With their third album, Entertainment, they succeed best whenever they are warming up their familiar electro sound with pop elements rather than aping worldly sophistication.

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

Noah and the Whale try their best to make weighty songs (look no further than the paint-by-numbers description of a funeral on the limp “Death by Numbers”), but they’re better as a pop group that digs ukuleles and acoustic guitars.

Sixes & Sevens feels more like movie-hopping at an art-house multiplex, an exercise in genre formats and stolen identities.

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

While the album, at times, feels a bit monochromatic, it maintains its intrigue and never loses its vision.

The outright space exploration of Lindstrøm's previous musical outings is sometimes lost here. His dancefloor is fun, but its been grounded this year.

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.

By trying to define they’re own specific legacy, they’re actually ramming it down their listener's throats, and daring the music world to question them.

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

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

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

Decent Work for Decent Pay, a slipshod mélange of long-overdue remixes, is not what we're looking for. Unless you've been living in Kyrgyzstan without an Internet connection for the past few years, you likely wore out most of the tracks on Decent Work for Decent Pay long ago.

31Knots have produced a very good album--maybe even a great album--but one that simply does not reach the level it could have.

Despite a heavy reliance on acoustic guitar, the album never rests on one sound and feels fresh throughout. Unfortunately, the songs that shape all these solid sounds don't quite come together.

With experimentation comes error.

Sure there’s a lot of questionable ethical implications with The Black Ghosts mixed in with a good ones, but a goth band with a rock conscious is successful even if their success in breaking through the mold of navel-gazing is Pyrrhic.

The band's debut full-length, Morning Tide--released on Chop Shop Records--allows that sound to sprawl and unfurl.

Luda has officially entered his "transition stage" as an artist. I hope it will produce better records than this uneven offering.

Sam Champion’s sophomore album, Heavenly Bender, is a worthy rollick.

While Start And Complete happens to have been recorded in just one day, lo and behold, it turns out to be album of relatively straightforward songs, staying largely within the musical and lyrical conventions of the pop/rock universe.

In keeping with this trope, Talking favors spare, shuffling jazz arrangements: the perfect complement to a powerful, emotive voice and heartbreaking lyrics, neither of which make a strong showing on this album.

The thinness of the sound, the lack of any edge, and the fact that most of these songs start off terribly prove too much to overcome, but Razorlight is not nearly the disaster that it could've been.

Bianchi doesn’t seem to be traveling down any new paths.

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.

Clunky, overblown, and decidedly Ross.

While there are some great moments and promising songs, the album is hindered by its refusal to either commit to a sound or commit to trying new things. The tone of the album seems indecisive, and Ghost ends up marginalizing its own strengths.

While it's likely to be a huge album -- and far more interesting than any other releases of its size -- it's not the leap forward his last couple albums were.

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

A predictable, oversimplified, boring mess.

The problem with the album goes past its unmemorable music.

What results instead is a solid offering full of familiar noisy-pop that with a little branching out might help the trio do something special next time around.

Maybe it's my lowered expectations for major-label rap debuts, or the fact that I never had Wiz pegged for out-and-out greatness, but Rolling Papers sure feels like a qualified success. The album's high points earn Wiz forgiveness for his mistakes.

So Amazin' may not be the huge leap in artistic achievement she may have hoped for, but it is a step in the right direction.

This album is a detour from the straightforwardness of Per Second, which means that comparatively it also often feels disjointed and uncomfortable.

Ultimately the album is merely a reward for sitting through a season of reality-show high jinks.

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").

No Mercy is a valley, not a peak, in a career that has seen plenty of both.

Not to give the Belles short shrift (they play with skilled abandon), but the record sounds like White... straight-ahead crunching blues-based guitar hooks that sound as if they were ripped from Zeppelin II, staccato bursts of noise, oceans of feedback, driving back beats and howled vocals.

There is bad music here, to be sure, and although the intentions are good, they are expressed in the now-common nihilism of our generation, where nothing is sacred and everything is a joke.

The band does achieve some small strides forward here, and gives us a few great tracks, but mostly Cogleton and crew leave me wondering exactly what it is I should be afraid of.

It’s a noise-rock album you can play without annoying your friends, but it won’t aggravate the Tortoise worshipers in your group, either.

A blistering triumph of a record.

The songs are imitative and lackluster.

The production is ultra-clean and the lyrics are delivered with a precision that is not to be scoffed at. But mostly what lasts is the self-pity and anger, which is at least enough to warrant our attention.

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.

The Seventh Seal is perhaps the most stale, thoroughly unremarkable album of 2009, and confirms a sad fact: Some comebacks are better left unexecuted.

Like fellow hook king/smooth soul singer Nate Dogg, Brown takes most of his solo record and spreads some watered-down slick R&B all over the dance floor and fucks up everyone's game.

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

With such a young, singular talent, it’s a shame to hear him aping other styles when he clearly is full of a wealth of unexplored talent.

This is an album that’s extremely clean--the spic-and-span sonics might be the work of producer Michael Patterson. Even if it might help Great Northern achieve some broader success, all that cleansing has buffed away much of the band’s character.

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.

Fast Man Raider Man isn't your father's Frank Black; it's Frank Black for your father.

Although the album does lag a bit toward the end--not due to a lack of quality but to the inability to match the album's earlier dazzling heights--it's a very respectable addition to the Swedish canon.

There are great pop songs on Tape Club, and it does remind us there is life after the hype-dam bursts, but most of us are better off picking up Let It Sway to see what Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin are all about.

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

You Have No Idea What You Are Getting Yourself Into is not a record to take seriously, and I suppose on some level it succeeds in reveling in that, even if it wasn’t the intention of the band.

Johansson simply lacks the intensity to stay afloat in Waits's whirlpools of ear-drummed madness.

The Vision shows that thus far Joker works better pushing out erratic singles than within the format of a full-length.

Charmed and Strange, however, is a collection of interesting guitar playing with a few lyrics thrown in for pop legitimacy.

After nearly a half-decade of records, Johnson still hasn’t learned anything about time signatures or experimentation, but at least he knows what he does best and sticks to it.

Scab Dates does an adequate job of capturing what is best experienced in the flesh.

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.

Few mainstream artists can hope to produce an album as wonderfully weird as The Sweet Escape.

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

Norman Cook’s concern for the state of his trade, while veiled in ironic drag, is hard to ignore. It’s what makes The BPA tick, but also what keeps the BPA’s debut album more in the theory-not-practice side of respectability.

Fergie is talented enough to compete with the likes of Gwen Stefani and Christina Aguilera, but the material on The Dutchess won't take her to those heights.

How does this sucker sound? Not very good.

Hallelujah the Hills steps out on their own turf with a new record label and a refined sound, they've also gone ahead and made their best record.

The band strips away any hard kicks and allows each song to quietly pulse at a more human pace. Ironically, the album feels best suited for traveling.

She seems to be lost among her new surroundings, pulling in old styles and dated arrangements to seemingly express her dissatisfaction and confusion with where music is going.

The songs on Illusion are detailed on the whole, but remain lightly so in other aspects.

Ferrari Boyz often sounds like a Waka Flocka solo disc that features Gucci Mane on every single song. Between the duo, Waka's lines tend to be the ones that stick with you the most.

This is alt-country (or folk or whatever) at its finest, music that elides from well-worn and comfortable generic trope to bursts of originality, music that revels in the holy trifecta of lyricism, instrumentation and production.

In the future, the guys in Jurassic 5 need to do a better job picking their friends and their song subjects.

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

Bones' role as the accuser, sputtering anger at everyone around him, is wonderfully assumed here, and makes A Fool for Everyone an enjoyable glimpse at the life of an unloved rogue.

Replicants is solid, displaying the conflicted inner workings of a sonically agitated man, even if its restlessness makes the album feel too frenetic at times.

It's more like easy listening with a funk flare, and, like all easy-listening, there are times when it falls decidedly flat.

To extend the title’s metaphor, Golden Delicious has the taste, but none of the bite.

The members of Massive Attack are using the EP to continue to explore their old sound with new voices, in much the same way that the idea of splitting the atom is concurrently old and futuristic.

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.

Sonically, the lean disc is more in line with Weezer’s recent work and the overall mood is playful--with plenty of lyrical references to a radder era.

Much of Awake Is the New Sleep feels labored, lyrically and musically.

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.

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

The simpleness just keeps on coming until it's simply deadening.

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.

His lyrics certainly won’t help, but if he wasn’t a Stroke, this album could only be sold out of Fraiture’s trunk at open-mic nights in upstate New York.

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

Ladies is a strong debut and, overall, it presents a pretty unique environment to get lost in.

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.

It's speculative fiction in album form, gleefully out of step with most sounds of today, demanding attention, but more importantly, keeping it.

What Darkel does offer is more of a good thing: songs that sound like the follow-up to Moon Safari, if Air weren't so progressive.

Shock Value isn't a perfect album, but it does possess various charms.

Somebody’s Miracle is a collection of pleasantly catchy, if unremarkable, pop songs.

Though there are some uneven points, particularly when Thornton tries to project straight pathos or regret, The Boxmasters prove once again that they are much more than a celebrity vanity project.