With Crooked Shadows, Carrabba aims to bring together his competing production impulses. Unfortunately, the results are all over the place.

Whether it's the lack of plot, insight, or collaborators, Achilles Heel also finds Bazan's music stuck in a room with no exits, with one loping distortion-pedal crawler after another.

There's an interesting sound here, a shell of an idea. But there is ultimately very little melody or personality for the arrangements to support and the record winds up sounding weirdly conservative.

Whether she's giving the rhythm section a cigarette break, trying to approximate the sound of an anesthetized New Pornographers, or adding the same sort of pseudo-dancey Casio flourishes that have colored her work since the first Azure Ray album, Taylor never fails to instill the same sense of inescapable inertia throughout.

New English is so woefully derivative it almost builds itself a new vocabulary from the Lego blocks of other rappers it stands on.

Eminem’s too talented a rapper with too good a Rolodex for this to flop, but damned if Marshall Mathers LP 2 doesn’t give it a go.

The redeeming moments are ones which make some unpredictable moves--any shocks are welcome on a record as polite and poised as this.

Like every jerk who reads an Orwell or Rand novel and walks around a few days with a chip on his/her shoulder, Starsailor play the self-righteous yet simplistic social critic.

The Neighbourhood is as ponderous as any forgotten post-grunge also-ran record selling for one cent on Amazon.

After all the sentimental rigamarole, it’s tough to come away from Heartbreak Weather feeling any closer to Horan. He spends too much of the record bouncing between sounds and songwriting concepts to feel distinct.

Underworld’s compositions are lush and polished, while Iggy’s ad-libs tend to spin their wheels, at times pausing and sputtering while he searches for the next word or phrase.

Every song on the album is crafted with clinical meticulousness, its production clean as a whistle, but like a flawlessly constructed garment lacking in inventive design it ultimately falls short.

Keep On Smiling’s glossy veneer never disguises its particle-board center.

Their 10th album, Medicine at Midnight, adds very little to their extensive catalog of interchangeable power pop and hard-rock sing-alongs. But you can’t hang them on their own music, because Foo Fighters would never dare to give you enough rope to do it.

Way to Blue is too rigid in its approach and too timid in its interpretations to challenge or enlarge our perception of Drake.

Even when Dunckel stays closer to type, here he usually relies on unremarkable downtempo beats to support unfortunate space-hippie mewlings.

Free Spirit isn’t the coming of age album Khalid intended it to be, though in his nascent adulthood he has mastered something. Unfortunately, it’s the art of being innocuous.

There are few fiery guitar freakouts, folk-influenced melodies, soaring space-rock bridges, or psychedelic flourishes here; instead, the empty space is mostly filled with serviceable falsetto funk and glassy-eyed yacht-pop.

The depth and breadth of the tracklist are commendable but often work against the band.

Hiding below layers of dated synth noise, dinky drum machines and expensive effects is, surprise surprise, a solo bedroom recording. 50 minutes of structured wankery, as performed by a lone Brit with the questionable talent to put a chorus to a verse, employing a thin, laddish vocal and rudimentary guitar skills.

The bulk of Machine Says Yes draws heavily on the rhythms and studio techniques of FC Kahuna's big beat roots, and garnishes them vigorously with the robotic female vocals and canned electro beats of Ladytron or Peaches; it gets old faster than Wesley Willis.

Street produces again, and Robyn Hitchcock is among the guests, but even they can't make up for repetitive, one-dimensional songs--mostly sleepy folk, occasionally fuzzy psych.

If adult critics really loved this stuff, the Xanarchy team would no doubt feel they’d made a wrong turn somewhere. It’s punk, or it’s the thing people who don’t really know what “punk” means call “punk,” or it’s a dog whistle meant to sail over the heads of the the elderly (i.e. anyone over 24).

Burn the Maps often sounds like simplicity transformed into bloat in an attempt to sound interesting.

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

Whereas poor production values and drug-fueled exuberance once excused their George Clinton worship, 20 years on, in Rick Rubin's sterile environment, the band sounds like they're in jamband training camp, filling in all the empty spaces with blippityblap reminders of Flea's virtuosity and John Frusciante's desire to use every effects pedal ever invented.

Like the YouTube culture the "Pork and Beans" video depicts so well, the song--and this album--relies on a high quantity of short-lived pretty good ideas to distract from a shortage of great ones.

Amber Headlights is a step backwards after the lush beats and subdued songs of the Twilight Singers' debut, 2000's Twilight, but it also seems weak following the harrowing Blackberry Belle and even the so-so covers album She Loves You.