Overall, Sad Sappy Sucker feels as if it was sort of put together in a hurry, despite it having sat around in the warehouse for seven years. The album part has plenty of good songs, though, and any completist will want to hear it.

The Great Escape Artist's intricate, heavily lacquered production--courtesy of Muse-man Rich Costey--has the effect of making Jane's Addiction sound like an anonymous assemblage of oversaturated recording tracks.

The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness may attempt to forge a common ground between two trans-Atlantic artists, but even when working from the same instrumental base, the sensibilities at play here are still oddly segregated.

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

Though repetition is part of its hammering appeal, things eventually begin to grey a bit as the record moves on, losing the punch of the pure blacks and neon reds of the first half. And though those spoken word samples that pepper the album do more obstructing than enhancing, there's no hampering Youth Code's intentions.

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

Mixed and mastered without nuance or mercy, the relentless blare of Excuse My French becomes a paradoxically ambient experience.

For the most part, Déjà Vu is rickety and wholly unnecessary.

From the quality of the production, it seems that Metro knows he wasn’t going to get a progressive performance from Sean. Most of the beats on the album are standard fare with a few gems like “Reason,” which recalls Metro’s What a Time to Be Alive production “Jumpman,” and “Who’s Stopping Me” which samples from Brazilian artist Nazaré Pereira’s “Clarão De Lua,” something a little bit different from Metro’s typically modern approach.

Unlike so much of Voigt's past work, it's not an idea worth exploring at this length. Zukunft's only impressive feat is making Voigt's elegant, pristine work under guises like Studio 1 and Gas seem like the work of a raving, impassioned romantic.

Machine disappoints on an almost unprecedented number of levels, and its unfortunate length is the least of its problems.

This album is absolutely terrible, a total abomination.

Now this is a terrible Liz Phair record.

Sadly, I Guess Sometimes... too often falls into the typical pitfalls of edge-of-millennium electronic music. Over the course of its seemingly infinite 65-minute runtime, Magnétophone's formula rarely varies, and many of the songs blur together.

Bafflingly outdated alt-rock songs that could comfortably sidle between choice cuts from Marcy Playground and Semisonic [circa 1998] and get their asses handed to them.

There are hints of this fledgling growth throughout Good Intentions. ... The most fun moments on the album are the ones where Nav gets out of the way.

Sure, it's nowhere near his incredible run of the seventies, but it is probably his best album since 1992's Harvest Moon.

While the J-Kwons and Juveniles enjoy the fruits of paradise and their Lexus helicopters, Shyne reminds us of the ones who didn't make it: the legions of his fellow Clinton inmates fighting to keep afloat under prison's psychic burden.

Lyrically, more often than not, these songs are frustratingly uncreative.

Strength in Numbers is far from unlistenable--I don't know if your free time is spent sorting through stacks and stacks of charmless indie rock CDs that have the nerve to call themselves "pop," but when the chorus of the title track hits with the subtlety of a latter-day Nas album title, it's damn refreshing to hear a group bound for glory as shamelessly as the Music.

There are still hints that Johnson still knows where his talents lie on Life Has Not Finished With Me Yet, but they're the faintest hints.

Melodies coast, but they don’t always stick; everything’s too mannered, too clean, and the album is marred by a clinicality further punctuated by its bonus tracks.

His singing voice isn’t nearly as tender and smooth as once it was. .... Sometimes the effect is monotonous and emotionless, which might suit his headspace, but ultimately it’s just boring. When he adds a little spice to his voice he can still sound expressive, like on the album standout “Small Town Fame,” which, if you ignore the shamelessness of the Brat summer bar, features him at his most earnest.

The band hasn’t done themselves any favors by sticking so closely to the sounds of their youth, either--not that they were ever going to top the pipe-bomb intensity of their earliest recordings, anyway.

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

The entire album sounds like a half-hearted compromise between what the group was and what the group wants to become.

Earth vs. the Pipettes sounds like not just a different group, not just a lesser group but, in sadly off-putting ways, almost an opposite group.

The first hour or so of It's Alive is perfect for Cars fans so diehard they'd not only pay for a live album of songs they mostly already own, but a live album 20 years after the fact with only two original members and a different lead singer.