The personalities on this album are so blank the songs may as well be performed by apps, and sung by Siri.

Most of Don’t You aims for Babyface but lands somewhere around Surfacing-era Sarah McLachlan, except nowhere near as good.

Thing is, it still sounds entirely like an Air album--just a remarkably bland one.

There's nothing truly transgressive or illuminating or innovative about Last of the Country Gentlemen.

The entire album sounds like a half-hearted compromise between what the group was and what the group wants to become.

[A] crushing bore of a detour.

There are moments of clarity when the band sounds fantastic, but they're not enough to save the record from landing in the band's forget pile.

What seems like a perfectly swell concept for a surprise gig at the local pub-- where sloshed spectators can join in on the hero worship-- feels much more suspect when reified into a permanent record.

Average from beginning to end.

Indicud has the sheen of a cinematic blockbuster.... Unfortunately, it also has no substance.

Montage of Heck is like a shaggier version of Family Tree, a voyeuristic document that attempts to plop you down in the living room of a dead hero, and it leaves you with a similar hollow feeling.

Rather than feel cathartic or caustic, it’s oddly cold and rote.

Dalley possesses neither heart nor soul as a lead vocalist, and his milk-warm emotional outpouring of tiresome, overwrought subject matter could get lost in a crowd of two.

An unwelcome presence, Morello is simply the most obvious of many elements on High Hopes that just don’t work. It’s all the more unfortunate given that there are actually some redeemable songs here, along with some brief glimpses of Springsteen the rock'n'roll storyteller.

Cry is a soulless and Styrofoam record as hollow as a booty-call text at 3 a.m. “Hey sexy, you up?” the record seems to beckon. It’s hardly an inviting proposition.

Okay, it's not really very good at all.

Sixth studio outing Beat the Devil's Tattoo is already getting billed as the one that brings all these prodigal sons' (and daughters'-- ex-Raveonette Leah Shapiro is now on drums) stylistic detours back home. It kind of is, but if BRMC's sound has cohered, their songwriting has unfortunately done the opposite.

Sasha and Digweed appear to be suggesting that, along with setting an NYC club aflame, they can also bore you to tears in your living room.

The Steinhardt who made Generic Treasure comes off as a guy far too stuck in his own head to get himself into yours.

Worlds Apart is an aspiration, an apology, the sound of confusion.

Nation is saved from being a total failure at its close, with 'Deft Left Hand.'

Mirage Rock is so lightweight and inconsequential that it really does seem more like an illusion than a record; it's wispy and indiscernible, as if the people who made it had no vision for what it should be.

Most of the cars in The Great Gatsby crash and so does Luhrman's soundtrack.

NF also shares Eminem’s shrillness and distorted sense of volume, rapping like he’s putting on the world’s loudest Punch and Judy show. He spends much of The Search darting in and out of an overbearing rappity-rap snarl-yell that can cut right through you if you don’t relate to his roiling anger.

Unless you approach Electronica 1 as a collection of unrelated songs designed to be cherry-picked for playlists--and given the generic title, maybe that's the point--there's little to hold it together.

So yeah, the tricks are clever; unfortunately, musically, There's Me... is an overstuffed mess.

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.

The fact that this dorkiness has enveloped a few usually-on-point guests (MF Doom, Mr. Lif & Akrobatik, DJ Shadow) is unfortunate enough; that it's being perpetrated by two MCs who've been consistently great since the early- to mid-90s just makes it more frustrating.

I cannot remember an album that suffered from such an extreme case of risk-aversion, nor demonstrated so little faith in an artist’s potential, nor any notion that their fanbase might be willing to grow with them. If anything, it shrinks his already narrow proposition.

Things just ain't the same for quasi-mad scientist/ghetto philosopher/sexual dynamo superheroes.

The Meth Lab is a posse record in practice, very much in the lineage of Theodore Unit's 718, Polluted Water, or the ultimate in Wu-Tang marginalia, Ugodz-illa Presents the Hillside Scramblers.

While it's unfair to directly compare Courtney's solo work with Hole's shifty discography, America's Sweetheart demonstrates a fairly monstrous decline in both quality and conviction.

As good as "Danger! High Voltage" is, the rest of this album is simply not worth it.

He stays in the background for most of God Did’s 18 tracks—but once in a while, he finally tiptoes out of his usual templates. It’s not enough to salvage a bogged-down album, but coming from him, even a little experimentation is surprising.

Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is interesting the same way a friend getting a dramatic bad haircut is interesting: Once the shock wears off, you still have to look them in the eye and level with them.

Outside of a distorted vocal on "Not Getting There" and a slowly blooming and surprisingly gripping waltz ("Everything Is Wrong"), the arrangements seem done up like hospital rooms, every sound picked for maximum sterility.

So maybe Pond really is just another ordinary-guy exemplar of the ongoing post-Coldplay adult contemporarization of indie, as his ordinary arrangements and ordinarier songs would attest.

Nothing here bears the strain of overzealous ambition, there are no flubbed notes, unseemly textures, unfortunate lyrical ideas; everything positive or negative about Breathing Statues is simply too ephemeral to make a fuss about.

It's the songs they've neglected: They plod forward with generic piston-like rhythms, focusing solely on the one-dimensional vocals and limp songwriting.

More streamlined than their older music, Mine Is Yours' relative simplicity allows its songs to more transparently deal with love lost and found.

A foreboding chronicle of the unpleasantness to follow, the typical arc of a break-up tale never materializes as "The Beginning" promises.

The only things you hear on the album are Wainwright's voice and his piano, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that he wants you to luxuriate in both when it's far more likely you'll feel like you're drowning, given how rarely Wainwright buoys the listener with an actual melody or memorable lyric.

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

That air of obligation presides during The World We Left Behind, a nine-track slog.

The only moments where Wayne sounds marginally interested in his own music come when he veers furthest away from rap.

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.

Instead of offering playful, engaging pop music, we get new wave retreads and a couple of rock journeymen and the whole thing comes off like an overgrown episode of MTV's "Making the Band".

The idea that a producer of his caliber can’t put together something resembling a likeable LP-- particularly in light of his endlessly amusing Gangsta Grillz mixtape, In My Mind: The Prequel-- is insane. Here, he’s shot himself in the foot. Where the mixtape exploded with enthusiasm and wit, In My Mind the album is corroded and ineffectual. Worse, it’s predictable.

Lamb of God's general lack of adventurousness makes them mostly indistinguishable from their heroes and, budget excepted, the bulk of their contemporaries.

Deer Tick try to score points simply by sounding like they could drink all those bands under the table, and the self-absorbed and even downright hateful Divine Providence ends up drinking at you, not with you.

Costello has eschewed all sense of melody and humor in favor of rambling, mock-jazz noodling.

Rarely has a genre sounded so tried and tired, so forced, formulaic and reliant on its own mythology as country music is made to sound on Regard the End.

Even as a record of adequate, vaguely politicized mook-rock, it mostly falls flat, whether by lazy lyrics or some uninspired drumming from Galactic's Stanton Moore, who adds plenty of percussive touches like the judicious cowbell of 'Clap For the Killers' but sinks more straightforward tracks such as 'The Oath' like a stone.

Pillowfight is technically flawless but thoroughly unexciting.

We have 12 microwave-nuked approximations of Drake songs circa 2013 and Kanye songs spanning from The College Dropout to Yeezus, with none of the wit, soul, or edge.

The songs are generally slow, samey, and sleep-inducing, and the lyrics, any language differences notwithstanding, are hard to take seriously, even for a guy who raved about I'm From Barcelona.

You’re Going to Make It makes life sound like one big bouncy castle of fun, and that unquestioned contentment renders Mates of State musically anonymous.

To catch a glimpse of these guys' past glories in 2009, your best option is still to go see them live; this is just a souvenir.

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.

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.

As it is, Peace & Love sounds like a rough draft full of rookie mistakes, rather than a veteran defiantly going it alone.

The Misfits' schtick should stand the test of time. But The Devil's Rain makes supernatural feel like fairly workaday stuff.

Death in Vegas wants to be a scary rock band. As such, they've crafted a scary album with scary guitars, scary beats, scary distortion, and scary Iggy Pop. But Death in Vegas isn't even a rock band. It's two pasty English DJ-type guys and some session musicians.

A career-low for Thievery Corporation.

On Untitled you get to decide whether you prefer Nas thoroughly exploring half-assed concepts or half-assedly exploring thorough concepts.

Everything Everything's debut LP, Man Alive, is proof that enthusiastic experimentation can't save your end product when the underlying elements are so incompatible and unappetizing.

Everything about Laugh Now, Cry Later feels utterly tapped of inspiration and vitality, and Cube's former greatness only makes this exhausting slog that much more depressing.

The debut's boring, not awful, but until the band stops sounding like they have a hundred cooler things to do than be in a studio, it's hard to imagine them as anything more than surf muzak.

The problem isn't that Red Carpet Massacre pushes Duran Duran out of their comfort zone. The problem is that they sound just a little too comfortable there to make the most of bad situation.

It’s an album that seems to exist primarily to be disliked, and it couldn’t seem prouder of itself for achieving that sad goal. Credit Joan of Arc for this, though: 20 years in, they’re still finding new ways to alienate and infuriate.

Let the People Speak feels utterly passionless and perfunctory.

True Sadness is a record that can’t seem to get out of its own way. Almost every track is bloated with instrumentation.

Argos is still witty, but here his punchlines tend to be predictable, due in part perhaps to the disc's overstretched answer-song conceit.

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."

On We Are the Night, the Chemical Brothers have switched from integrators to imitators.

At its worst, this is effectively a contemporary acoustic neo-No-Depression record with Costello's signature vocal tics slapped on top.

Her own versions aim at some druggily evocative conception of 60s soul, which makes them pale next to the originals.

Beyond stripping Pop of his personality, the most offensively bad [tracks] on Faith are the ones that have no shame in hiding their financial intentions.

-, pronounced “subtract,” which responds to them much like its predecessor, 2021’s =, did to its themes of turning 30 and becoming a parent: with the usual beige palette, generic hooks, and vapid lyrics. The songs on - are almost uniformly dour, often slow, occasionally drumless.

Throughout Post Traumatic, you can sense how unmoored Shinoda is without that spectacle. His chest doesn’t puff out as far as it did on Fort Minor. His compositions don’t detonate like his best work for Linkin Park. His bandmates aren’t there to lift him up when he falls short. He sounds abandoned.

Conceptually, they're close to Mumford & Sons: opportunistic in their borrowings, yet entirely unimaginative in the execution. Theirs is a thoroughly timid, tentative take on Americana: roots music without the roots.

The album is stacked with cartoonish approximations of what she thinks a rap song should sound like: shivers of bass, the occasional “skrrrt,” Mad Libs of designer brands and bodily fluids. Many sound like direct imitations of the rappers she admires.

Too much of Man of the Woods is musically and thematically shallow; at 66 minutes, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep.

A few fatal flaws eclipse all of Rooty's abundant qualities. Basement Jaxx have taken kitsch a few steps too far.

Belladonna sounds technically flawless-- every marimba strike and fret run has a specific texture that's almost miniaturist in its realistic detail-- but it's all in service to vocal-less songs that are ponderous and dull, whose strict adherence to an overriding motif hems them in.

Let Go's only plausible use is to forcibly expose us to mid-90s alt-rock in the context of today so that we might come to grips with just how damn crappy it sounds.

There is no scrape, no tension, no noisy bullshit, and Destroyed is eminently un-replayable as a result.

Break Line is a musical without an audience, and its creators might be better off if it fails to find one.

Nothing on Outbursts turns out to overblown sonically, but "Sea Change" does signal a straining quality that runs throughout the album.

Pump’s only motivation is to stunt on his old high school teachers. That theme is heavy-handed on the album, as Pump bashes us with a running joke about how he used to go to Harvard before dropping out.

Replicants' problems extend beyond vocal limitations; the real issue is that, at 13 tracks and 40 minutes, this record plays like a shiftlessly uninteresting, self-parodic slab of warm-in-2010 pastiche.

Surely, we can do better for the platonic ideal of a rock band than four guys gunning for a spot rightfully inhabited by My Morning Jacket but instead coming up with the best songs 3 Doors Down never wrote.

Full of the kind of basic strum-alongs and diaristic musings that yield showers of Starbucks praise.

What [3rdEyeGirl] don’t have is much of a personality. Recorded live in the studio using analog equipment, the album is nevertheless too proficient, too slick, and too professional to come across as much more than anonymous.

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.

In the end, Barbara could've been made by a computer with a specific coding procedure: bass riffs align themselves into right angles, sharp synth lines blare, hi-hats sizzle, hooks dissolve on contact, and 2004 never ends.

It just feels like empty tribute, lip service for someone who really does deserve something more: the dignity of being left alone.

Much of the material sounds rushed and half-finished, like a high schooler trying to write a research page paper during his lunch period.