The album, sweet as it sounds, is so polite that to keep from offending listeners it stops short of saying anything to them.

The lyrics meander, often failing to offer so much as a hooky line or even a coherent narrative.

Unfortunately the album as a whole, modulo a few bright sections, fails to come to life.

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

Tamborello's textural sensibilities remain, but his ability to supercharge glitch into something intoxicating and luminous seems to have dipped out the back.

The Black Kids may only have one trick, but as long as they only pull it at a house party, it’s the only one they’ll need.

All too often Shadow Temple falls short and is flat out boring when it should be actively engaging. It took Rama 14 years to rise to the throne and bring peace and harmony. The band members need to do more than this if they want to if they want to outperform their namesake.

Taken as a whole Shy Pursuit feels like a flat amalgamation of post-millennial indie-pop tropes clean-cut from the quirks and charms of their creators.

These mid-tempo songs sap some of the group's natural energy from Dracula.

Despite these head-scratching derailments, 200 Tons of Bad Luck brings the gloom in Biblical doses.

Cotton Jones is comfortable, but that comfort can be tiresome.

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.

For every standout near the beginning of the album-most notably the catchy girl group-aping "All Kinds of Guns"-there's a sorta-tedious ballad near the end.

California Wives' music is soft and pleasant and fully formed and vague. Their lyrics are ciphers.

It’s certainly punk, but it does not rock. At less than a 30-minute running time, it’s revealing that much of Frauhaus! is quite tedious. The future may hold great things for Wetdog, but for now their appeal doesn’t reach much further than diehard genre adherents.

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

Instrumental mastery can provide for some fireworks (particularly on the opening triptych), but spending six minutes in service of sprawling songs with no substance (like most of the album’s middle third) doesn’t do anyone any favors.

The Spirit of Apollo is what happens when you pack 40 guest appearances onto a single album and expect their charisma alone to make something intriguing. It’s a huge gamble, and one The Spirit of Apollo lost.

Ultimately Songbird feels a bit rushed, and when you have as gifted a songwriter as Adams working with as gifted a songwriter as the Red-Headed Stranger, it's a bit of a letdown to ponder what they could have done.

On Off to Business, he accomplishes another step toward canonization, making a late-period album that removes any semblance of what made him great in the first place and is a largely uninspired trip down memory lane.

It ultimately lacks cohesiveness and direction to evolve into something truly outstanding, but still remains intriguing enough to possibly earn points with the more adventurous listeners.

The ideas it presents of consequence and scars, and the deep pathos with which they are conveyed, are often compelling, but the songs themselves work better here when they sand down the fangs a bit, a concession Stewart is rarely willing to make.

As with any Teddy Bears release, this is all meant to be a sort of pastiche; lots of genre jumping, lots of smooth transitions, lots of hooky goodness mixed with a plethora of guest stars and vocalists.

The playing on the album is strong throughout, and unfortunately the lyrics don’t quite pass muster. Though Hood acquits himself nicely, none of the songs rank near the top of his considerable artistic output.

Unmap is the definition of a vanity project, except there’s not much vanity in doing an electronic record that is inferior to the original music either group has made on their own.

Transcendent tracks like 'Your English is Good' and 'In a Cave' indicate that there’s still room to grow on subsequent Tokyo Police Club releases. But for now, the band seems to have lost its mojo.

At 15 tracks clocking in at 57 minutes, it shouldn’t feel as lengthy as it does. But certain cuts tend to drag, be it because of the inconsistent production, Moye’s sometimes phoned-in rapping, or both.

Jeff Bridges is all quiet and sepia-toned, dripping like molasses in dollops of hammy pedal steel, placid acoustic guitars, and Bridges' cracked vocal chords.