I'm With You's hip thrusts and gyrations simply go through the motions, the work of a band with all kinds of capital to blow but no incentive to do anything differently.

In 2001, their Brit-derived goth-punk was just gaining a foothold and still felt like a novel reinvention; now, its dreary slog is as commonplace as three-chord punk after the millennium's turn.

Unfortunately, The Fire Theft actually sees the band indulging in ersatz approximations of Yes and Genesis' epic odysseys much more deeply.

Try listening to Brian Eno's Music for Airports in choppy RealAudio. Hear that? Digital clicks, random bursts of static, and underwater compression swim over icy electronic drones, numbing your mind into a state of paralysis. Now imagine spending $12 for it. That's the Oval experience in a nutshell.... As always, Ovalprocess isn't bad for what it is, but it's certainly not clever anymore.

While Descending Shadows (their second full-length and first for Vice) is leaner and mellower than anything they've done, it still barrels forth with the same haggard, long-fanged intent that made Dead Moon so great.

While Yuck made listeners nostalgic for the first Clinton term, Glow & Behold will just make you wish it was 2011 again.

The most interesting ideas aren’t developed into anything more than ear-pricking novelty, which used to be almost all they did.

Walking the fine line between so many gradations of emotion can be tricky, and there are more missed opportunities on Say Yes! than revealing interpretations.

Lean, at some point, gets lost in the wall of sound. And still it feels like the most essential music of his career: no longer an outsider looking in, but an artist fully embodying himself.

Pierson hasn’t lost any of the force or heat that’s characterized her vocal work for 40 years; if anything, she’s acquired the ability to enrich otherwise pedestrian line readings with a resonance that feels born of a life well lived.

Fly Yellow Moon just can't quite solve that old problem: how to be mushy but not mundane.

It leaves Selected Studies in an odd place, one that doesn't feel like any kind of stretch for one of its participants, but is quite the opposite for the other.

Sun, Sun, Sun is a modern pop simulacrum of traditional country, devoid of the electro accents that pocked the last Elected record, pretty delectable as long as you've a strong taste for ham.

In a sense, it seems more apropos to judge Double Up as a comedy record than as a pop record.

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.

Wire never wanted to be a satisfying band, yet they somehow became one--which leaves the otherwise bold impulse behind Document and Eyewitness curiously inconclusive.

TLC's letting-go is bittersweet and good, a sometimes somber, sometimes playful requiem for their time together (and with us).

There are building blocks for something fantastic in most of these pieces, but only in two of them have they been used to make more than the sum of their parts.

The joycore bricolage of CSS is all but missing on Donkey.

That the archaic should sound this fresh is at least a mini-miracle.

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.

Season Dreaming is the sort of record that could, in the wrong hands, easily drift off into formless bedlam, but the group's employment of simple melodies and tunefulness when needed keeps that from happening.

A Very She & Him stands guilty not of being oppressively adorkable, but of being not nearly adorkable enough.

Fated is an overwhelmingly pleasant listen. It is decidedly un-dazzling.

It's a wayward journey, which appears to be the intention of the piece, although at times it produces the kind of mixed results you get from opening a novel at a random page and trying to make sense of it.

The album shows that Grubbs’ music and his relationship to pop convention remains as distanced, fitfully frustrating, and stubbornly idiosyncratic as ever.

When they go for manic instead of mellow, Canyons do bring something new, even if it's just intensity, to the 80s retro party.

As a double album, Scratch might have produced something like an elaborate mixtape with originals on one side of the Maxell and covers on the other. In execution, however, I’ll Scratch Yours plays like another artifact of the 90s, this one less fondly remembered.