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.