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.