The greatest-hits disc is a misnomer: It's mostly a grab-bag of Shady throwaways and deep cuts.

Swept up in maudlin strings and chintzy brass, Ashcroft blurs his anguished syllables like Tom Petty doing Bob Dylan, embraces U2-jerkoff bombast, and follows his idiosyncratically generic muse into uncharted depths. Keys to the World is as hilariously indulgent as "Trapped in the Closet", if vastly less self-aware; it's also a more laughable satire of contemporary music than Bang Bang Rock 'n' Roll, though less durable and totally accidental.

A few good hooks, in fact, would go a considerable way toward redeeming Blank's largely forgettable debut, I Love You.

Their music,... while pretending to be candy-coated pop-rock, shares all of emo's key indicators, including melodramatic vocal delivery, seamless production, and shameless overambition.

She comes across like a severely dumbed-down Lily Allen at best, and at worst she seems like someone you would want to root against in a televised singing competition

This album is as much of a baffling nadir as Metal Machine Music, with nowhere near the stoned bravado.

Hologram Jams (that title remind you of Oracular Spectacular or Robotique Majestique?) is a vastly inferior record to Sea, replacing the dynamic punk psychedelia of their debut with sugary overstimulation and rank nostalgia.

The four new songs here are less blank than the four on the first, if only marginally.

Tired riffing, uninspired lyrics, and god-awful wankery.

I've listened to this EP twice; that's once more than I would have ever liked to have heard it, give or take one listen.

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.

Solaris is an anthem for Eurotrash everywhere. Its sins are ultimately sloth and indifference. Eschewing the brilliantly cold futurism of earlier efforts, Photek has crafted a dull excursion into the sunnier latitudes of electronic music: a tropical cocktail of salt-rimmed drum n' bass, faux-sexual bedroom ambient and lifeless house.

Rush!, their first album recorded mainly in English, is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level: vocally grating, lyrically unimaginative, and musically one-dimensional. It is a rock album that sounds worse the louder you play it.

The Handler only meagerly amplifies what he was already doing, probably pleasing his no doubt respectable cadre of core followers, but handily turning off the rest of humanity.

The brio of an amateur would almost have to be preferably to the overzealous professionalism of Beautiful Lie, whose frilly "classicist" pop gets all dressed up to go absolutely nowhere.

Now, with the early new century demanding "opuses," Tool follows suit. The problem is, Tool defines "opus" as taking their "defining element" (wanking sludge) and stretching it out to the maximum digital capacity of a compact disc.

Whenever Rice risks truly touching us emotionally-- say, when he's asking a former lover, "Do you brush your teeth before you kiss?" on "Accidental Babies"-- he undercuts himself with go-nowhere melodies and formulaic arrangements.

As annoying as Endicott's mascara-tainted bellyaching was on the Bravery's debut, his histrionics-for-the-masses commandeer the group's stylistic direction on The Sun and the Moon, cheapening already trite regurgitations of Robert Smith confessionals by bloating them to anthemic proportions.

Sounds From Nowheresville makes me want to buy chocolate, try on clothes, take a holiday--anything but listen to this record.

This album is absolutely terrible, a total abomination.

At its worst, this project is just plain retarded.

A mopey bunch of trite sap O.D.-type tales almost as unstomachable as the band's former crapothecary hymns.

The Airborne Toxic Event is an album that's almost insulting in its unoriginality.

The lengthy, indistinguishable tracks could pass for a Daniel Lanois-produced collaboration between the Dave Matthews Band and Kenny G.

These clusterfuck all-the-cooks experiments, more often than not, add up to way, way less than the sum of their parts.

What they lack in self-awareness they more than make up for in rigid self-consciousness, failing to make any fun or campy choices to lift these songs out of a morass of the worst impulses of Rush and Cream. The back half of the album alternates between the ignorable and unforgivable.

While Glover's exaggerated, cartoonish flow and overblown pop-rap production would be enough to make Camp one of the most uniquely unlikable rap records of this year (and most others), what's worse is how he uses heavy topics like race, masculinity, relationships, street cred, and "real hip-hop" as props to construct a false outsider persona.

Codename: Rondo sounds like two people doing the least amount of work possible before something can be considered a "song."

There's virtually zero worth to this album, a combination of zealous experiments with Garage Band and would-be Music and Lyrics soundtrack cuts.

Like hearing DLR's lonely voice doing its best in the absence of accompaniment, most of Robotique is just sort of depressing.

At best, this record is Suicide resurrected as a novelty act; at worst it could pass for an extreme deodorant commercial with swearing.

Not everything here fails in such catastrophic fashion, but because the band noodles its way through Mirror Eye's druggy, sitar-laced exercises without any thought towards coherence (or completion), even its few promising tracks feel slapdash and unfinished.

Only the truly earless would mistake this assortment of bloated in-jokes and interminable, sub-song drones for some kind of masterpiece.

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

It's an unrefined, poorly calculated mess.

His art is 144,487 times less remarkable than his first week sales numbers would have you believe.

This music wasn’t just written or recorded without any regard to the quality of the Pixies legacy, it was done so without regard to songwriting quality at all.

Words fail ("I'm dying to be living"). They fail early ("You could say we're changing formats" on opener "Final Broadcast"). They fail often ("Through our cell phones we shout"; "Who are you holding when you're sleeping next to me?"; "Ignorance was so blissful"). They fail spectacularly ("This distance is getting tough"), and best of all they're posted.

Audacious to the extreme, but exhaustingly tedious as a result, its few interesting ideas are stretched out beyond the point of utility and pounded into submission.

I highly recommend that Animal Collective fans seek out the re-reversed copies of Pullhair Rubeye [available illegally on the Internet]. They are enjoyable.... But then there's, you know, the thing that sits on store shelves and costs money. And that version of Pullhair Rubeye is remarkably dull.

An album that hideously disgraces the band's original work.

What an utter mess.

Juvenile, simpering, weak, preachy, pointless and accidentally snooty, Dying in Stereo is about as empowering as Legally Blonde 2.

So then, what is the excuse for a typically elitist music nerd to bow to Andrew WK's blistering tard-rock? That's right, folks: there isn't one.

The Butthole Surfers have finally become shocking only in their sheer banality, like a watered-down mix of the worst Beck and Perry Farrell material you can imagine.

Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums.

Liz Phair proves so ultimately unnecessary, it might as well not even exist.

An unfathomable album which will be heard in the squash courts and open mic nights of deepest hell.