Relapse can be an intermittently thrilling sonic experience until you realize everything sounds like a variation of 'What's the Difference,' 'If I Can't,' or even fucking '30 Something.'

The negatives far outweigh the positives... sounds entirely manufactured.

As long as the Low Anthem discount the idea that this music was once meant to stir the blood, rile the soul, and actually be exciting, it's always going to be historically inaccurate in a way no amount of sepia-toned ambience can overcome.

Secrets has its finger on the pulse of mainstream radio, judging from its oppressive sonics. But stuck between a tired, nebulously elucidated artistic direction and their own nebulously elucidated commercial aspirations, they just sound a whole lot like the major-label also-rans that they actually are.

The rest of the album is stuff he's done before and better.

He gathers the biggest names in rap, then has them make the same music they’d record on their own anyway. Sometimes staying out of the way works—the album’s first two singles were just Drake solo tracks with Khaled’s name on them. But the returns are never more than the sum of the talent involved.

The bulk of Gorgeous Johnny is unfortunately too earnest and too patient really to go anywhere in particular, preening like a collection of meticulously cleaned Travis demos or, at their worst, an Adam Green album without any of the dirty bits.

Unfortunately, all this talent behind the boards often feels like a waste because of Spektor's inability to let her songs stand on their own merits without the persistent interjection of vocal curlicues or verbal flights of fancy.

For a band that's lyrically so devoted to upsetting the order, Goatwhore sound unequivocally content with replaying the past.

As with nearly every R. Kelly album, sex is Untitled's raison d'être. But too often here he trips over trends.

With songwriting that veers between snoozy and face-palming, it's the kind of sophomore album that makes you question whether the debut deserved so much love in the first place.

Clark can, and hopefully will, do better. But for now he feels like a genuine talent unable to find a foothold.

Between the innocuously rambly music, Fite's toned-down vocal mannerisms, and this pencils-up-the-nose persona, Ain't is a record that's hard to dislike, but nearly impossible to imagine loving.

In the end, though, Everything Is Borrowed's musical high points aren't enough to save it from its lyric sheet, and that, going forward, constitutes a real problem for Skinner.

You get the sense they're shooting for something epic, something that would sound just as big as the pop bangers on radio, but the results are goofy.

Here, they shuffle through one stylistic experiment after another. The fingerprint on the album's cover art seems a little ironic, since for the first time, the Magic Numbers seem hard to identify.

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

Perhaps unintentionally, Turning the Mind feels chemical itself--it's a cheap buzz that ultimately should have no problem finding its way into the wheelhouse of people who just can't get enough whooshy sound effects.

The band's third LP, Gramahawk, is pretty much a do-over in every conceivable way.

Tittsworth has produced, by and large, an album of potential novelty singles. That's fine--you can argue that some of the best records are novelty records--but the problem is that most of the tracks on 12 Steps are neither particularly novel nor memorable.

Despite the dual versions, Storytone never finds a comfortable middle ground: the orchestral versions too maudlin, the solo versions over-sharing.

Without much variety to spice it up, the overall sluggardly pace is energy-sapping. An album of the sort of tracks on which Eskmo earned his reputation might not have gone amiss before he ventured a more songwriterly statement, but there's no reason he can't regroup and pull that off yet.

Dream House forsakes even the grandiose manipulations of their EPs for a placid, empty surface. It looks good on paper. It will sound nice while you cook dinner. Then you’ll forget you ever heard it.

The R.E.D. Album will likely fade into obscurity immediately upon arrival, but if it doesn't raise some eyebrows around major label offices, then this is a failure of not just one person, but also of an entire industry.

In playing it this safe, Summer Camp is just another entry in an increasingly trivial catalog.

Fuzztone guitar and the occasional woodwinds dress up the many slow-paced songs, but repetitive, fragmentary compositions such as 'Paquita Reads by Candlelight,' Vancouver-repping 'Skeleton Aim,' and the typically moribund 'Come Darkness' sound more concerned with melisma than memorable melodies or vibrant production.

More often than not, however, Mice Parade pushes these songs down paths that don't fit.

Each of the 11 songs here are positioned at some point in an endless cycle of going out, scoping girls, getting drunk, making out, passing out, and “waking up in [your] clothes.” But for Skaters, such scenes are apparently so routine that they often sound disinterested in their own debauchery.

The old cliché about double albums is that most could be greatly improved if edited down to one disc, but that doesn’t hold true here. Animals is an anomaly: a two-disc set without enough solid material for even a single LP.

His process of filtering out the bad has failed him on Adrian Thaws, leaving an album that bears both his names but offers less of himself than ever before.

With Crooked Shadows, Carrabba aims to bring together his competing production impulses. Unfortunately, the results are all over the place.

Whether it's the lack of plot, insight, or collaborators, Achilles Heel also finds Bazan's music stuck in a room with no exits, with one loping distortion-pedal crawler after another.

There's an interesting sound here, a shell of an idea. But there is ultimately very little melody or personality for the arrangements to support and the record winds up sounding weirdly conservative.

Whether she's giving the rhythm section a cigarette break, trying to approximate the sound of an anesthetized New Pornographers, or adding the same sort of pseudo-dancey Casio flourishes that have colored her work since the first Azure Ray album, Taylor never fails to instill the same sense of inescapable inertia throughout.

New English is so woefully derivative it almost builds itself a new vocabulary from the Lego blocks of other rappers it stands on.

Eminem’s too talented a rapper with too good a Rolodex for this to flop, but damned if Marshall Mathers LP 2 doesn’t give it a go.

The redeeming moments are ones which make some unpredictable moves--any shocks are welcome on a record as polite and poised as this.

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.

The Neighbourhood is as ponderous as any forgotten post-grunge also-ran record selling for one cent on Amazon.

After all the sentimental rigamarole, it’s tough to come away from Heartbreak Weather feeling any closer to Horan. He spends too much of the record bouncing between sounds and songwriting concepts to feel distinct.

Underworld’s compositions are lush and polished, while Iggy’s ad-libs tend to spin their wheels, at times pausing and sputtering while he searches for the next word or phrase.

Every song on the album is crafted with clinical meticulousness, its production clean as a whistle, but like a flawlessly constructed garment lacking in inventive design it ultimately falls short.

Keep On Smiling’s glossy veneer never disguises its particle-board center.

Their 10th album, Medicine at Midnight, adds very little to their extensive catalog of interchangeable power pop and hard-rock sing-alongs. But you can’t hang them on their own music, because Foo Fighters would never dare to give you enough rope to do it.

Way to Blue is too rigid in its approach and too timid in its interpretations to challenge or enlarge our perception of Drake.

Even when Dunckel stays closer to type, here he usually relies on unremarkable downtempo beats to support unfortunate space-hippie mewlings.

Free Spirit isn’t the coming of age album Khalid intended it to be, though in his nascent adulthood he has mastered something. Unfortunately, it’s the art of being innocuous.

There are few fiery guitar freakouts, folk-influenced melodies, soaring space-rock bridges, or psychedelic flourishes here; instead, the empty space is mostly filled with serviceable falsetto funk and glassy-eyed yacht-pop.

The depth and breadth of the tracklist are commendable but often work against the band.

Hiding below layers of dated synth noise, dinky drum machines and expensive effects is, surprise surprise, a solo bedroom recording. 50 minutes of structured wankery, as performed by a lone Brit with the questionable talent to put a chorus to a verse, employing a thin, laddish vocal and rudimentary guitar skills.

The bulk of Machine Says Yes draws heavily on the rhythms and studio techniques of FC Kahuna's big beat roots, and garnishes them vigorously with the robotic female vocals and canned electro beats of Ladytron or Peaches; it gets old faster than Wesley Willis.

Street produces again, and Robyn Hitchcock is among the guests, but even they can't make up for repetitive, one-dimensional songs--mostly sleepy folk, occasionally fuzzy psych.

If adult critics really loved this stuff, the Xanarchy team would no doubt feel they’d made a wrong turn somewhere. It’s punk, or it’s the thing people who don’t really know what “punk” means call “punk,” or it’s a dog whistle meant to sail over the heads of the the elderly (i.e. anyone over 24).

Burn the Maps often sounds like simplicity transformed into bloat in an attempt to sound interesting.

Fly Yellow Moon just can't quite solve that old problem: how to be mushy but not mundane.

Whereas poor production values and drug-fueled exuberance once excused their George Clinton worship, 20 years on, in Rick Rubin's sterile environment, the band sounds like they're in jamband training camp, filling in all the empty spaces with blippityblap reminders of Flea's virtuosity and John Frusciante's desire to use every effects pedal ever invented.

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.

Amber Headlights is a step backwards after the lush beats and subdued songs of the Twilight Singers' debut, 2000's Twilight, but it also seems weak following the harrowing Blackberry Belle and even the so-so covers album She Loves You.

On Trágame Tierra, Bates is both audacious and original, two qualities that are hard to fault. But in the absence of focus, listening to Trágame Tierra can feel like looking for dinner in a candy store: there's a lot of brightly-colored packaging to take in but not much you can really sink your teeth into.

Trapped Animal is nothing more than an odds-and-sods record being passed off as "business as usual" by a band that doesn't seem to know what that business is anymore.

As silly as the songs on an A.merican D.ream are, it is Gerner’s wincingly theatrical vocals that really take the album into the realm of unintentional comedy.

Gardens & Villa’s self-conscious, spindling attempts at regression and societal contemplation are admirable and occasionally catchy, but there are so many other albums--Reflektor, Kid A, even the oft-maligned, ahead-of-its-time Metal Machine Music--that navigate the intricacies of technology and society more compellingly and less heavy-handedly that you can’t help but write it off as another brick in the firewall.

Boarding House Reach is a long, bewildering slog studded with these moments, which seem to be directly antagonizing you.

Jordi bounces between smeary electropop haze, wobbles of tropical house, a forgettable Stevie Nicks appearance. It’s too cluttered to sink into, too limp for catharsis.

Good as it is to have these dudes back, their reunion sounds disappointingly anticlimactic.

The record grows soggy with Veirs' over-reliance on nautical themes.

Sounds overproduced and underdeveloped.

'Relator' aside, there's little about this duo's chemistry that lives up to Matt and Kim, let alone Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.

Like the other white rapper he will never escape comparisons to, Cage exhausts the patience of even his faithful followers at times, and Depart From Me almost reads like a plea to whoever might be left checking for him in 2009.

Beyond a few other fleeting moments of experimentalism on ERYS—the second half of “K,” when the buzzing of an electric razor slowly morphs into a heaving trap beat, or “Fire Dept,” a decent ode to the fast and distorted energy of SoCal punk—it’s mostly a slog, the sound of an artist with a blurry vision and too many resources at his disposal.

Following those pleasantly modest, Paste-worthy beginnings, however, Adams draws the blinds entirely and Cardinology starts sliding into self-indulgent banality of a sort so pinched and uninviting it makes Conor Oberst seem like Will Rogers.

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.

Rave Age makes you wish you were listening to other songs.

Wantonly skipping between sounds with a dilettante zeal, Wolves in the Throne Room seem woefully under equipped for this music.

If you listen to EA2 it seems like the goal isn’t for the album to be divisive or even loved—just for it not to be hated.

Musically, it’s the grittiest-sounding track on the album, with eddies and distortion clotting the guitar licks and evoking the more destitute vistas of San Francisco. Lyrically, however, the song sounds entirely disingenuous.

Bianchi's not much for such subtleties, emotional or rhetorical, which may suggest he'll have as much lovelorn electro-symphonic melodrama to recount on future albums as on those past and present.

Babymetal are still at their best when they hover around their initial idea—harnessing the energy of metal and J-Pop into high-flying hybrids. ... Otherwise, Metal Galaxy teems with embarrassing gimmickry.

Give Me the Future is almost perverse in its inability or unwillingness to develop its premise beyond the most basic and obvious elements.

I Am Gemini is Cursive's weakest record by a disheartening margin.

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.

Before, it seemed like these beautiful free spirits were just cranking out great happy-sad songs, one of which happened to sneak into a Target commercial. Now it seems like they're trying to make music for a Target commercial.

Younger Now blends pop-rock and pablum country fare that is so restrained, so thinly produced, it seems like her lovably goofy personality was hobbled throughout the recording process.

The album is straightforward, but often so much so that it can seem as if there’s nothing below the surface.

At least OX 2010 doesn't feel entirely like one MC stranded in his own malaise. The beats are serviceable, with some unostentatious boom-bap from the likes of Kount Fif, Harry Fraud, and Ayatollah. And the guest verses range from complementary mediocrity (Cappadonna treading water on "I Don't Care") to complete upstagings (Guilty Simpson going berserk on "The Verdict").

Despite the frequent overtures to grandeur, spectacle, and machismo, these songs are limp and flabby.

The sound and songs of [Aden's fourth album, Topsiders]... are no different whatsoever from the band's already homogenous and uncharacteristic previous three.

On Gung Ho-- much like 1996's Gone Again and 1999's Peace and Noise-- Patti and the band aren't exactly bad, but they hardly rock like they did back in '77.... when you listen to Gung Ho and forget about myth, legacy, mystique and all that crap, you have to wonder-- does Patti Smith really matter anymore?

It’s been fussed over so much that any spark that may have spurred it has been smothered.

New Glow may be Matt & Kim’s most polished album, but their songwriting has never been more amateurish.

But with all the excitement and decadence drained out of the music and the voice, the trite themes stand out a bit more clearly.

The beats on Story never quite cohere, and tracks like 'Uncle Swac Interlude,' an endless phone conversation with Banner's drunk uncle, further interrupt the flow.

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.

The band hasn’t done themselves any favors by sticking so closely to the sounds of their youth, either--not that they were ever going to top the pipe-bomb intensity of their earliest recordings, anyway.

The thoroughly unenjoyable Paralytic Stalks might be a sign that Barnes should take some time off and let the inspiration come to him.

There's a distinct lack of fun in the instrumental wankage of The Mix-Up, a bad sign for a band that has seen their results fade in direct proportion to how seriously they take themselves.

Too much of Blood Money represents something sad and fascinating-- two demons domesticated, two artists who have willfully transformed themselves into hucksters.

The band's new sound is nothing short of painfully, achingly banal.