The Dears, by and large, make tracks that would slide without much distinction onto any number of mid-90s albums, neither gumming up the works nor sounding particularly special.

A more immediate, less cerebral album than you'd expect from such a green musician.

Tales Told lacks the charm of the Seeds' most ebullient singles, and it's certainly no Crocodiles, either.

Slim still loves blabbing repetition and dropping yapping vocal samples into the gobs of the dull, and this helps make Palookaville less a reformation than merely his latest and quite bland big beat manifesto.

Its chief problem is that every word, every note, and every instrument sounds dry, sapped of most of their personality.

Mono have wisely restrained from directly replicating their previous sound, but here the band has sacrificed sonic heaviness for intellectual ponderousness, and too often has fallen prey to slow, repetitive, tiresome songwriting patterns and a frustrating lack of variation.

Hidden Vagenda is elegantly constructed and outwardly naive, but it lacks a consistent underlying honesty.

Spooked sounds closer to folk-inspired songs Hitchcock performed very early in his career, his recent forays into Dylaniana, and Welch's prefab Americana. For Hitchcock, it's both a departure and a return to his roots.

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

It lurches along like a junk-heap jalopy, unsteady and unsafe, bits flying off in every direction, stopping, starting, and bouncing in pain.

For an album I approached ready to shrug off as sheer novelty, its humor and candor give it a fair amount of staying power.

These are summer-blockbuster songs, overdriven and overproduced simply because they can be, with little-to-no actual substance behind the heavy-effects bluescreen.

The Grind Date brings together an unimaginable team of the underground's hottest producers and meshes their idiosyncrasies without dissidence.

Power is, to say the least, hardly the collection of hard rockers that No Kill and Different Damage were. But with its lilt melodies, Davis' downplayed role, and the band's admission that, hey, a bassline here or there couldn't hurt, Power boasts a cohesion and distinct identity missing from Q & Not U's two previous albums.

He contorts both his simplistic pop urges and his more obtuse soundscaping, and makes good on neither.

Burned Mind, better than any recent album I can think of, betrays music's implied purpose of providing an enjoyable aural experience, while at the same time being psychologically compelling and richly imagistic enough to invite repeat listens.

Damage is a far cry from the stripped-down screech that made these guys famous. In its contrast, it calls out everything the Blues Explosion once was and now isn't.

It's the kind of record that will have a profound impact on a small number of people, be ridiculed by many more, and never be heard at all by almost everybody.

Treble and Tremble showcases a full array of old-school remedies, from inventive mic'ing and overdubbing to brutal filters and bullhorn distortion a la Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse. If Espinoza sang any better than he does, he'd probably be bored in the studio.

Even if Hate stands as their most visionary statement, Universal Audio has a subtler strength.

Travistan fails so bizarrely that it's hard to guess what Morrison wanted to accomplish in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, Rademaker makes his mark when he forsakes goth-rock and embraces his jangle-pop roots.

Though Interpol couldn't be expected to surpass their previous heights, it's difficult to imagine a savvier or more satisfying second step.

The end result is a great album, albeit one more lighthearted than its myth would suggest.

What frustrates about The Beautiful Struggle is that its flaws are purely musical: Kweli remains the fist-raising visionary who burned "The Manifesto" at the Lyricist Lounge with the same fiery pen that blazed "African Lounge".

Greenspan... manages to fold elements of nearly a quarter-century of forward-looking pop into a distinct sound without sounding either conceptual or trading on contradictions or the smoke-and-mirrors of attention-grabbing eclecticism.

VHS or BETA have moved on, like so many bands this year, to pillaging the dance-friendly template of late-80s Cure.

While no track dips below the quality line, the album lacks thematic fluidity and spark.