The Deconstruction produces no eccentricity, pop smarts, orchestral creativity, or emotional revelation.

With every bungled attempt at pop, metal, or pop-metal, Get Hurt just rewrites its own worst case scenario.

(together) is borderline unlistenable taken as a whole.

By bombarding the listener with innocuousness, Alpha forge a test to determine exactly when the pedestrian becomes excruciating. By the third track, they more or less have their answer.

There is an alarming lack of imagination in evidence on Skeletons, and virtually nothing in the way of strong emotion.

The main issue here is a distinct and debilitating lack of craft.

On My One is precisely the kind of mistake that pop stars make when they think they’re smarter than the system.

The album never makes a case for X as anything other than a thinly subversive figure and never even rationalizes the baggage that comes saddled with it. X’s musical legacy will forever be interlinked to violence. Skins is merely a shallow attempt to overwrite that legacy gone awry.

These are dance songs so strident that no one could ever hope to move to them, pop songs so thin that no one could choose lines worth singing along to, rap verses so fumbly that practically anyone could rewrite them and make them better.

Despite attempts at lyrical heft detailing a too-vague sexual awakening ("Sebastian") and an encomium for a friend ("Ghost Bike"), Ulicny undermines himself on a second-by-second basis by finding no lyric that can't be subjected to at least six different forms of contortion regardless of its content.

Lupe often has enough trouble staying out of his own way, yet Lasers doesn't suffer for that reason; it just feels like the flaming wreckage of a project that never had a prayer.

With their staid textures, the songs tend to blend into one another, sounding at best like a spiritless hodgepodge of About a Boy's weaker moments.

No matter what their exteriors, Keane still seem incapable of anything other than the most heavy-handed gestures, peddling the same populist mock uplift that leaves you feeling pushed when it's meant to move.

Traffic and Weather finds them treading water in the worst possible way.

Futures is like a rotten onion, revealing layer upon layer of foulness.

These tracks are botched experiments that can't even function as interesting failures.

Neither here nor there, the funklesss would-be dancefloor fodder of P.D.A. frankly comes off D.O.A.

Dead Petz is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can.

Bafflingly outdated alt-rock songs that could comfortably sidle between choice cuts from Marcy Playground and Semisonic [circa 1998] and get their asses handed to them.

Musically, it’s unfulfilling, lacking standout melodies or exciting rhythms. The sound of Come Home the Kids Miss You, in turn, is about as sophisticated and interesting as a Daniel Arsham sculpture, neat at a glance but vapid upon any extended interrogation.

What we've gotten instead is a forgettable collection of fairly generic, overproduced rock songs that feel, oddly, like a put-on.

Like a washed-up athlete, Lee's stuck reliving his glory years.

Though they'd probably be better off rehashing Bring It On's supplicant roots-rock in the current climate, Whatever's on Your Mind begins with a fumbled acoustic strum, and after exactly three seconds of human touch, you get all the elbow grease, brow sweat, and rock'n'roll heart of a dubstep record Cut Gomez and they bleed Purell.

With a bloated 60+ minute runtime and some truly misguided dabblings with e-bows and saxophones, Log 22 presents Bettie Serveert at their most self-indulgent. And it's not pretty.

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

On his lonesome Anderson is oppressively unimaginative.

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.

Songs feel simultaneously tossed off and over-considered; there are perhaps two passages across C6’s 67 minutes that scan as anything other than the product of a hyper-competent professional in need of serious creative guidance. It would be a disaster if any of it mattered.

It's not so much that Rock N Roll is incorrigibly written as that the record is unforgivably careless, unwilling to commit to anything including itself.

Overly orchestrated mid-tempo ballads with inane lyrics.

In execution the whole thing comes off as nothing more than a thinly disguised, crass attempt to smoke latent Oasis fans out of hiding. Unfortunately for them, Beady Eye already beat them to the punch.

At best begs to be a fan-club download, since it offers so little to anyone not Eef's bride or offspring.

The lack of honesty doesn’t really matter--nobody’s going to Sheeran for gritty soul-searching. But the lack of imagination does.

Musically and lyrically, E is spent-- out of ideas, out of innovation, unable to cough up anything but by-the-numbers pop in the fourteen originals he wrote for this disc.

Beyond the Neighbourhood is the sonic equivalent of a beautiful coffin.

We Are A&C is feckless junk.

This year, we've seen Taking Back Sunday, Saves The Day, and the Get Up Kids attempting to play catch up with themselves, but here Braid bafflingly jettison the goodwill of their past: the palm-muted verses and squeaky choruses, the one-sided conversations of the lyrics, the antiseptic production -- I'll say it could come from anyone because you probably don't remember who the Pinehurst Kids are.

If The Datsuns serve any purpose, it's to remind us that 70s glam/garage-rock was largely accountable for the abomination that was 80s hair-metal.

Looking like Michael J. Fox clones decked out in garage rock gear, The D4 present aural amnesia with the lyrical complexity of an even less non-ironic Andrew WK.

Yes, these are songs, supposed expressions of a character, but they are as artless, discursive, and slapdash as a to-do list or a diary entry; the central character seems to be only a deep sense of self-pity in need of external validation.

Born is his blandest, most non-descript offering yet. Even the so-so Have You Fed the Fish? seems like a masterpiece in comparison to the downtrodden piano banalities that slosh all over this latest nadir.

Out of all the depressing aspects of Recovery, the worst is the realization that for listeners the album takes the opposite arc-- the more he motors on about having reclaimed his passion for hip-hop and finally figured out who he is, the more draining the album becomes.

Yes, Mink Car is crap. All the charms They Might Be Giants once seemed to possess have dissipated into a cloud of embarrassing awkwardness.

Universal Mind Control is a painful misstep from a talented rapper who's decided to be as nasty as he wants to be--which turns out to be much, much nastier than we'd like.

They've jettisoned nearly all their Strokes, Television, and other grab bag post-punk propensities, turning instead to adult alternative as a foundation for this late-20s midlife crisis. I guess if ya can't beat 'em, just quit and make soft rock!

Coldplaya-hatas will loathe Keane; most others will just be insulted.

Never has that rift between Pollard the songwriter and Tobias the arranger been more transparent-- and more problematic-- than on the formless, often dull The Crawling Distance, a particularly blank batch of Pollard tunes dressed to the nines in Tobias' perfunctory sheen.

An often unlistenable album from WHY?, a group whose music is often excellent.

The first hour or so of It's Alive is perfect for Cars fans so diehard they'd not only pay for a live album of songs they mostly already own, but a live album 20 years after the fact with only two original members and a different lead singer.

If anemic blues guitar riffs and half-assed attempts at white-boy soul were the only problems with In Our Gun, it might almost be passable.

The problem with Twelve isn't the staid song selection so much as this dogged insistence on staying faithful to the originals.

In the City is proof that you can co-opt the most retarded aspects of 80s corporate rock and still not be any fun.

It's mind-boggling that such sloppily arranged, barely listenable stuff is getting this kind of attention, but that's celebrity for you.

Generation is a sonic mess, all weightless synth swish, dull beats, and maybe-ironic midi horns.

You almost hope Young the Giant acquiesced to some music executives' request to compromise their style, because nothing else sufficiently explains a debut so devoid of personality.

He issues his grievances with a smart-ass certainty, rarely showing empathy or compassion for his characters or admitting that maybe it's his perspective that's skewed.

All the clichés from French pop and house music collected in one shiny package.

She shows greater range than expected, but the clatter of Johannes' busy production too often obscures her charisma and renders her odd punk melodies sadly lifeless. She's better than this perplexing project.

The Vines earn real damnation as Winning Days comes to a close. However boring and harmlessly vapid the first ten tracks are, "F.T.W." obliterates any possibility of forgiving them.

Try as you might, searching for vestiges of the ol' Morcheeba is futile.

More so than the album's overall malaise and inconsistency, it's this ridiculous (and in some cases, offensive) attempt at "edginess" that's most off-putting.

Maybe Funstyle will be liberating for her; maybe, as with Self Portrait, her deck-clearing exercise will let her shake off aspects of the way she's understood that she finds burdensome. At the very least, it's a shrewd way to lower expectations. After this, whatever she does next can only be a pleasant surprise.

Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, the debut LP by the London folk-pop quartet, bites its best sensitive-indie forebears and then pukes up all the most superficial chunks.

The problem is that this was, at best, a 1997 cash-grab that probably would've worked in that economic climate, and now you just get to debate whether it's a cynical move on Soundgarden's part or, more likely, something they had absolutely nothing to do with at all.

As a follow-up, 18 plays it safer than a quadruple-condomed fundamentalist Christian at an abstinence rally.

Cover albums and mixes aside, Radio Retaliation is the pair's fifth studio album, and finds them once again failing to make anything but the most minute adjustments to the polite groove that is their stock, trade and--in 2009--monopoly.

The slightly more dynamic Louis XIV only give you testosterone-fueled rock at its least appealing extremes: heedless lust or, arguably even more repulsive, cheesy balladry.

It's all third-rate bar band stuff.

Perhaps the Blues Explosion is aware of the garage revival, and looking to claim some kind of Neil Young-esque patriarchal crown. If so, the dozen tracks of Plastic Fang fail miserably, giving off the appearance of a 35 year-old accountant hanging around the old frat house on Homecoming weekend.

Problem is, for the second straight album, they do so with the same exact set of tools as every other band in this sphere. So critiquing Ritual threatens to be a process of listing obvious influences that's just as dull as actually listening to the thing.

It doesn’t help that Nine Track Mind is all ballads except for three tracks, two of which are duets (Trainor, a sleepy Selena Gomez) that somehow still feel like ballads. Puth cannot fill this frame of sentimentality with any genuine sentiment.

Is the band's self-titled album under the new moniker a brave change-up? Sure. Is it any good? Not even a little.

For the most part, Déjà Vu is rickety and wholly unnecessary.

The result of so much suspicion is an album that’s somehow both loud and timid--all clamor and no soul.

I suppose that the backstreet Black Market Music will endear itself to gender-exploring teenagers who find the girl-on-girl action in Buffy the Vampire Slayer "fucking awesome."

Asleep feels less like an album of music meant to entertain than an assumption that you can actually bump a marketing plan in your cars and house parties.

If Moby has accomplished anything with Hotel, it's that he may have become the rare musical artist equally despised by both of modern music criticism's warring camps.

There are a lot of choir fills, growling electric guitars, and stomping drums, but the bombast is hollow. “Bulletproof” sounds like a “Wild Wild West” outtake, its country-and-western elements way overdone.

Trilla, Rick Ross's inexplicable second album, is every bit a fatty contemporary American disaster.

With inchoate, banal lyrics and blustering tunes that go for it all, all the time, Degeneration Street sounds like the product of too much euphoria. Definitely catch the Dears on the comedown, if at all.

It goes through your system like a juice cleanse—quick and optimized, but ultimately meant for the toilet.

Lacking any dynamism, complexity, or invention, the relentless drone of most of these tracks is a shallow, reactionary statement to the progress of the post-rock genre, and completely unedifying.

Do I really wish to describe the pallid piano ballad that is "Judy, Don't You Worry," or the Euro-dance dreck that Cracknell calls "Taking Off for France?" Nico's Liquid Steel remix of "Anymore" adds a modicum of drum-n-bass excitement to the original but not enough to excuse the Vengaboys-for-Uptown-Soirees statement of vacuity, "Penthouse Girl, Basement Boy." How about if I skip the would-be anthemic were-it-not-so-Michael Bolton "How Far?"

A treacherous, crashing disaster.

Their bumbling composite of generic pop and trendy metalcore is both schmaltzy and dull: a vacant wasteland where joy, excitement, and intrigue—sensations that all good metal and pop should evoke—go to die.

So this record's creative and artistic value is pretty much nil--in fact it only just hits competent.

Someone clinically extracts whatever trace of messy humanity made it through the first time the Bravery worked the nu-wave shtick, on their debut; Stir the Blood is a parodoxically bloodless listen.

It's as if Primal Scream have run completely out of ideas and so they've reverted to the detestable fallbacks of honking harmonicas and bar-band choogles, acting like college freshmen who just discovered blues.

Ghosthorse and Stillborn tends toward lazy, meandering nothings.

Mimicry is one thing, but at least choose wisely. You see, OK Go decide to impersonate post-Pinkerton, post-catchy, fun-by-numbers Weezer, resulting in an Ivy Leaguer Sugar Ray sound.

Ersatz G.B.'s abrasiveness, inscrutability, and tedium are increasingly tough to take with repeated close listening... a shabby, grueling album.

Though some might say that Armstrong's music is powerfully evocative and serene, such people hate music and all its subtle possibilities and intricacies.

Bell X1 generically compartmentalize everything instead and end up with a record that doesn't even top the work of their former bandmate.

He's only a middling guitar player, but insists on soloing and showboating endlessly, drawing out songs to unnecessary lengths.

Yoav goes about his expecting some sort of kneejerk praise for rolling dolo, but thanks to a total lack of depth, sonic or otherwise, all I see is the gimmicks, the wack lyrics.

Radio 4 can be commended for at least trying to move past the purposeful lo-fi of Gotham! and into fresher territory, but there's no bell or whistle in the world that could energize the utterly impotent songs at the core of Stealing of a Nation.

R&G has a unified sound, rare in hip-hop albums, but it's a sound based on tinkly pianos and noodly guitars and windchimes. It sounds something like The Black Eyed Peas if they tried to make a Barry White album, but with more falsetto warbling.

Awful as it might be, Oskar is not easy to dismiss because awfulness has always been a part of Momus' gambit.