In its essence, Death To False Metal is competently put together, and adequately celebratory in its own way (as the album title might suggest), but there is very little to latch on to as far as a reason for existence.

No matter your feeling on CocoRosie, whether love them for their innovation or hate them for their grating pretension, when you hear Grey Oceans you might find yourself missing those more challenging (or more inventive) days.

A couple of moments are cool--the seamless transition to hard rock guitars in 'Gravity and Heat,' the intimacy of closer 'Spanish Triangles.' But there's not much else worth hearing on Life Processes.

Work (work, work) sounds more like a laborious task than a bracing trip into emotional bedlam and sexual anarchy.

Most of Angles finds The Strokes trying as hard as possible not to sound like The Strokes. This is done, in part, by recycling the least palatable parts of their last LP, and interpolating them with weird, near-atonal choruses.

Hard Times… unfortunately spends most of its running time inadvertently showcasing the delicate difference between stylistic variation and tonal inconsistency.

What's missing where these lame boasts exist in Curtis is the vulnerability of moments on The Massacre (especially 'A Baltimore Love Thing') or any of the rich narrative that graced his first album, not to mention any of the goofy, sing-along catchiness that previously made his singles chart events. Musically 50's collaborators don't feel like they've brought anything near their best to the table.

Like OMNI, this record seems a bit trite.

It's hard to view Radioactive in any context that doesn't label as it a total artistic failure, to see the totality of Yelawolf's rolling over to commercial demands as anything but truly disheartening.

A Weekend in the City borders on emo in its wordy self-obsession, so even though the record is actually more sonically adventurous than its predecessor, it seems like a massive step backward.

The result is an album that's heavy on ideas instead of execution. It's pleasant but forgettable.

Harris's frivolous humor loses its charm when the music falls flat.

The Dears left Arts & Crafts and cut their least entertaining album yet, Missiles, deciding to release it through the more populist confines of Dangerbird.

The rest of the 15 tracks are of two types: sub-par production work DOOM did for other people (like Masta Killa) or two-minute tracks where DOOM drops a vintage sample, says a few winking pop-culture references and then moves on without consideration.

A sprawler is always a dangerous gambit for a band. It can easily trip over the line from cracked genius into failed experiment, as The Evening Descends does.

Sometimes, the band forms something interesting and new from these starting points.

Pink Friday lives or dies on Minaj's ability to fully embody all of the various personas she toys with, the singer, the rapper, the lover, the fighter, the tomboy, the girly girl, the big sister, the bitch. But she isn't always engaging, and she doesn't always sound at home with this material.

Congratulations shares nary a sonic smidgen with Oracular Spectacular, instead existing in a netherworld where mod-era psychedelia meets prog-rock and where the ecstatic heights of the band's debut don't exist.

The overall effect is a more diluted sound, in keeping with the watering down of Skinner's diatribes.

Putting out an album called The Recession right now, and draping the American flag over your head on its cover, comes with expectations of politically conscious ruminations. Instead, we get more of the same

Essentially a funhouse mirror of 2007's far superior "Because of the Times," Only by the Night stumbles under the weight of its ambitions by lacking the songs necessary to support them

The biggest problem with Red is that as obvious as Datarock's aesthetic is, it's still boring, and it doesn't stick to the tracks at all.

The tracks on Forth are long and often overproduced. It’s a tough blow to handle when a band you’ve loved for so long comes up so short.

The lack of musical coherence here is jarring and irritating.

If the members of Rye Coalition had at least done a masterful job of impersonating their muses, we could call Curses a tribute album. Sadly, they fail even in that.

Mostly, this record is yet another reason to wish that people with real talent would stop throwing it away.

This is stadium schlock of the highest pedigree, the kind of thing that can make you feel desperately cynical about rock music.

If Hotel Sessions had a layer of banished songs or the context of label-drama, that would be one thing, but as it stands it's a very boring, commonplace, and unneeded part of music-biz procedural that never needed the light of day.

Hirway intends for much grander experience, but his shortcomings, be it insecurity or fear, do not allow him to achieve that. Instead, we're left confused over just who Hirway is, and the real loss is the lack of intimacy between the artist and his audience.

Despite the three or four keepers, 29 suggests that Adams is still struggling to nail down his musical identity.

Mostly, the record displays a jump closer to American hip-hop in both production styles and rhyming, and the urgency that was so palpable on the first installment is gone.

Most of these tracks stumble around Dick Valentine's wacky lyrics, and the limited karaoke-style production only cheapens the equation.

The songwriting is bland and the production is overdone.

A disappointingly amateurish performance.

I Am Gemini is all jerky distortion, an endless sputtering, as if Cursive set out to intentionally make ugly music.

The Kooks come off like a Ringo to most of Britpop’s Paul.

It's his overwrought vocal sensibility that really drags Make Sure They See My Face down into Starbucks country.

Unsatisfying.

Now that Cuomo is older and singing about things like fame and the alienation of age, it's become harder to empathize.

Keep trying N.E.R.D., you’re not even close to blowing us away here.

The album isn’t just undone by Blank’s well-worn playbook of sexualized shtick, however; the tiresome music is just an egregious.

Put simply, this music is slow, the same slow soggy tempo the whole way through.

Gone is most of the musical adventurousness that redeemed the most seemingly cliché moments of the debut.

The problem is that making songs that are fit for beer commercials makes for an atrocious album full of half-baked ideas that are only good for 30 seconds of enjoyment.

When the World Was Our Friend is for third-tier tone-deaf hipsters.

Whirlwind Heat does nothing to disprove the argument that this recent flock of slinky, neo-post-punk bands aren't doing anything Gang of Four did much better a quarter century ago.

Much of With Love and Squalor is like your old coat rack: You know where the hooks are going to be even in your sleep.

One Way Ticket to Hell's blandness seems like the perfect example of the difficulties of riding a revivalist routine longer than necessary.

Where they used to sound like the crackling of a subway car rounding a bend or the seediest alleys of New York in the pre-dawn hours, here they sound like alt-rock renderings of what moody post-punk is supposed to sound like.

Phosphene Dream's real achievement is that it takes the band's earlier murderous attitude and makes it impossibly bland. It might be the first time you fall asleep during an album with copious references to toxic gas, hauntings, death, blood, and killing.

It's a boring album, it's a depressing album, but it's also a deeply cynical album.

Some of it works--'Southern California' 's honey-harmony’d and piano-led wistful look at the history of the Beach Boys in specific and SoCal in general is rather touching. But the rest of the album, especially the overwrought spoken-word interludes, remains a series of harmonized thuds and (however pretty) blank-eyed lobotomy-pop.

There's too many synths, too many hooks, and just too much happening for us to enjoy it. The charm is gone, and we're left with a mess too muddy to understand.

It seems to me that this album has already been made countless times by countless bands.

For those who never liked That Guy Who Plays Acoustic Guitar At The Party, Babel's gonna sound like the dentist's drill. For others, this still may be the point at which you put down your makeshift tambourine, get up from the half-circle and find a better room in the party house.

What we get is a self-indulgent and silly album that never makes any lasting impression.

Songs that range from energetic, immature guitar hacking (“Dispenser”) to tedious slow-churners (“Icebreakers”) to just plain awfulness (“I Thought There’d Be More Than This,” “The Knowledgeable Hasbeens”).

While the slog through the mostly interchangeable mid-tempo, spoken-verse tracks on the first twenty two minutes of the album is a lot of saminess to deal with, a couple genuine pleasures await anyone patient enough to make it through to the album's final moments.

With Fight Softly they seem so out of sync, so bland and so disappointing.

There’s nothing wrong with a band being crass. But when that band tries to act like they’re doing it in order to make a vague, nonsensical statement on twenty-first century love and sex, the result is albums like Reality Check.

This isn’t some lost early album that is as good as the new stuff; Campfire Songs might be the weakest entry in Animal Collective’s catalog. The album is the aural document of a young band blowing 45 minutes on a porch and hoping in vain for some kind of transcendent musical revelation.

Ounsworth's impassioned delivery is gone throughout most of Some Loud Thunder, replaced by what can only be described as vague indifference.

It's sad to see a band that touts itself as experimental sounding like a watered-down, unfocused version of its younger self.

The majority of its ten tracks resemble either retreads of their former glories or listless attempts at Spotify-friendly R&B which rob them of any identity whatsoever.

Closing In consists of amateurish approximations of the music the duo wishes it were playing.

Idlewild has become predictable and boring.

Nothing sticks. The only times you’ll be tempted to rewind is when Jones says something stupid, which is often.

Her effort is continuously admirable, but what is frustrating about The Beekeeper is the music itself: it’s almost formulaic, including even the token song that displays a powerful sense of womanhood.

Sometimes it's hard to take seriously a band that bases its identity on a shtick -- but it doesn't seem like the members of the Dresden Dolls are much interested in being taken seriously.

The thickset blues-rock of Havilah, the fifth studio album from the Drones, makes for opaque and impenetrable listening.

The songs are imitative and lackluster.

Instead of copying the aesthetic of 1970s rock ‘n’ roll, they’ve copied some of last year’s more popular indie records. The result, though at times satisfying, mostly feels contrived.

Dead Drunk sounds six billion times better in concept than in execution.

Largely forgettable.

Though comparisons to the Postal Service and M83’s newer work are somewhat understandable, the record lacks emotion in a way that makes it better suited for a Volvo commercial or a Starbucks compilation.

A majority of the tracks lack in everything but production value.

Turns out Isaac Brock is just too damn weird to be imitable.

The guitar work is straight out of the Velvet Underground/Television songbook, and the production begs for comparisons to the Strokes or Interpol. That's not to say being compared to these folks is bad, it's just that those comparisons don't reveal how unimaginative The Black Magic Show really is.

Most of these songs are only pleasant for thirty seconds or so.

Even if it came out in 1996, it would still be self-absorbed, turgid, over-produced and soulless.

Sweet Christ, in no universe will Big Sean be greater than Notorious B.I.G. or Big Pun, and at the rate he's going he'll be lucky to end up a better rapper than Sean Combs, let alone Sean Carter.

It doesn’t challenge listeners or give them anything unexpected or even asked for, really (who's waiting around with bated breath for 'Ring-A-Ling?'), but it’s already a certifiable hit.

This album will sway neither the faithful nor the unbelievers from their positions along the borders of her stalled momentum.

What makes BAYTL really frustrating is the fact that besides V-Nasty's appearances, the album has a chance to be excellent.

How does this sucker sound? Not very good.

"Cartoon Motion" was a nice moment for Mika, but this second album does not improve or advance what he did before. In fact, he seems to have regressed through his venture into childhood on The Boy Who Knew Too Much.

Comparing his remarkable contributions to Deerhoof with this boring, nondescript effort suggests that Cohen should open his studio doors and welcome collaborators.

Thrilling prospect though it may be, the result is a disaster.

The album has a consistent lack of meaning and genuine feeling.

In the Dark is a big, loud, dumb record, filled with songs about not respecting women you bang on the bus ("Someone's Daughter"), feeling empty inside ("So Lonely" and "I Don't Even Care About The One I Love") and being for real ("I Am For Real").

It essentially exposes Doherty’s biggest weaknesses: his trite lyrics, his less than perfect voice, and his inability to sound interested in anything he’s doing not under the title "Libertines."

In the end, Calling the World left me bored as hell.

Sounds like a band mashing all the current trends and ending up with nothing.

None of the band’s stylistic flourishes are pulled off well enough to convince you they could do one style effectively, nonetheless the 10 they try out here.

A predictable, oversimplified, boring mess.

The lyrics are especially vapid here in the Stadium Arcadium.

Ahead of the Lions is pure press-a-button-out-comes-album radio pap.

Even with slick production the instrumentation is lackluster, missing that rattling punk energy; in their overt politics and complete lack of subtlety, the lyrics are trite.