Those hoping for a trove of overlooked gems will be disappointed, as too much of With the Lights Out sounds like nothing so much as a dull-edged instrument lifting flakes of material from the bottom of a barrel. Simply put, there's enough good stuff here for a solid single disc.

If Mm..Food? feels merely good or somewhat inconsequential, it's because it is that way by design.

Watching such an undeniably talented artist blindly follow such an errant muse can be endlessly compelling, and the failure of these two albums to capture his visions and ambitions with any adequacy possesses the pull of true tragedy.

R&G has a unified sound, rare in hip-hop albums, but it's a sound based on tinkly pianos and noodly guitars and windchimes. It sounds something like The Black Eyed Peas if they tried to make a Barry White album, but with more falsetto warbling.

Encore is a fourth fascinating record from Eminem, but it's also easily his weakest and, in many ways, tamest album to date.

White People, for all its ambitions, fails to coalesce.

Case is a singer first and a songwriter second, and The Tigers Have Spoken is afflicted with the same malady as Blacklisted: Many of its songs are too short, clocking in under two minutes.

Joji sounds like a record made by mountains.

Replaces the cheap sounds of their earlier records with more traditional sonics, which leave the often-clever lyrics feeling like an afterthought.

One of this year's most remarkable "punk" albums.

Sure, greater dynamic variety and some selective risktaking would be nice, but these precocious upstarts already got the tough part pinned down: subtlety. Psapp have laid themselves a remarkably self-assured template for subsequent outings.

Cohen's towering presence and deft songwriting breathe life into the lite-jazz arrangements.

Unfortunately, when they could have stopped it at 12 tracks and had a pretty good party on their hands... they kept right on going, and it stops being fun after a certain point.

By turning the rock knob down a notch, DFA79 have kept You're a Woman loud and nasty and ensured a cohesion and unusual degree of listenability.

The new musicians forgo the gauzy, playful dilettantism of Euphemystic in favor of expansive pop marathons.

It would be foolish, however, to think that you could get through a Nick Cave project this ambitious without a few clunkers. At least here Cave's missteps occur when his reach exceeds his grasp, and the songs that fail manage to do so dramatically rather than boringly. [average of scores of 78 for 'Abattoir' and 74 for 'Orpheus']

Far from being either vindicating or enthralling.

A worthy if not exactly earth-moving capstone to the band's career.

On Gold Medal, even when they fail, it seems as if that failure is a result of The Donnas trying to carve their own identity rather than just being a cute cover band that ran out of ideas.

The Futureheads rely on actual chops and the kind of melodic astuteness usually associated with piano-pop balladeers, and in doing so, they exhibit complete control over their music and intertwining vocal deliveries.

At nearly every turn of their flaccid debut, Up All Night, Razorlight squander the ideas they've snatched up from other, more talented acts, then somehow find even more ways to ruin already perfectly uninteresting songs.

Young, earnest, eerie, and overzealous, Von is a unique, almost belligerently unaffiliated piece of music that unsubtly blazons its idiosyncrasies.

The most Chisel-sounding record he's released as a solo artist, returning to stripped-down arrangements and, on "The Angel's Share" and "Little Dawn", his fascination with repetition.

Futures is like a rotten onion, revealing layer upon layer of foulness.

If This Island failed musically but still got Le Tigre's message out, it could be counted as a minor success. But at this critical juncture in their career, Le Tigre seem tame.

Maverick has a more consistent tone than either of Beans' previous records, but it also lacks the stand-outs of its predecessors, settling into bland production strokes that recede behind his always fascinating rhymes.

They have general technical proficiency and a knack for a good riff, but listening to them is nevertheless a chore-- and a boring, repetitive one at that.

The most disheartening thing about From a Basement on the Hill is its plainness-- it's neither a perfect record (and not one of Smith's best) nor the kind of colossal disaster that could be angrily pinned on money-hungry handlers and desperate fans.

Who Killed...the Zutons is an unexpectedly impressive start, consistently showcasing off the band's dynamic songwriting and penchant for weird, sprawling throwdowns.

You don't judge a compilation by its hits alone, and it doesn't take long to find the set's weakness: sequencing.

Dents and Shells is Buckner in top form, using a broad brush to manifest his enigmatic poetics, hallucinatory atmospheres, and melodies that appear and evaporate like breath exhaled onto cold glass.

Yes, the Brothers still overuse lyrical gore the way the Evil Dead series did Kero syrup, but their sonic pace and intensity has somewhat slowed.

Here, as on previous albums, Arthur demonstrates his gift for emotionally direct songwriting, but the specifics often escape his attention.

Dangerous Dreams is plagued by a pervasive feeling of been there/done that, and the album ultimately sounds like the same two or three tracks on repeat.

Despite the strength of "Music Is My Boyfriend" and lush single "The Fear Is On", I continually find myself humming songs from the debut instead.

The second disc is ultimately little more than a curiosity for most-- and will no doubt be complete anathema for some-- but given that the entire package retails for a single-disc price, that's hardly a reason for a die-hard to opt out.

A uniformly strong collection of sharp-eyed, sardonic allegories.

[A] disappointing release.

Unfortunately, these high points are surrounded by plenty of semi-coherent nonsense about the wanderings of their fictional protagonist soldier boy.

Arguably their best record yet, a logical and accessible realization of a sound they've been developing for more than six years.

The Dears, by and large, make tracks that would slide without much distinction onto any number of mid-90s albums, neither gumming up the works nor sounding particularly special.

A more immediate, less cerebral album than you'd expect from such a green musician.

Tales Told lacks the charm of the Seeds' most ebullient singles, and it's certainly no Crocodiles, either.

Slim still loves blabbing repetition and dropping yapping vocal samples into the gobs of the dull, and this helps make Palookaville less a reformation than merely his latest and quite bland big beat manifesto.

Its chief problem is that every word, every note, and every instrument sounds dry, sapped of most of their personality.

Mono have wisely restrained from directly replicating their previous sound, but here the band has sacrificed sonic heaviness for intellectual ponderousness, and too often has fallen prey to slow, repetitive, tiresome songwriting patterns and a frustrating lack of variation.

Hidden Vagenda is elegantly constructed and outwardly naive, but it lacks a consistent underlying honesty.

Spooked sounds closer to folk-inspired songs Hitchcock performed very early in his career, his recent forays into Dylaniana, and Welch's prefab Americana. For Hitchcock, it's both a departure and a return to his roots.

It's awkward to witness such a gloriously thuggish monster vainly attempt the rope-a-dope.

It lurches along like a junk-heap jalopy, unsteady and unsafe, bits flying off in every direction, stopping, starting, and bouncing in pain.

For an album I approached ready to shrug off as sheer novelty, its humor and candor give it a fair amount of staying power.

These are summer-blockbuster songs, overdriven and overproduced simply because they can be, with little-to-no actual substance behind the heavy-effects bluescreen.

The Grind Date brings together an unimaginable team of the underground's hottest producers and meshes their idiosyncrasies without dissidence.

Power is, to say the least, hardly the collection of hard rockers that No Kill and Different Damage were. But with its lilt melodies, Davis' downplayed role, and the band's admission that, hey, a bassline here or there couldn't hurt, Power boasts a cohesion and distinct identity missing from Q & Not U's two previous albums.

He contorts both his simplistic pop urges and his more obtuse soundscaping, and makes good on neither.

Burned Mind, better than any recent album I can think of, betrays music's implied purpose of providing an enjoyable aural experience, while at the same time being psychologically compelling and richly imagistic enough to invite repeat listens.

Damage is a far cry from the stripped-down screech that made these guys famous. In its contrast, it calls out everything the Blues Explosion once was and now isn't.

It's the kind of record that will have a profound impact on a small number of people, be ridiculed by many more, and never be heard at all by almost everybody.

Treble and Tremble showcases a full array of old-school remedies, from inventive mic'ing and overdubbing to brutal filters and bullhorn distortion a la Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse. If Espinoza sang any better than he does, he'd probably be bored in the studio.

Even if Hate stands as their most visionary statement, Universal Audio has a subtler strength.

Travistan fails so bizarrely that it's hard to guess what Morrison wanted to accomplish in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, Rademaker makes his mark when he forsakes goth-rock and embraces his jangle-pop roots.

Though Interpol couldn't be expected to surpass their previous heights, it's difficult to imagine a savvier or more satisfying second step.

The end result is a great album, albeit one more lighthearted than its myth would suggest.

What frustrates about The Beautiful Struggle is that its flaws are purely musical: Kweli remains the fist-raising visionary who burned "The Manifesto" at the Lyricist Lounge with the same fiery pen that blazed "African Lounge".

Greenspan... manages to fold elements of nearly a quarter-century of forward-looking pop into a distinct sound without sounding either conceptual or trading on contradictions or the smoke-and-mirrors of attention-grabbing eclecticism.

VHS or BETA have moved on, like so many bands this year, to pillaging the dance-friendly template of late-80s Cure.

While no track dips below the quality line, the album lacks thematic fluidity and spark.

Fans of Client will appreciate the more dynamic edge to City... but those without a history with the band may write it off as another limp post-electroclash exercise.

Often, Costello just sounds prissy and uptight in these more relaxed environs.

A challenging debut that sidesteps inflated expectations by staying close to the group's established sound while still demonstrating a flexibility conducive to future musical development.

For all its grandiosity, American Idiot keeps its mood and method deliberately, tenaciously, and angrily on point.

Tracking the spiritual crossroads of hip-hop, reggae, soul, and flamenco, Joyful Rebellion stirs each of those ingredients into an album that, at the very least, deserves acclaim for blending classic and often forgotten Afro-sounds into 04's hip-hop scene.

A quarter-century after its first release, London Calling is still the concentrate essence of The Clash's unparalleled fervor.

Banhart's disinterest in obvious narratives is, for now, his greatest strength.

Their caveman take on 70s nostalgia-- simultaneously misguided and entirely too obvious-- renders them mostly forgettable and entirely ineffectual.

Her voice has matured to a fine saw-toothed rasp, and carries with it the echoes of every hard minute through which she's lived.

Some of the rowdiest Giant Sand music since the near-grunge of 1992's Center of the Universe.

Their forlorn, polished California pop is like the sprawling Valley suburbs: nice enough, if that's your sort of thing.

Ultimately, It'll Be Cool succumbs to the general lack of ambition that has always been Silkworm's Achilles' heel.

Timms has made some perplexing choices in song selection.

Outgunned is a mess of unfocused energy and uncomfortably irrelevant sonics, an odd mix of cartoonish immediacy and tired youth-cult ideas that would be the perfect soundtrack to Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie: The Movie.

The Handler only meagerly amplifies what he was already doing, probably pleasing his no doubt respectable cadre of core followers, but handily turning off the rest of humanity.

The album naturally lacks the shock of the new, the jolt of Boy in Da Corner-- instead, it's a consolidation of his strengths, lyrically and sonically, and a more satisfying listen than its predecessor.

Their songs fuse Ashlee Simpson mall-punk with the retro 80s fetish of former tourmate Ryan Adams' recent high-profile stinker.

So long as we're unable or unwilling to fully recognize the healing aspect of embracing honest emotion in popular music, we will always approach the sincerity of an album like Funeral from a clinical distance. Still, that it's so easy to embrace this album's operatic proclamation of love and redemption speaks to the scope of The Arcade Fire's vision.

Their mistake is in forcing too many ideas into every possible second.

Radio 4 can be commended for at least trying to move past the purposeful lo-fi of Gotham! and into fresher territory, but there's no bell or whistle in the world that could energize the utterly impotent songs at the core of Stealing of a Nation.

About half of it works reasonably well, though the end result is somehow closer to Low-era Bowie or Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain than anything truly contemporary or avant-garde.

There's a disarming simplicity and artlessness... with an increased emphasis on persistent pop melody over crafty wordplay.

It picks up right where Thickfreakness left off-- outside the bar in the gravel parking lot, swinging aggressively with Dan Auerbach's ferocious six-string and Patrick Carney's cymbal-and-snare seizures-- and brings the noise one step further.

Well-paced and cleverly sequenced, it is, in many ways, a throwback to the great records of the 1970s, and fresh enough not to sound like one.

The band's saving grace is its commitment to and execution of its textural aesthetic, owing as much to David Lynch's oneiric odes to Los Angeles as any musical counterpart.

It's brilliant at points, exhibiting the casual, grimy grace that laced Up the Bracket through English countryside benders, sing-alongs, and pub anthems, but evidently, The Libertines are creatures of excess, and even a good thing can be overdone.

It continues Björk's run of releases that sound nothing like their predecessors, yet is, as ever, particular to her.

But while the album is stylistically and sonically brilliant, it still suffers from the primary flaw of the band's four previous albums: Their songwriting hasn't made the same leap as their chops.

Anyone looking for [an] unpretentious, laidback and solid full-length is hereby invited to check out what's made Kilgour one our most consistent performers for 25 years.

To say that the album is over-produced is an understatement; you could bounce a quarter off of most of these songs.