LAMB has one mega-hit, one okay song, three stillborns, and seven full-fledged embarrassments.

Those hoping for a trove of overlooked gems will be disappointed, as too much of With the Lights Out sounds like nothing so much as a dull-edged instrument lifting flakes of material from the bottom of a barrel. Simply put, there's enough good stuff here for a solid single disc.

If Mm..Food? feels merely good or somewhat inconsequential, it's because it is that way by design.

Watching such an undeniably talented artist blindly follow such an errant muse can be endlessly compelling, and the failure of these two albums to capture his visions and ambitions with any adequacy possesses the pull of true tragedy.

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.

Encore is a fourth fascinating record from Eminem, but it's also easily his weakest and, in many ways, tamest album to date.

White People, for all its ambitions, fails to coalesce.

Case is a singer first and a songwriter second, and The Tigers Have Spoken is afflicted with the same malady as Blacklisted: Many of its songs are too short, clocking in under two minutes.

Joji sounds like a record made by mountains.

Replaces the cheap sounds of their earlier records with more traditional sonics, which leave the often-clever lyrics feeling like an afterthought.

One of this year's most remarkable "punk" albums.

Sure, greater dynamic variety and some selective risktaking would be nice, but these precocious upstarts already got the tough part pinned down: subtlety. Psapp have laid themselves a remarkably self-assured template for subsequent outings.

Cohen's towering presence and deft songwriting breathe life into the lite-jazz arrangements.

Unfortunately, when they could have stopped it at 12 tracks and had a pretty good party on their hands... they kept right on going, and it stops being fun after a certain point.

By turning the rock knob down a notch, DFA79 have kept You're a Woman loud and nasty and ensured a cohesion and unusual degree of listenability.

The new musicians forgo the gauzy, playful dilettantism of Euphemystic in favor of expansive pop marathons.

It would be foolish, however, to think that you could get through a Nick Cave project this ambitious without a few clunkers. At least here Cave's missteps occur when his reach exceeds his grasp, and the songs that fail manage to do so dramatically rather than boringly. [average of scores of 78 for 'Abattoir' and 74 for 'Orpheus']

Far from being either vindicating or enthralling.

A worthy if not exactly earth-moving capstone to the band's career.

On Gold Medal, even when they fail, it seems as if that failure is a result of The Donnas trying to carve their own identity rather than just being a cute cover band that ran out of ideas.

The Futureheads rely on actual chops and the kind of melodic astuteness usually associated with piano-pop balladeers, and in doing so, they exhibit complete control over their music and intertwining vocal deliveries.

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.

Young, earnest, eerie, and overzealous, Von is a unique, almost belligerently unaffiliated piece of music that unsubtly blazons its idiosyncrasies.

The most Chisel-sounding record he's released as a solo artist, returning to stripped-down arrangements and, on "The Angel's Share" and "Little Dawn", his fascination with repetition.

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

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.

Maverick has a more consistent tone than either of Beans' previous records, but it also lacks the stand-outs of its predecessors, settling into bland production strokes that recede behind his always fascinating rhymes.

They have general technical proficiency and a knack for a good riff, but listening to them is nevertheless a chore-- and a boring, repetitive one at that.