I just always felt comfortable in my thinking that one Toad The Wet Sprocket was more than enough to fulfill a specific emotional and intellectual niche. Am I wrong?

At nearly every turn of their flaccid debut, Up All Night, Razorlight squander the ideas they've snatched up from other, more talented acts, then somehow find even more ways to ruin already perfectly uninteresting songs.

This is a decently crafted, moderately hooky, fairly vacuous power-pop album, and under the right light, you could do a whole lot worse.

We sound like everyone's favorite old rock bands, we have insipid lyrics, we say 'Come On!' and 'Oh Yeah!' every five seconds, we have no discernable identity, and we're from Australia. What could people possibly dislike about us?

Son Volt's label debut, American Central Dust, is some of the sleepiest protest music ever made: Every song saunters by at a slow tempo, Farrar's voice sounds increasingly inexpressive, and John Agnello's production makes everything sound real purdy but lifeless.

It's sort of a catch-22 that Editors can write songs sticky enough to be memorable in unfortunate ways.

Positively pillaging Oasis and The Stone Roses (whom Oasis pillaged in the first place), Johnny Marr + The Healers' mediocre debut is a defeated regurgitation of danceable Britpop and Madchester traditions that, in its best moments, recalls a second-rate... Soup Dragons.

All of these moments lurch through time without any thought of build or denouement—no tension, no release, no narrative. Muse parade their influences while giving us all comical winks.

Instead of a musical or narrative point of view, Boone relies on speaking his truth, a songwriting axiom that doesn’t take into account whether someone’s truth is fundamentally boring or has been rendered in pop music countless times before.

Harris reduces pop's limitless possibilities to one-joke self-parody, his youth his most distinguishing characteristic, an unremembered yesterday always more vibrant than today.

Lateness never does much to prove Clare and his producers were on the same page (let alone reading from the same book).

Dr. Dooom 2 isn't Keith's worst album, but it doesn't do a whole lot to break recent trends.

Yet another standardized LP of glorified Dave Matthews tunes.

Ultimately, this particular dream is less one of flight or past glories, and more one of going to work and finding you've forgotten your trousers.

The Fratellis have comfortably nestled themselves among the ranks of British rock's most besotted, but even relative to their contemporaries they still manage to come off sounding bored, tired, and downright silly.

Acoustic has all the ponderousness of a forgotten episode of MTV Unplugged, and that setting only highlights Band of Horses’ worst tendencies.

With precious little exception, these songs are just so wispy, and the band's treatment of them so delicate, it turns Courage into a museum piece, stuffy, bloodless

This could be the group's most accomplished record musically, but when Anthony Roman opens his yap he consigns the band's good deeds to the remainder bin.

While the songs certainly do the Whigs no favors, the production and mixing on Dark are downright unconscionable, making one long for the relative restraint of Don Gilmore or Andy Wallace.

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

The problem with Kane’s emulation of past performers is that he remains a tourist lost in his time warp, lacking the originality and vocal grit to elevate fandom into innovation.

Drama in music works perfectly fine in mediated, tactical doses, but for Tourist, the stakes are unrealistically high.

Come Around Sundown is, and it ends up being no different from a lot of the phony populism in the air these days.

Eels' latest, Tomorrow Morning, is far too insular to mean much of anything outside itself. It's an exercise in self-referentiality, which might be more impressive if the music didn't sound like the folk-with-beats path Beck was smart enough to avoid.

As with his last two releases, Baby I'm Bored is gutted by under-worked, inconsequential two-minute ideas.

Love Sign's belief in the righteousness of its intentionally big, dumb songs being big, dumb and nothing else ultimately sets Free Energy up to fail.

He’s settled into the comfort zone of songs that will haunt weddings for years to come, like “2step,” in which he raps about “Two-steppin’ with the woman I love.” Even at his most passionate, Sheeran sounds as threatening as a meringue peak. ... Sheeran’s reliance on clichés is especially unfortunate during the album’s back half, which is where he placed a majority of the songs about death and fatherhood.

Elefant's latest is only as deep as its clenched-jaw fake-Brit hooks.

The mix here is guitars to 11, everything else to 6, as the slurring, inebriated Liam is buried under mountains of riffs for better and worse.... Familiar to Millions reheats leftovers of better songs written six years ago and force-feeds them as reminders that Oasis could once write an uplifting song. As for those looking for a compact, two-disc set of Oasis' best, it's called What's the Story Morning Glory? and Definitely Maybe-- available for the low price of $8 at your local used record shop.

Helium moves with the numbing pace of a stubborn hangover, and its drums have the grain and snap of limp celery.

As a clearinghouse for an increasingly prolific band, False Metal isn't particularly generous. In fact, judging from its wacky title/cover combo, 10-song tracklist, and overall quality, it dubiously achieves Cuomo's stated goal of creating the logical follow-up to Hurley.

Given which songs are chosen and when this is being released, Scab Dates is a neither a concession nor a step forward, revealing inclinations that feel half as indulgent as they should when following a record like Frances the Mute, and about half as interesting to listen to.

Ultimately, the songs XXXTentacion has left behind are insubstantial and narrow, and Bad Vibes Forever only weakens the case that his view of himself was ever a worthwhile lens with which to process his art.

Earth is a whopping 70 minutes long, and at no point in it do we get an idea of what exactly the fuck the Dandy Warhols are trying to tell us.

Replica Sun Machine is an exceedingly simple thing--with tunes so familiar-feeling to be easily ignorable--but it's presented with a false sense of intricacy, gussied up and disguised as something more than it really is.

It's overproduced as hell, filled with all manner of electro doodads and backmasking effects, but it also boasts an immediacy and pop smarts heretofore unheard from the band. Unfortunately, that directness applies to the lyrics as well, and they simply cannot be ignored.

Even as Sledge and Jessee work to add some rough edges to the music, their frontman keeps his distance on Sound of the Life of the Mind, as though he can't quite get outside his own mind. As a result, the album sounds barely able to polarize, like Folds is rockin' the suburbs gently to sleep.

Indeed, there are lessons to be learned from Automato's debut, the foremost being that the golden touch of Mssrs. Murphy and Goldsworthy can't save a band from their own indie-rap dullness, horrible cybernetic-produce bandname, and absolutely atrocious MC.

I'm sure there are kids out there that think Basement Jaxx is great dance music, but the odds are, they don't know much about jungle.

Grrr... seems transcribed from a distant memory or read from the pages of a script.

Green Imagination does awkwardly stumble into some redeeming moments, but never without a slog through the banal first.

The edge that sparked Spank Rock's best moments back in the day either isn't there or flails around without direction.

A flatulent, irrelevant, self-indulgent attempt at recapturing the hotwired spontaneity of their debut through a dirge of sub-par psychedelia and try-hard freakouts.

Mixed and mastered without nuance or mercy, the relentless blare of Excuse My French becomes a paradoxically ambient experience.

Despite the attempts to recreate the dense power chords and pained whines that made Saves the Day emo poster boys, the formula fails when applied through Conley’s rose-colored vision of his own glory days.

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

Ultimately, the whole of Tinted Windows is so much less than the sum of its considerable parts that it's almost tragic.

A lackluster, continuously-mixed double-disc look back at Maas' remixing talents. Or rather, a look back at his ability to appropriate hooks from often far superior sources.

It's Loverboy-style lite-metal meets new wave, without the riffs, melodies or red leather pants. In other words, it's Survivor.

The production of The Bridge sounds like it came out of an extended catch-up session, the work of a man best accustomed to the breakbeat era's techniques trying his hand at the last ten years' worth of club-rap digitalism.

Synths lap, strings weep soppingly, ham-fisted fingers tap, time signatures flash, and the amphetamine Beat poetry...is amphetamine Beat poetry.

She spends so much time rambling about her pain that she never bothers even to try to make us feel it.

While the whole package is marketed as a "love letter" to fans, true followers will quickly be able to sniff out its inferiorities. If anything, this latest selection from the dwindling Buckley vaults subverts his talents and ultimately insults the same hardcore fans it's aimed at.

The beats on Fatherfucker are not only frustratingly simplistic, but the energy and surprising rhythmic complexity of the vocals on her debut are noticeably absent, too.

One of the most annoying records you're liable to remember.

Druggy records are never all that good when they don't convey anything about the experience other than the blur. That's not to say you couldn't get swept up in The Mirror Explodes' churn under the right influence, but it's not something to inspire the formation of many new memories.

There is no fight in these songs, not even the faintest stab at hope. There’s just empty moaning, and a lone, feeble guitar that chugs for all eternity in hell.

On the stupid loud songs, Craig Nicholls sounds like a bored Kurt Cobain. On the stupid slow songs, Craig Nicholls sounds like a bored Liam Gallagher.

Pull the Pin might be going for the uncluttered "production" of older Rick Rubin, but instead it cops the sterility of newer Rick Rubin, each song lumbering on a chassis of waterlogged tempo and Jones' wooden melodies, begging for just about anything to grab you.

They've jettisoned just about anything that ever made them perversely enjoyable.

Bully’s real curveball is the lack of Ye, even after he re-recorded it with human vocals. He’s on every track but also somehow none of them, making a case for redemption and not sounding very convinced by it himself.

The problem with Fear Yourself is not that it sounds big, rather that it sounds condescending to the man it's supposed to be all about, and more importantly, by.

Mostly the standard fare of Tekashi throwing sounds and flows at the wall, praying something sticks.

There are a few quality tracks among these 16-- enough for a pretty good EP-- but this is an 80-minute album with at least an hour of stuff on it that sounds at best like studio outtakes.

The songs here are absent of feeling or inspiration, but even creepier, they feel absent of intent.

Their songs fuse Ashlee Simpson mall-punk with the retro 80s fetish of former tourmate Ryan Adams' recent high-profile stinker.

Slapping a brand new bag on these pasty-white-dude tunes more often bombs than not.

Nothing's Lost is a well-meaning record that just got its priorities mixed up. These tech'd-up tearjerkers can out bench press anyone in terms of sonic fodder, but the album is whiny, transparent, and a colossal hodgepodge.

On a Wire has that glossy veneer that only happens with the help of a good decisive manager, a fast-talking label guy with All The Answers, and that bloodthirsty, all-encompassing desire for yet another Big Tour.

This album, barely over half an hour in length, bears the hallmarks of a barrel- scraping reissue program.

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.

If This Island failed musically but still got Le Tigre's message out, it could be counted as a minor success. But at this critical juncture in their career, Le Tigre seem tame.

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.

These songs highlight the poseur mentality and insincerity that paradoxically plagues and blesses The Dandy Warhols.

Maybe it's good for a laugh, but only as a defense mechanism against the cringe-inducing experience of watching artistic expression abandon a heartbroken man at his lowest moment.

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.

If there's any difference between this album and von Bohlen's lackluster recent output, it's that this collection somehow manages to be even more tepid.

Magnificent City is lazy and inept, devoid of force and inspiration and chemistry.

United Nations of Sound arrives with a Sunday-school sermon's worth of resurrection rhetoric that conflates Ashcroft's return with that of J.C. himself.

Tranquilzers does very little to reinvigorate or recontextualize chillwave or shoegaze and does even less to signify innovation on its own terms.

Earth vs. the Pipettes sounds like not just a different group, not just a lesser group but, in sadly off-putting ways, almost an opposite group.

Elixer runs the gamut of bland-but-classy R&B, from antiseptic slow jams to rote dance-pop, slick as you'd expect and completely failing to suggest what bunched Prince's panties when he initially discovered Valente.

More deadening than the suffocating arrangements and production or the nonexistent hooks is a tiresome perspective that goes beyond the Weeknd and connects to a celebrated lineage of male authors who assume an inherent profundity in treating a psychosexual crisis of mid-twenties masculinity as miserably as possible.

It's a shame to waste the term "spectacular" on such a mundanely depressing, blatant cash-in.

A warmed-over stew of scrubbed-up psychedelia, scrubbed-up sunshine pop, scrubbed-up soundtrack music, electrofunk, and lounge that's all produced immaculately, right down to the "messy" parts.

Unfortunately, Seconds, Higgins' first album in 36 years, doesn't match the vitality of its backstory.

The trio unlearns everything that distinguished them as instrumentalists on snakes, ending up with something that’s more entertaining when seen as a potential document of alternate history.

Spacesettings is liquidated, hookless, and entirely flaccid.

He's already recorded such a wealth of great material that no mystique remains, leaving no real reason for anyone-- including the most dedicated fan-- to seek out these poorly produced musical shreds.

LSD sound like an algorithmic midden of pop music. ... More than anything, this album is both tired and wired, like drinking Red Bull after a fifth Red Bull.

Feels more like failed market research than soul searching.

A career low.

On their own, N.E.R.D. are the hip-hop Toto.

On Paths Taken, the Junkies sound like a band battling obsolescence and trying entirely too hard to make an impression as an inventive and therefore relevant band.

It's plenty catchy and big, but it's also wildly uncreative and predictable.

A collection of preposterously cheerless (and charmless) songs that try much too hard to achieve a poignancy-- or anything, really-- that might hide their complete insignificance.

The versions of Winehouse's repertoire that turn up on At the BBC's audio disc, though, are almost all sloppier than their studio counterparts, and she rarely manages to reveal anything we didn't already know about her songs.

This album feels like the rarest kind of unintentional parody, so ridiculous and transparent in its intent that I really get a kick out of it. But the truth is that none of Monica’s parodic elements would matter that much if the music felt like a genuine experiment rather than a self-serving, big-budget attempt to deepen his image.