedown and it’s off with the heads of everyone involved in this nightmare.

Rather than the thoughtful songcraft and inspired peformances of Banhart's pre-Roberts Young God recordings, what you hear now is the zoned-out noodling of someone who foolishly believes his own genius hype.

They’ve set their laser harp on “snooze” and come up with a yawn-inspiring set of digital whoosh over which to chant some nonsense that at best resembles the Chemical Brothers at their worst.

While a hip-hop album that’s not a complete kielbasa festival is refreshing, Luda’s feminist intentions are horribly misguided.

Whether it’s Africa, Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, a-ha's Take On Me, their hamfisted Billie Jean or (say it ain’t so) No Scrubs, every cover is unnecessary and pretty much unwanted. Cardigan-toting, alt-rock covering R&B was played out before it ever even happened.

Boring grooves that last a couple of minutes before ending abruptly just don’t cut it. What a letdown.

Even Linda Perry, Swizz Beatz, Nellee Hooper and the Neptunes have their share of duff tracks, and it appears that's all they had to offer when Stefani came calling.

Instead of moving forward with a bold new sound, they seem lost and confused, eventually reverting to the sprawling space rock jams of their early years, which may be their comfort zone.

The newest disc from the once-innovative Vancouver group assaults you with 18 contrived, lazy tracks. The best is a seven-year-old re-release, 'Red Dragon,' from when Moka Only gave this outfit some class.

Despite their brevity, the songs are repetitive, wanky and almost impossible to differentiate. They make you yearn for the days before genre cross-pollination.

The album wobbles between Timberlake-style sexy-time R&B, Bublé-light standards and flat attempts at sincere John Legend-type balladry.

In real snap-music fashion, everything's repeated to death over tinny, cellphone-tailored little synthesizer riffs with snares.