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

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

The result of so much suspicion is an album that’s somehow both loud and timid--all clamor and no soul.

I suppose that the backstreet Black Market Music will endear itself to gender-exploring teenagers who find the girl-on-girl action in Buffy the Vampire Slayer "fucking awesome."

Asleep feels less like an album of music meant to entertain than an assumption that you can actually bump a marketing plan in your cars and house parties.

If Moby has accomplished anything with Hotel, it's that he may have become the rare musical artist equally despised by both of modern music criticism's warring camps.

There are a lot of choir fills, growling electric guitars, and stomping drums, but the bombast is hollow. “Bulletproof” sounds like a “Wild Wild West” outtake, its country-and-western elements way overdone.

Trilla, Rick Ross's inexplicable second album, is every bit a fatty contemporary American disaster.

With inchoate, banal lyrics and blustering tunes that go for it all, all the time, Degeneration Street sounds like the product of too much euphoria. Definitely catch the Dears on the comedown, if at all.

It goes through your system like a juice cleanse—quick and optimized, but ultimately meant for the toilet.

Lacking any dynamism, complexity, or invention, the relentless drone of most of these tracks is a shallow, reactionary statement to the progress of the post-rock genre, and completely unedifying.

Do I really wish to describe the pallid piano ballad that is "Judy, Don't You Worry," or the Euro-dance dreck that Cracknell calls "Taking Off for France?" Nico's Liquid Steel remix of "Anymore" adds a modicum of drum-n-bass excitement to the original but not enough to excuse the Vengaboys-for-Uptown-Soirees statement of vacuity, "Penthouse Girl, Basement Boy." How about if I skip the would-be anthemic were-it-not-so-Michael Bolton "How Far?"

A treacherous, crashing disaster.

Their bumbling composite of generic pop and trendy metalcore is both schmaltzy and dull: a vacant wasteland where joy, excitement, and intrigue—sensations that all good metal and pop should evoke—go to die.

So this record's creative and artistic value is pretty much nil--in fact it only just hits competent.

Someone clinically extracts whatever trace of messy humanity made it through the first time the Bravery worked the nu-wave shtick, on their debut; Stir the Blood is a parodoxically bloodless listen.

It's as if Primal Scream have run completely out of ideas and so they've reverted to the detestable fallbacks of honking harmonicas and bar-band choogles, acting like college freshmen who just discovered blues.

Ghosthorse and Stillborn tends toward lazy, meandering nothings.

Mimicry is one thing, but at least choose wisely. You see, OK Go decide to impersonate post-Pinkerton, post-catchy, fun-by-numbers Weezer, resulting in an Ivy Leaguer Sugar Ray sound.

Ersatz G.B.'s abrasiveness, inscrutability, and tedium are increasingly tough to take with repeated close listening... a shabby, grueling album.

Though some might say that Armstrong's music is powerfully evocative and serene, such people hate music and all its subtle possibilities and intricacies.

Bell X1 generically compartmentalize everything instead and end up with a record that doesn't even top the work of their former bandmate.

He's only a middling guitar player, but insists on soloing and showboating endlessly, drawing out songs to unnecessary lengths.

Yoav goes about his expecting some sort of kneejerk praise for rolling dolo, but thanks to a total lack of depth, sonic or otherwise, all I see is the gimmicks, the wack lyrics.

Radio 4 can be commended for at least trying to move past the purposeful lo-fi of Gotham! and into fresher territory, but there's no bell or whistle in the world that could energize the utterly impotent songs at the core of Stealing of a Nation.

R&G has a unified sound, rare in hip-hop albums, but it's a sound based on tinkly pianos and noodly guitars and windchimes. It sounds something like The Black Eyed Peas if they tried to make a Barry White album, but with more falsetto warbling.

Awful as it might be, Oskar is not easy to dismiss because awfulness has always been a part of Momus' gambit.

Every hoedown on Sigh No More-- every rush of instruments in rhythmic and melodic lockstep-- conveys the same sense of hollow, self-aggrandizing drama.