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.