Positively pillaging Oasis and The Stone Roses (whom Oasis pillaged in the first place), Johnny Marr + The Healers' mediocre debut is a defeated regurgitation of danceable Britpop and Madchester traditions that, in its best moments, recalls a second-rate... Soup Dragons.

Codename: Rondo sounds like two people doing the least amount of work possible before something can be considered a "song."

Is the band's self-titled album under the new moniker a brave change-up? Sure. Is it any good? Not even a little.

Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. It’s like you drank a bunch of cough syrup and went to Live Aid: The Vatican.

At its best, its songs are serviceable bangers to nod off in the club to; at its worst, it’s a collection of strange admissions that, thanks to Nav’s affinity for taking himself too seriously, come off cringe-worthy.

[“Everything Good, Everything Right” is] a high point on an otherwise confused album that knows what it’s good at and what it’s not, and yet still chugs on anyway.

Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums.

Crafting art-house meanderings that rock turns out to be the easy part. It's sticking the landing that's hard, and no matter how much D. Rider twists, turns and tumbles in midair, they're just not there yet.

Swept up in maudlin strings and chintzy brass, Ashcroft blurs his anguished syllables like Tom Petty doing Bob Dylan, embraces U2-jerkoff bombast, and follows his idiosyncratically generic muse into uncharted depths. Keys to the World is as hilariously indulgent as "Trapped in the Closet", if vastly less self-aware; it's also a more laughable satire of contemporary music than Bang Bang Rock 'n' Roll, though less durable and totally accidental.

Sounds From Nowheresville makes me want to buy chocolate, try on clothes, take a holiday--anything but listen to this record.

Neither off-putting nor engaging, Client's debut occupies a rather uninteresting place in electropop's soft middle.

It all sounds so serious without any real reason for it.

For 28 tracks Van discusses hidden cabals of dangerous media types so frequently that it verges on a convoluted concept record.

It's awkward to witness such a gloriously thuggish monster vainly attempt the rope-a-dope.

New Glow may be Matt & Kim’s most polished album, but their songwriting has never been more amateurish.

Though much of Driving a Million rides along on a similar, slightly heavy new wave pop groove like "Neon Tom," it's the subtle lapses into more diverse sounds that are perhaps the record's most welcome aspect.

There is an uncanny, even hollow air to the album. It can feel a bit like watching a Super Bowl commercial: the budget is all there on the screen, the lighting and set dressing and sound design just so, but you can’t shake the nagging sense that there is no center, just a clot of references without a referent.

The idea that a producer of his caliber can’t put together something resembling a likeable LP-- particularly in light of his endlessly amusing Gangsta Grillz mixtape, In My Mind: The Prequel-- is insane. Here, he’s shot himself in the foot. Where the mixtape exploded with enthusiasm and wit, In My Mind the album is corroded and ineffectual. Worse, it’s predictable.

This is a guy that more than understands the music he's goofing on-- he worships it.

It's all pretty silly stuff, but if nothing else, it manages to establish Flickerstick as a frontrunner for the Varsity Blues II soundtrack.

'Relator' aside, there's little about this duo's chemistry that lives up to Matt and Kim, let alone Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.

What matters most is, with Monochrome, Helmet is back to doing what they do best.

Everything I Thought It Was brims with a misplaced confidence that can only be described as Timberlakean, laboring for such a long, long runtime under the misapprehension that a risk-averse mop bucket of last decade’s trending sounds is gonna hit through the sheer force of its performer’s waning charisma.

This album, barely over half an hour in length, bears the hallmarks of a barrel- scraping reissue program.

On his lonesome Anderson is oppressively unimaginative.

To say that the album is over-produced is an understatement; you could bounce a quarter off of most of these songs.

Maybe Funstyle will be liberating for her; maybe, as with Self Portrait, her deck-clearing exercise will let her shake off aspects of the way she's understood that she finds burdensome. At the very least, it's a shrewd way to lower expectations. After this, whatever she does next can only be a pleasant surprise.

Easy to dismiss, smirk at, or even hate on the fist listen, nine out of The Snare's ten tracks are grind-and-pause, semi-sultry pairings of exotic keyboard settings and mid-tech beats that exploit their refrains and come weirdly close to the patterns of 'risqué' after-dinner radio pop circa 1999-present.