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.

Yes, Mink Car is crap. All the charms They Might Be Giants once seemed to possess have dissipated into a cloud of embarrassing awkwardness.

Universal Mind Control is a painful misstep from a talented rapper who's decided to be as nasty as he wants to be--which turns out to be much, much nastier than we'd like.

They've jettisoned nearly all their Strokes, Television, and other grab bag post-punk propensities, turning instead to adult alternative as a foundation for this late-20s midlife crisis. I guess if ya can't beat 'em, just quit and make soft rock!

Coldplaya-hatas will loathe Keane; most others will just be insulted.

Never has that rift between Pollard the songwriter and Tobias the arranger been more transparent-- and more problematic-- than on the formless, often dull The Crawling Distance, a particularly blank batch of Pollard tunes dressed to the nines in Tobias' perfunctory sheen.

An often unlistenable album from WHY?, a group whose music is often excellent.

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.

If anemic blues guitar riffs and half-assed attempts at white-boy soul were the only problems with In Our Gun, it might almost be passable.

The problem with Twelve isn't the staid song selection so much as this dogged insistence on staying faithful to the originals.

In the City is proof that you can co-opt the most retarded aspects of 80s corporate rock and still not be any fun.

It's mind-boggling that such sloppily arranged, barely listenable stuff is getting this kind of attention, but that's celebrity for you.

Generation is a sonic mess, all weightless synth swish, dull beats, and maybe-ironic midi horns.

You almost hope Young the Giant acquiesced to some music executives' request to compromise their style, because nothing else sufficiently explains a debut so devoid of personality.

He issues his grievances with a smart-ass certainty, rarely showing empathy or compassion for his characters or admitting that maybe it's his perspective that's skewed.

All the clichés from French pop and house music collected in one shiny package.

She shows greater range than expected, but the clatter of Johannes' busy production too often obscures her charisma and renders her odd punk melodies sadly lifeless. She's better than this perplexing project.

The Vines earn real damnation as Winning Days comes to a close. However boring and harmlessly vapid the first ten tracks are, "F.T.W." obliterates any possibility of forgiving them.

Try as you might, searching for vestiges of the ol' Morcheeba is futile.

More so than the album's overall malaise and inconsistency, it's this ridiculous (and in some cases, offensive) attempt at "edginess" that's most off-putting.

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.

Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, the debut LP by the London folk-pop quartet, bites its best sensitive-indie forebears and then pukes up all the most superficial chunks.

The problem is that this was, at best, a 1997 cash-grab that probably would've worked in that economic climate, and now you just get to debate whether it's a cynical move on Soundgarden's part or, more likely, something they had absolutely nothing to do with at all.

As a follow-up, 18 plays it safer than a quadruple-condomed fundamentalist Christian at an abstinence rally.

Cover albums and mixes aside, Radio Retaliation is the pair's fifth studio album, and finds them once again failing to make anything but the most minute adjustments to the polite groove that is their stock, trade and--in 2009--monopoly.

The slightly more dynamic Louis XIV only give you testosterone-fueled rock at its least appealing extremes: heedless lust or, arguably even more repulsive, cheesy balladry.

It's all third-rate bar band stuff.

Perhaps the Blues Explosion is aware of the garage revival, and looking to claim some kind of Neil Young-esque patriarchal crown. If so, the dozen tracks of Plastic Fang fail miserably, giving off the appearance of a 35 year-old accountant hanging around the old frat house on Homecoming weekend.