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

Last Light contains fine songwriting and production and collaborations, but it offers little new.

The songs on this album all sound the same, and there are a lot of them.

Despite White Bread Black Beer's undeniable beauty, it feels largely out of place as a product of the contemporary spectrum of music.

On the whole, Anxiety lacks the addictive quality of its predecessor, and it's certainly less musically interesting.

Plays more like a gimmick than a remix album.

I'll keep conceding to Jenny Lewis's voice any day. It's amazing. It could bring the rafters of any church down. But the material it takes up on Rabbit Fur Coat is boring.

Miller has the voice to support the songs and the talent to write a whole sturdy catalog of them. But with the bravado and confidence he’s shown in the past, the problem is one of volume. With so much to say, much of Rhett Miller feels muted.

Her melodies sound tired and her deliveries sound rushed.

His offbeat interpretations of tough-guy hip-hop cliches often make for great listening, but on We Are Young Money, Weezy decides that he can’t be bothered to display such originality.

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

More carnival claustrophobia than world tour.

Irving's penned a batch of songs that can hold your interest in short bursts but will never inspire arguments. And that's damnation for pop music.

Although these songs of attempted triumph comprise the band’s strongest material yet, they still lack the originality that will shed them of the “underrated” label they’ve worn for the last decade.

It's hard to figure out what exactly the concept is behind this concept album.

Although the band hasn’t really strayed from its cutesy indie-pop formula, the qualities that made Death Cab stand out aren’t present this time around.

More often than not it just comes off as either needlessly melodramatic or watered down to a state of vanilla

OX 2010 lacks a clear vision and focus.

Tapes goes through the motions of dance music without ever delivering anything remotely danceable.

Aside from the occasional goofy detail (“I love sandwiches after sex”), their horndog bravado provides exceedingly little in the way of memorable lines, growing numbing and interchangeable over the course of 15 tracks.

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.