It was a mistake for VHS or Beta to subjugate their dance beat into a perfunctory structure for the guitars to smash against; the riffs sound like they're there for their own sake, biding their time and waiting for a moment of catchiness that never really arrives.

What For Stars lack in originality they overcompensate for in emotionality.

Bono may have self-deprecatingly described Songs of Innocence as “the blood, sweat and tears of some Irish guys...in your junk mail,” but it’s not even that interesting--it’s just a blank message.

Youngish American is a hapless vanity album, sad for all the wrong reasons, and all the more frustrating because it couches wokeness in songs about the extra advantages afforded to Tomson’s demographic.

It would be too easy to dog Hombre Lobo as a case where going back to the well leads to diminishing returns, but the problem is just that Hombre Lobo is too easy.

There will be an audience for bands like Jukebox the Ghost, who at least do this unoffensive brand of power-pap serviceably. But if you're too much of a realist to believe in trick lighting, happy endings or choreographed emotion, Safe Travels will probably leave you wishing for riskier terrain.

A cautionary tale of what happens when a "hit record" forgets to actually include hits.

At its best, its songs are serviceable bangers to nod off in the club to; at its worst, it’s a collection of strange admissions that, thanks to Nav’s affinity for taking himself too seriously, come off cringe-worthy.

They're not trying to pull off anything like that any more; instead, they're polishing up the durable façade of their signature sound, while the songwriting that it used to support has crumbled.

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.

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.

All Velvet Changes creates is a disquieting malaise that deflects any attempt to penetrate its billowy, monochromatic, meaningless contours.

It settles for the safe and familiar. Throw it back.

Virtually the whole record settles into the same formula the band's been dutifully churning out since the dawn of the millennium.

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

The good news is that they're too skilled, experienced, and important to make a record that's just a mess, and for a while there's nothing so terrible about this one.

That the Watson Twins blend seamlessly into these backdrops, however, is far from a compliment. Of course it's lovely to an extent when the girls harmonize, but neither owns a voice strong enough to convey much besides a languid aridity.

Vroom Vroom is pointedly uncommercial and abrasive.

The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2 is not only superfluous, it actually erases some of the gains made by its predecessor as it plays into the worst trappings of self-indulgence.

War Stories is the most unadventurous, most typically rock UNKLE release to date.

The noxious muck on evidence here obscures most of what made his past music so singular.

Its only commitment is to a subtle antagonism, and it ignores pretty much any worthwhile development in pop, rock, electronic, or hip-hop music since the turn of the century.

Affectionate but misguided tribute that’s nowhere close to satisfying.

On Yungblud, Harrison leans almost exclusively into saccharine pop-rock, making this his most monotonous and least distinctive record.

Unfortunately a whole album of similarly DJ-pitched material, all the quote-unquote pop frills shaved off, wouldn't have allowed blog readers to devote the few days their attenuated attentions can muster for He Was King's singles, before the next this-is-kind-of-okay-I-guess electro-pop album arrives to distract them.

The music is more unmemorable than bad, though occasionally Gonzalez's inexperience, which seems to limit what Trapanese can do as well, shows.

The Saga Continues is full of competent if forgettable rapping straight out of the Wu-Tang manuscripts, and each Wu rapper does a serviceable job mustering up shades of their primes, in function. The verses don’t do what they used to, but at a distance they move in the same ways.

Mercury Rev have created so many otherworldly symphonies in the past, but there’s very little of their previous ingenuity or vision on Born Horses. Everything shimmers and sparkles in roughly the same way, with very little to distinguish one song from the next.

My biggest gripe about Lovage is that it finds a number of clearly talented artists constructing the same song continually without variation.

After a few tracks, it becomes increasingly more difficult to ignore the pathetic lyrics and boring flows-- even the production seems redundant, bland, and horribly imitative and regressive.

Plays Music offers up breezy, instrumental jazz-rock that seems to be little more than the reheated leftovers of Tortoise's TNT, The Sea and Cake's The Fawn, Dave Pajo's Aerial M debut, and occasionally, Gastr del Sol's Camofleur.

BRMC is a big, dumb band who writes big, dumb songs.

The King & I is simultaneously too stingy and too indiscriminate with its star attraction, denying fans new verses yet projecting his hologram raps over every song until the reflexive thrill of hearing one of rap’s greatest voices is extinguished.

Concocting the world's finest excrement-related rhymes, Rebirth is most definitely a flop, terribly unsexy, and contains surprisingly few shit jokes.

A charitable perspective might see the band's embrace of pub rock as a conscious rejection of political correctness in the form of so-called good taste; the reality is that it seems like a last-ditch attempt to aestheticize a sublime lack of inspiration.

Despite his chart success with Drake, many of 2 Chainz' pop maneuvers feel tone-deaf.

On disc, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl is a bland, bluesy celebration you can afford to miss.

The music is pretty but still--without many shifts in color or tone, they sit there like flat, two-dimensional objects.

A letdown after Fables; whether haughty, homesick, or ha-ha, on the way toward frankness, the album gets bogged down in simplicity.

Since Bohemian Rhapsody is a soundtrack targeted at a wide audience, not an archival release suited for collectors, not all of the Live Aid performance is here; “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “We Will Rock You” are missing. The omissions underscore how superfluous Bohemian Rhapsody is.

It's not the music that sinks Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, it's those lyrics: well-intentioned, certainly, but as deep as the bowl on a one-hitter.

Sadly, they seem content for the kind of mediocrity that designates you as the headliner Firefly and Bonnaroo call when someone else isn’t available.

All of Black Cascade pounds away with a similar notion for four tracks and 50 minutes, offering four black metal tides that occasionally shift into some texturally bankrupt, wintry drone.

Whatever pleasure can be generated from Bellamy’s admirable melodic sense and overblown hooks is negated by Muse’s insistence that they’re profound rather than fun.

This is ultimately mediocre music that sometimes recalls the sound and feeling of excellent music, and the only thing that Heidecker brings to the table is a smirking irony that is not particularly appealing when separated from hilarious comedy.

There are still hints that Johnson still knows where his talents lie on Life Has Not Finished With Me Yet, but they're the faintest hints.

They try and fail to reinvigorate themselves in the rock’n’roll fountain of youth they helped create, only to emerge with a dozen hackneyed duds.

Code Orange’s second album for Roadrunner, the exhausting and uneven Underneath, lands like a glib attempt to do just that while forsaking the idiosyncrasies that made them interesting.

Dereconstructed can be fiercely intelligent, but more often it is frustratingly blinkered; his lyrics can be defiantly blunt, but they’re often elbowed out by music that is dumbly bombastic.

The measurable failure is the album's music. On a track-by-track basis, the songs make for dull labor, not worth our time and not befitting Rihanna's talent.

It's all pretty silly stuff, but if nothing else, it manages to establish Flickerstick as a frontrunner for the Varsity Blues II soundtrack.

The idea is clever, and very Beck: a mix of the modern and the antiquated so fluid that you start to see how they're not that different to begin with. The execution feels out of his hands, and really, out of everyone's--just another project whose purpose seems lost in the labyrinth of production.

Scattered bright spots come from guests—on “Forever,” Post Malone injects his destabilizing energy, singing with the urgency of someone in dire need of a bathroom. Kehlani’s appearance on “Get Me” enlivens the muted, Noah “40” Shebib-type beat. Otherwise, the only appealing moments appear in the last third, when Bieber sings over minimal accompaniment.

Hawk makes marginal stylistic advances that it could stand to omit, and it lightly retreads stuff that needs no recapitulation.

A casual, slightly-weirder-than-usual release with one very good R&B song (that's reportedly been kicking around in his vault for a while), stranded in the album's penultimate slot.

RELAXER shows us what remains after those quirks are dialed back: some perfectly nice, perfectly blank lads who have no idea why they are standing in front of you and even less of an idea what to say.

Every song on Scratch My Back, regardless of its original tone or meaning, is flattened out and turned into this one melodramatic and depressing thing, often with Gabriel whispering half the words to go with the ultra-slow tempos.

Blueprint 3 is the kind of stuck-on-stupid, event-driven money pit that proves while Jay-Z's at a point where he's got no one to answer to but himself, he's still capable of an entire hour of failing to take his own advice.

The album is full of big rock guitars anchored to big rock effects, but it somehow never manages either to sound big enough or to rock hard enough.

It's not that Múm have broken a barrier to make their first entirely unpleasant record-- the addition of drums and trumpet do make for some compelling instrumental moments-- but there simply aren't enough exciting or even vaguely interesting moments in each song, and between this scarcity and, Jesus, that voice, Summer Make Good seems an unfortunate addition to 2004's disappointments.

Leray boasted about introducing the younger generation to artists like Busta Rhymes through her use of samples. That’s a nice idea—introducing people to other music through her samples—but that’s basically the only idea she brings to COI.

It's when Wasser puts her voice front and center that The Deep Field collapses in on itself.

Uncanney Valley seems too bent on interrupting serious moments with corny jokes and bewildering asides to say much of anything about anyone else.

Large chunks of MDNA are shockingly banal, coming across not so much as bad pop songs per se, but as drably competent tunes better suited to D-list Madonna wannabes.

Everything about this album is half-assed: From the bafflingly bare packaging to the at-times miserable mix, True Magic is a mess.

Jones still croaks out songs with that wretched voice of his, an amalgam of nicotine, alcohol and AOR. The guitars still churn out feeble riffs more appropriate for a Hot Wheels commercial than a grown-up's rock album, and even when they're on to something it feels like they're only fumbling with a good idea.

Ambitious production can’t quite cover the fact that none of the songs on Run Fast Sleep Naked have a conceptual core.

At just over 33 minutes, Earth Junk is a short recording, but even at that length, the limited sonic range and repetitive tricks are ultimately draining.

The point of horrorcore is to both piss off church moms and find a language and vehicle for rage and misery. But there is no aching, tortured self at the center of clipping., just three fanboys’ overworked hearts palpitating into the abyss. While you can’t deny the imagination, you also can’t fathom the point.

Aside from some fleeting hellacious decisions, like the jump scare of a warbling child’s voice that opens the cloying final track “Wonder,” 143 is mostly just…there.

While this sort of proactive fandom hardly qualifies as bad art, you'd have to get pretty smashed to ignore the album's missing spirit and just dance, which, sadly, may be the point here.

Now, for what it's worth, Dirty Vegas won't rob you of the gift of sight or make your ears bleed; it's just boring.

As the next step in Kittin's conflicted evolution, Two is not that much different from (or more enjoyable than) what's preceded it. As a supposed remembrance of the heyday of electroclash, it's a nostalgia trip that's best left untaken.

I Love You, Dude doesn't shake off the confines of genre to reveal a shiny new pop act underneath. Nor does it meaningfully improve on Digitalism's previous formulas.

We Can't Fly's stylistic knuckleballs lack just about everything we'd grown to love about Aeroplane: namely luxurious grooves and effortless cool.

This album drops four consecutive hard rock stinkbombs to kick things off... Senor Smoke's saddest aspect, however, is its yearning for another dance-floor single.

This is an album that suffers in the context of Fink's career. She is an obviously talented artist working well below the standards she's set for herself as both one half of Azure Ray and a solo artist, and if that makes for a disappointing album.

Cale squanders whatever momentum he accrued on the estimable avant-pop of 2003's HoboSapiens by adorning these new songs with such unflattering, generic alternarock textures that they often render their author unrecognizable at best, and irrelevant at worst.

Ultimately, it's the unbearable triteness of the lyrics that does Long Knives Drawn in.

There are flashes of coherence and grace in all the furious noodling, but overall, you probably had to be there, bathed in the glory of mortal combat.

If the teaser EP Splitting the Atom is any indication, that Burial remix joint will probably make a better and more convincing Massive Attack album than the next actual Massive Attack album.

A few brilliant left turns that feel almost accidental mixed in with a sort of end-times hunger for a top-40 audience that doesn't seem to exist anymore.

That’s how Spring feels: a lot of planning, a shrug to finish. Like OK Human, this is a product of the pandemic. Unlike OK Human, it actually sounds like it.

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.

Unlike so much of Voigt's past work, it's not an idea worth exploring at this length. Zukunft's only impressive feat is making Voigt's elegant, pristine work under guises like Studio 1 and Gas seem like the work of a raving, impassioned romantic.

As overblown as You Can't Take It With You is musically, Nigro's not one to be upstaged by guitar pedals.

Virtually every song enunciates its central joke, then repeats it and repeats it and repeats it. And repeats it. And repeats it. And so on, with the repeating. (And repeating.)

Ghost Stories certainly sounds like the product of someone working out their private pain in public; unfortunately, the results are less Blood on the Tracks and more "Can I Borrow a Feeling?".

There is a resigned quality to Hungry Bird that stands in sharp contrast with the sprightly, slightly goofy tack the band took on 2001's career highlight The Ghost of Fashion.

While Kasher’s platitudes are presented as hard truths forged from experience, most of the time, it just sounds secondhand, scripts written by someone whose worldview has been shaped mostly by Cursive records.

Double Bubble is neither deep or dense enough for electronic connoisseurs, nor is it brash enough to spawn another "Connected" with kids sprung off of Justice or Hot Chip.

The songs are fine but largely feckless, and what could be an animating contrast between glum lyrics and upbeat music is too often hobbled by clunkers both generic ("I am lost in my mind when you go to sleep") and specific (something about tarot cards).

Anything But Words is the rare side project that might have been better off if both parties had cared a little less.

The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade.

I's a 40-minute, 12-track dance-rap full-length without a single hard punchline or trenchant moment, the sort of thing that sounds like it could've been banged out in a couple of weeks.

Sleep Mountain's lack of originality is made worse by the fact that few of its songs actually go anywhere.

Let Her Burn is so, so dry.