Roni Size's new album is vapid, boring and uniform.

After the limp meandering of Afterglow, We Are Science is unquestionably a leap in the right direction.

Cash's renditions are often breathtaking in their simplicity, but rarely do they justify their presence among a dozen other similarly afflicted songs.

Machine disappoints on an almost unprecedented number of levels, and its unfortunate length is the least of its problems.

That's just the thing with Badly Drawn Boy-- he doesn't care about momentum, or continuity, or a lot of other things that you might quite reasonably care about when you sit down to listen to his records.

If these tracks had even the slightest shred of originality, it would be one thing, but Tillmann's on autopilot from the moment we push play.

The tracks on Yanqui are content to continue building to bored, satiated endings we can see coming 20 minutes in advance.

A decent follow-up from a band who has already proven themselves capable of much, much more.

We Are Your Friends might not be a completely successful album, but it's rarely less than a compelling one.

American Supreme, even at its most unlistenable and monotonous, still makes its point.

All this variety is to be commended, but a lot of the tracks here sound like unfinished sketches.

Saint Etienne have been "back" before, but this time-- this time it sounds like they're really back.

With every album, the Foos get slicker than before; the passion behind their songs waxed off by an ever-thickening veneer of overproduction. Right now, the Foos are so polished you can see right through them.

Make no mistake, Spend the Night defies any post-liberation role reversal debate: The album, both musically and lyrically, is so one-dimensional, it would be equally vapid at the hands of either sex.

Not really a must-have collection for anyone that doesn't have a Ben Gibbard shrine in the corner of their dorm room.

Skinner has an obvious talent for forging damn sharp hip-pop hooks that supercede his inherent verbal handicap.

Tobin's definitely out to have some fun with this record, though the immense density of these soundscapes prevent them from being reduced to chop-shop filler.

Hear most of these songs a few times and you'll feel like you've known them all your life.

Röyksopp are, ultimately, too beautiful to hate and too harmless to really love.

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.

O'Connor sounds very relaxed, and ultimately humbled by the ancient material. She resists the temptation to use her vocal tics and affectations; for the most part, she sings the words with a straightforward clarity and reverence.

Make no mistake, the record is extremely endearing and flawlessly constructed-- it's just hard to love an album that has a dazzling surface and not much underneath.

No matter your feelings on the mic work, though, you can't help but notice the musical talent at play here, be it in the unusual song structures or the unobtrusive, color-adding use of the organ behind Dante DeCaro's unpredictable chords.

The lyrics to Mascis’ songs no longer resonate.

Manages never to get tired or annoying.

Every track is memorable, though rarely on a musical level.

This formulaically old-school approach is both J5's greatest asset and worst liability.

As leftovers, Close Cover Before Striking is more akin to day-old pizza than three-week-old pasta.

A career-low for Thievery Corporation.

Wire is continuing to make greatness look easy.

Despite their best efforts, nothing on Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak is even half as interesting or poignant as the CD casing itself, and musically, the decision to focus on this album's mood and textures largely falls flat.

The album's only worthwhile moment [is] the title track, which has already become a concert fave for fans.

A dynamic album with intriguing lyrics, a country/folk shimmer, and explosive pop moments.

It's difficult to overcome consistently lame, often meaningless lyrics-- especially with Suede's classic rock focus on singer and melody-- but they cope.

Nextdoorland finds the band's old chemistry in full effect, and Hitchcock's songwriting seems re-energized by the presence of his old mates.

Here, as on Mutations, he confuses lyrical simplicity and standard-tuning, key-of-C songwriting with the unpretentious directness of his idols.

While it's not torture to listen to Dirty Dancing repeatedly, it does contain more than its rightful share of slip-ups and missteps.

The first five tracks here are on par with anything you loved about Us.

Miller offers more than enough quality material here to justify stepping out on his own: what he's occasionally lacking in energy, he largely makes up for with craft.... That said, it's unlikely to instigate much beyond some afternoon head-nodding, and even some of Miller's fans will be somewhat put off by the album's borderline MOR sound.

The Creek Drank the Cradle is made of small epiphanies.

Despite its flaws, though, The Lost Tapes is nice. Not a return to form, per se, but possibly as close as we're likely to get.

A Hundred Days Off is enjoyably uninspired; it defines both "pleasant" and "unremarkable".

The album preserves their defining qualities: superb lyricism and powerful tension. But it's missing two key elements of Low's last outing. That is, the engaging songs and captivating production.

These tried-and-true structures can seem fried-and-false.

Aldhils Arboretum and its inverted career-path singles focus disappoints.

While Demolition forgoes the overproduction and even much of the shameless rock-god posturing that plagued Gold, Adams hasn't yet found his way out of his songwriting rut.

Ladytron has succeeded at programming a record so distant that you'll wonder just what comprises the wind beneath their wires.

Martsch continues the sub-greatness trend of his recent work, releasing another record that fails to carry the weight of the canonical two-fer that lies at the center of his career.

Lif has managed to transcend the gimmicks and wankery that generally mar this kind of grand opus, and emerge with his strongest offering yet.

The monotonous stretches of this concert package make it difficult to feel anything about him at all. The proceedings lack a transporting element; if this disc is playing while one is stuck in traffic, one will feel very much stuck in traffic.

Although How Animals Move has solid arrangements and melodies, Parish is at his best when he mixes hard work and detail with spontaneous, rough-edged playing. It's not that the slow stuff doesn't work; it's just not as exciting or even as inventive as his rock music.

A unique, gripping listen that's certainly not for everyone, but manages to carve out an appealing niche for itself.

Could easily have been the dullest, nicely produced thing in the world, if not for the fact that the songs are remarkably good.

It's probably a smart move for Columbia to release a reconfigured sampler of her early songs to catch people up on her talent. Yet, as an ardent fan, it's hard for me not to feel a little let down.

When these guys are on, it truly is the wrath of the righteous. However, Songs for the Deaf vacillates constantly between soaring heights and mind-numbing lows, making for a true hit-or-miss affair.

But while the sound of this album is more expansive, the influences a bit less obvious, and the approach more varied, the guys forgot to tote along their initial strength: the songs.

Lost in Space leaves you feeling that she's already covered this terrain.

Pulp have pulled off yet another remarkable reinvention of their sound and outlook, while simultaneously making their most organic album since their full-length debut, It, was released almost two decades ago.

Eternal Youth feels like more of a lackluster stopgap than equal-footing sidecar for Merritt's songcraft, a frustrating teaser from the Merritt portfolio of aliases.

This is the sound of Grunge Past, raised from the dead to parade its rigor-mortised corpse around for a few moments before returning to the grave. And it's kinda fun, but hardly bears a second listen.

Blacklisted's accompaniment is roundly excellent and evocative, but Case's voice is what really sells the record.

A return to textbook Mekons-- from gracefully shambling country to deep-beating tribal rhythms, by way of good, clean rock 'n roll.

Zoomer is a very, very good album, but one thing it makes clear is that the songwriting aspect of this sort of lap[pop] hybrid must continue to improve.

Spoon's latest is their magnum opus to date; it takes a scalpel to the highlight reel of their career, cutting and pasting a 35-minute tour de force that ends too soon.

The problem is the production.

If nothing else, Frank's 33-minute Devil's Workshop is the punchy record that should have followed Teenager of the Year.

Loss, regret, and a minor key brilliantly permeate jangling guitars and rhythmic and tonal shifts-- and although it's no Closer or OK Computer, it's not unthinkable that this band might aspire to such heights.

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

An uncompromising, energetic monster of a record.

It's jaw-dropping, certainly, and what's more, it actually works.

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.

They've managed to broaden the nervous-tic angst-rock of their previous band into something more readily adaptable without reducing it to mealy-mouthed pop regurge.

There's very little on Son of Evil Reindeer to perk up the ears for anyone with more than a couple Jeepster products in their Case Logic.

The results as a whole, whether fabulously disastrous or formidable, offer an aural spectacle that other 55-year-old, or even 35-year-old, rock stars should dream of wrangling.

Love it or hate it, the precious, nasal vibrato Oberst affects is the tie that binds all these varied tunes together in the end, and in most cases, it compliments the music admirably.

The album crawls from the speakers like a stabbing victim and gives up a great moan; it's a difficult listen, but the rewards are great.

Better to track down this decade's insane explosion of tangents individually than to be given a brief summary by a hit-or-miss marketing device.

What truly separates Daybreaker from other Orton efforts is its lack of emotional resonance-- moments where Beth just belts it out or where she actually seems engaged with the songs she's singing.

Despite these moments when PE shows their age, they have largely prevailed with Revolverlution by revamping the very structure of how we digest music.

The Vines get credit for ambition, but Highly Evolved covers so much ground that none of it seems convincing: there's just no emotional depth here.

Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is a bold and inventive work, brimming with ideas and sublime moments of brilliance. But it's also unfocused and top-heavy.

Charango reeks of Warner Brothers' attempt to find a viable audience for this waning band.

Fans of Superdrag will like this, provided they're okay with more of the same.

This isn't a record, it's a portfolio: it's noisy but catchy, it lets them try out different styles, and it makes you give a good goddamn.

After the initial bustle of a few extremely strong tracks, Optometry wanders blindly for far too long.

The detached, semi-ironic delivery doesn't play well with the perky club beats.

Loewenstein's problems seem to spring from a penchant for textbook hard rock and an almost astonishing lack of range, failings that are amplified by his choice to record all of At Sixes and Sevens' instrumentation himself.

Heathen Chemistry also takes the time to cop riffs and progressions from previous Oasis hits.

Gedge seems oblivious to the fact that all the gushing critics and cliquey consumers are crowding the 60s, 70s, and 80s lounges, leaving him to hog the stage in the remember-the-90s room.

It sounds like a home studio project, a whole album of ideas that sound almost-clever but go absolutely fucking nowhere.

Read & Burn is still Wire, and without even retreading the past.

Murray Street is Sonic Youth's first successful convergence of envelope-pushing guitarwork and accessible songery since 1988.

It's a damn good pop album, with a little muscle behind its melodies to boot.

While it doesn't recapture the magic of the Sprout-era Guided by Voices records, Universal Truths and Cycles marks the return of some of the most sorely missed qualities of early Guided by Voices: strong vocal melodies and refreshingly atypical song structures.

The disc is enhanced with gleefully absurd, marginally interactive cartoons, and packed with that Eisenhower-era zip-twinkle.

Heathen is the best Bowie release in years.

As with most of the 70s sensitive guy genre though, a lot of the music here toes the schmaltz line. And by the second half of Three, Prewitt's tripped right over it, landing in dangerous Neil Diamond territory.

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.