As far as mainstream pop-rock records go, Brain Thrust Mastery occasionally gets the job done.

Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, their new drive can be awkward. Even more unfortunately, it's most notable on what should be their catchiest songs.

The main weakness is the same one found on Crazy Clown Time: the songs. As songs, they don’t do much or say much.

Naturally, the double-album's peaks occur when both members' ideas intersect.... With these moments, Hella back up their ambition with impressive amounts of ingenuity and elbow grease, creating a White Album for disgruntled Gen Xers still finding solace in shoeboxes full of NES cartridges.

Just as you'd have to be made of stone not to enjoy at least some part of a Monotonix gig, anyone who likes garage rock would have to be an obstinate stickler for originality not to enjoy the best parts--that is, the majority--of Where Were You When It Happened?

Religious music was never a hot button issue, and at no point does this, Moore's latest, feel like anything other than an honest expression of love.

Masseduction Rewired is by no means indispensable, but as a distraction it has the frustrating charm of a good crossword puzzle.

It settles for being a mildly adventurous AAA rap album made by two friends searching for fun in heartbreak.

Most of these songs aren’t offensive on their own. .... The cumulative effect, though, is exhausting, a daisy-chain of shaky half-measures that doesn’t even feel particularly committed to being depressing.

If this attempted reconciliation produces moments of both elation and frustration, well, the band's erratic track record gives us no real reason to expect otherwise.

Like every jerk who reads an Orwell or Rand novel and walks around a few days with a chip on his/her shoulder, Starsailor play the self-righteous yet simplistic social critic.

It's softer feel also illustrates the dynamic range Cohen has as a songwriter on his first solo outing, one that isn't especially revelatory or inventive, but does offer a solid starting point for the second chapter of his career.

He’s never sounded more checked out. Even Cudi doesn’t seem to believe his own hype anymore. To its credit, INSANO is trying to do something different—that different thing, however, is just having DJ Drama provide thin narrative window dressing to a spate of uninspired Kid Cudi songs.

On an album that feels about six minutes long (it's actually just under 29), a couple highlights aren't enough to make it a keeper. But you can't necessarily count the band's new younger focus as a flaw; Velocity of Sound showcases a tight, concentrated power-pop sound that the band seemed to have lost on their last couple outings.

No peaks, no gorges, just a steady oscillation between adequate and inspired.

Not fully realizing where their strengths and weaknesses lie makes Sam's Town, despite the drastic makeover, roughly equivalent to Hot Fuss, a mediocre album surrounding a few towering singles.

Like its unexpected stylistic kin My Morning Jacket's Evil Urges, Seeing Sounds finds its creators partaking in the subversively phallocentric narcissism of staring at their CD collections, confusing music listening with music understanding rather than enjoyment.

Contrary to what some have claimed, They Were Wrong is listenable, and intentionally so: the band frequently finds ways to successfully straddle the fence between form and noise... though most of the time, it's admittedly impenetrable and alienating.

There are a lot of reasons this album doesn't gel, not least that Liam Gallagher now sounds like a singing anti-smoking campaign, and the brash, snotty arrogance that once sold "Cigarettes and Alcohol" and "Champagne Supernova" is crushed out by his gruffness.

Natalizia recorded Banjo or Freakout with Nic Vernhes at the Rare Book Room in Brooklyn, and Vernhes' naturalistic production style deepens the expanses in Natalizia's sound while maintaining its clean lines and immersive chill.

The truth is, if Head Carrier had arrived as the umpteenth Frank Black solo album, little about it would seem amiss. But coming from a band whose legacy was built on shock-and-awe transgression, Head Carrier feels overly pleasant and pedestrian.

These many mismatching, criss-crossing threads create an incredibly convoluted 77-minute slog that is as tough to listen to as it is to digest.

Even at 46 minutes, Preparations is wearying; it's the same Prefuse tricks once more, with less feeling.

With more experience, the group could perhaps one day drum up a more cohesive, compelling vision, something that reaches out and grabs you. For now, though, the band's grasping at straws.

To some extent, WYWH can get by on vibe, but really, a listener can do much better, even without going further back into the Concretes catalog.

Like the YouTube culture the "Pork and Beans" video depicts so well, the song--and this album--relies on a high quantity of short-lived pretty good ideas to distract from a shortage of great ones.

Blake is fighting the respectable fight on Enough Thunder, though the EP's totally bass-less tracks show that he needs dubstep as much as dubstep needs him.

These clusterfuck all-the-cooks experiments, more often than not, add up to way, way less than the sum of their parts.

After confidently striking out from Delorean’s cocoon of reverb on Apar, Lopetegi has returned but the rest of the band hasn’t, giving Muzik a curiously unbalanced, deflated mix.

Sadly the two best (read: different) tracks come at the end, a shame because you'll have probably put on something closer to actual music by then.

A treacherous, crashing disaster.

If Sia spent more time at the piano, and/or hired Robyn to write her a couple of tracks, the results could be marvelous.

Instead of crashing rock and roll and electronica head-on, his integration is a more subtle mix. He's not a pioneer by any means, but Volume Two is testament to his more nuanced approach. On this, his third album, Warren allows the guitars and "real" instruments an equal say, and ends up with music that sounds incredibly intelligent in light of many other clumsy cross-breeding musicians.

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

Let’s Try the After may be inspired by forward movement, but it feels directionless, preoccupied by searching without clarifying what was lost.

The album isn’t bold enough to commit in any one direction, offsetting whispery synth-pop with saccharine country ballads.

After six albums, Cabic has yet to build a discernible and discrete identity for this band. It remains the ongoing also-ran from a loose freak-folk confederation that’s splintered in a dozen surprising ways.

It's to his credit that he never seems too in awe of his most obvious antecedents, instead simply choosing to flex his own capabilities within the tight constraints that musicians like Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Moebius have operated within for decades. Still, it's a shame Manley didn't choose to filter more of his own ideas into the myriad eulogies on offer here.

Swoon ultimately delivers the exact same results as its predecessor mostly because it's written in nearly the exact same way. The problem all along for the Silversun Pickups isn't that they sound too much like the Smashing Pumpkins. They just sound way too much like themselves.

Young People still find their way to some incredible moments, but the paths that take them there are a good deal less inviting.

The most innovative and intriguing aspect of Pulaski is not its music, but ultimately its not-quite-definable form.

Patrick Watson doesn't do foundation work exceedingly well. Yet this is not to say that there aren't moments on Wooden that suggest songcraft was the foremost urge.

In Dva, Emika may be aspiring to a larger scale of pop, but for the most part this only serves to amplify her flaws.

Seeming short at 40 minutes, it's a slight album, and it's marred by Blueprint's slavish devotion to his own goofy song-concepts.

Together with the ultra-mellow atmosphere, this lack of cohesion makes the album feel messy, and maybe worse, a little boring.

Never has that rift between Pollard the songwriter and Tobias the arranger been more transparent-- and more problematic-- than on the formless, often dull The Crawling Distance, a particularly blank batch of Pollard tunes dressed to the nines in Tobias' perfunctory sheen.

If you somehow like everything about early Bright Eyes’ music except for the lyrics, it’ll be your favorite record of theirs. If, more likely, you’re a hardcore fan that was somehow unaware of its existence or didn’t shell out for the 180g white vinyl in 2009, it equally balances Yuletide memories with nostalgia for a time when Saddle Creek’s roster was still operating as a vibrant, and prolific artistic community.

Pacific Daydream, in spite of its name, mostly just gives you a feeling of being nowhere.

Every part of Life Processes seems meticulously calculated with such antecedents in mind, laid out in every detail and implemented exactly to referential specification.

Colonia is mostly careful to use its expanded palette of sounds for subtle shading rather than gratuitous effect.

Housing only a couple of keepers, Fluorescence might initially feel like another letdown after the end-to-end excellence of Citrus, but that overlooks the challenges Asobi Seksu are up against.

Lambency's lack of contrast and its vacuum of irresolution are only symptomatic of the record's holistic problem: there's not much memorable to grab onto.

As it stands right now, though, it's a nice bit of gauzy, gray-hued racket to throw on when you've only got so much attention to give.

Talk That Talk tries too hard to send a more one-dimensional message and ends up falling flat: Rihanna's obviously going for sexy here, but her music's at its most alluring when she's blissed out in her own reverie, not taking the time to spell it all out for us.

Cabello has the juice to be her own artist and is more than capable as a writer, but the risks she takes are inherently safe when they’ve all been taken before.

Jay weaves his way through every imaginable style and flavor with unyielding expertise.

If all of this sounds more geared toward Eno completists and poetry fans than the general listener, that's about right.

Maybe once the Ting Tings stop trying so hard to convince everyone they're having a good time and start actually having a good time, these cute little ballads will no longer be their sole redeeming quality.

Were we swimming in a sea of likeminded releases, Frauhaus may seem merely competent-- a collection that leaves listeners wishing the trio weren't so slavish in their devotion to early-80s post-punk and no wave, but one that gets the toughly innocent, acidic vibe right nonetheless.

It's the first release for the band as an “all in” musical endeavor and it definitely feels that way.

Vroom Vroom is pointedly uncommercial and abrasive.

Their bumbling composite of generic pop and trendy metalcore is both schmaltzy and dull: a vacant wasteland where joy, excitement, and intrigue—sensations that all good metal and pop should evoke—go to die.

It’s an Aphex Twin EP more than just an EP, and as those go it’s very good.

Marela’s lyrics sometimes lack craft and thoughtfulness, like words plucked from a diary and dropped into a song without regard to word choice or rhythm. It’s a fine line between childlike and childish, and too many songs tend toward the latter.

After a handful of other singles and remixes, the full-length debut Reality Check still can't match the Teenagers' first time, but it shows a developing group with their own distinct take on misspent youth in the era of free internet porn.

Compelling... [Yet] Forever So's resolutely overcast vibe grows a touch dreary around the three-quarter mark; Husky's tempos tend toward the deliberate, and they're most comfortable hanging out in a minor key, but after nine or 10 fairly maudlin affairs in a row, you may find yourself longing for a little respite.

As an album, it feels complete but transient: True Romance has the capacity to lift and inspire, but that feeling doesn’t linger.

Tyga isn't a gifted lyricist, but he has a few key things going in his favor: a workmanlike ability to ride a beat, a solid singing voice, and a great ear for melody.

The result is idiosyncratic pop-rock appealing to geeky outsiders and scene lifers that's perennially in short supply, largely by design.

Poor Moon turns out to be a wisp of a record, intentionally light and certainly promising but also oddly--and perhaps ironically--weightless.

A career-low for Thievery Corporation.

While many adolescents go through mixed-up times, most have the sense not to let Wyclef Jean remix their accounts of first love into a four-minute bowl of mush called "Dancing Lessons."

Considering Gucci re-energized gangster rap with a new style and methodology for rap performance just as a restless media elite had begun writing the subgenre's obituaries, The Appeal definitely feels like a missed opportunity.

After a point this lightless gloom can get a tad oppressive, but Evangelista are able to leaven the mood somewhat through consistently inventive instrumentation.

People deserve a two-disc Sparrow comp to bury all other Sparrow comps, but this isn't it (Smithsonian's First Flight, from 2005, is much better, though it falls off before Sparrow hit his prime).

Gordian is never boring, and none of the songs drag on past the point of entropy. That every listener might bring their own meaning to each song is an provocative approach on Nicolae's part--but it'd be better if the songs made their own purpose just as clear.

He is most effective when he harshly distorts his vocals to create texture, and in the company of others he can serve as a welcome change of pace.

Arbor Labor Union have taken a respectable leap toward realizing the throbbing cosmic Americana that clearly rings in their souls.

For a six-track EP, She Is Coming is remarkably repetitive, but it does manage a few OK spots.

A record that takes bolder swings than its predecessor while falling even flatter.

Lack of focus undermines the beauty of Younge’s arrangements. The record traffics in grandeur and importance without tethering them to perspective, curiosity, or imagination. No people or passions grace his elaborate stages, giving The American Negro a vacant, bloodless feel. The American Negro is a concept album without an essence, agitprop that doesn’t know what it’s agitating for, citing everything and saying nothing.

Business Is Business, perhaps due to its nature as a cobbled-together collection from someone who can’t access a recording studio, even to comb through his vaults, frequently recalls Thug’s loosest, most apparently improvisatory work. It’s all the more compelling for it.

It's understandable if Clipse no longer feel like they have to actually prove shit to anyone, but perhaps that's why Til the Casket Drops awkwardly vacillates between confidence and complacency, between sneering at perceived competition and smarting at perceived and possibly self-made slights.

Yet another standardized LP of glorified Dave Matthews tunes.

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band wasn't a good record, but its exuberance and overstuffed arrangements at least helped counter its derivativeness. But Messengers drips with resignation and defeat-- the record actually sounds depressed.

Lyrically, Lo-Fang songs range from almost embarrassingly inert to annoyingly overwrought to frustratingly tone deaf.

A few too many other tracks, such as "Away", compensate for thin material with sheer bluster, and they can feel unwarrantedly grueling. But there's a conviction here, and that's nothing to feel sorry for.

Yours to Discover never feels like a dishonest record, just one where it’s incredibly hard to grasp the intentions or ambitions of its creator.

If anything, ye compresses the Kanye West character, making everything about the artist feel smaller, blurrier, like you are squinting at an image once larger than life.

Strangely, all the missing elements and nostalgia-grabs that make the first half of Endless Wire such a sad listen organize themselves into a form that is faintly exciting for the second part.

This is a band that has given up on trying to look cool to most anyone, so Muse do here what they have always done and likely will always do—throw money at their latest fancy with the indiscriminate, earnest taste of a teenage boy. ... If there’s anything Muse truly nail here, it’s at last embracing just the right amount of camp.

Motorhead do what they do best: be Motorhead.

Every song here sounds expensive, and would play exquisitely on enormous sound systems. But that imbalance, between the level of production and substance, means all the SFX and sonic wizardry of CCCLX can feel a little brainless.

None of these tracks are all that interesting beyond a listen or two-- even the best ones get tired fast.

Despite the blatant bid to sound modish and rejuvenated, U2 cannot help in certain respects but sound the same.

A New Found Relaxation suggests a New Mexico healing experience that’s both IRL and online. The samples move quickly, spiking the ambience with appropriate doses of anxiety.

Sound of a Woman fails to spark, as its homogenous textures blend together to rob this music of the personality and emotion it has when done right.

On Golden, she sounds like someone playing at country music, rather than someone who understands it. Her star will doubtlessly endure this awkward release, but let’s hope country Kylie is short-lived.