There isn't a lot left on Nothing, apart from these faint reminders, to indicate that these two guys were the same pair who once revolutionized the sound of hip-hop.

The Vines get credit for ambition, but Highly Evolved covers so much ground that none of it seems convincing: there's just no emotional depth here.

The album is filled with nearly indistinguishable third-hand indie-pop songs.

The disc infuses folk with frenetic intensity, but it's all so over the top that it's hard to take it as anything more than a distraction, like an annoying buzz or a particularly scratchy pair of wool socks.

Instead of focusing on one idea and shaping it into something unique, though, the album tries its hand at everything that is "now" (noise-pop, dance rock, etc.) and owns none of it.

Iron Sea is filled with the sort of greeting-card poetry that would even give Bono pause.

The result is pale, beefy, and contemptuous.

This record meanders through a set of passable songs that ultimately decline to move or enthrall you.

To some extent, WYWH can get by on vibe, but really, a listener can do much better, even without going further back into the Concretes catalog.

Thirty-six songs is too many. ... He seems to have lost a great deal of energy as a singer and performer, leading to a ton of uninspired retreads and some truly generic filler.

On the whole, though, the women Craft expends so much breath obsessing over drift in and out of his songs like cardboard cutouts from a bygone era, there to be lusted after and then blamed when they don’t fit into his fantasy.

Cudi too often assumes some sort of higher ground even though his self-pity is flaunted no differently than any other tacky rapper accessory.

Winners Never Quit plugs along on two gears-- the "ballad" and the "rocker." The ballads rely on obvious signifiers like acoustic guitars, brushed cymbals, and pianos. Moody!

Even when their songs pass muster, the performances feel ineffectual, which makes long stretches of Venus on Earth drag semi-miserably.

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.

The long list of guests here indicates a record in need of some padding, but most of these names provide little more than hook fodder.

Adams' 1989, for all its sincerity and technical execution, is ultimately hollow because it's nothing but context.

Mallet percussion, multilingual lyrics, chesty vocal huffs, fumbled acoustics, roundabout vocal harmonies, tentative EDM dipping, Asian monasticism, "Rule Britannia", American gothic: they all get sucked into the vacuum of This Is All Yours without leaving an impression.

Rather than build off each other's styles and arrive at a cumulative, comprehensive sound, Teenage Time Killers' revolving cast have conflated quantity with quality, resulting in a pedestrian product that, at best, offers a decent soundtrack to throwing back beers at Punk Rock Bowling.

Monkey comes off resembling either a padded greatest-hits comp or an "inspired by" soundtrack for a non-existent movie. What it certainly isn't is a DJ mix where previously hidden links between seemingly unrelated songs are unearthed through the ancient art of juxtaposition.

The sad fact is, no marketing strategy, no matter how savvy, could conceal this collection's bathetic, overwrought travesties and gruesome failures.

As a think piece, Rehearsing My Choir is enormously engaging, but as a pop record, it's exhausting and fruitless.

More focused on offering Banhart's international and oddball bona fides than crafting songs that feel at all like home, What Will We Be finds Banhart in need of direction and editing.

Their caveman take on 70s nostalgia-- simultaneously misguided and entirely too obvious-- renders them mostly forgettable and entirely ineffectual.

If you liked the new Oasis and U2 records, never bought "Turn on the Bright Lights," and tend to ignore clumsy lyrics, you might enjoy raising your beer to this album just fine.

Wild Nights' drab sound might have been saved if the lyrics had some life to them.

Shobaleader One's not tuneful enough to pass for pop, not funky enough to satisfy a club, and lacks the wildstyle (if sometimes infuriating) excess of Squarepusher's other records. Whether hard or soft, there's nothing here that you can't hear executed with more joie de vivre by a half-dozen Frenchmen.