She seems to be lost among her new surroundings, pulling in old styles and dated arrangements to seemingly express her dissatisfaction and confusion with where music is going.

The songs on Illusion are detailed on the whole, but remain lightly so in other aspects.

Ferrari Boyz often sounds like a Waka Flocka solo disc that features Gucci Mane on every single song. Between the duo, Waka's lines tend to be the ones that stick with you the most.

This is alt-country (or folk or whatever) at its finest, music that elides from well-worn and comfortable generic trope to bursts of originality, music that revels in the holy trifecta of lyricism, instrumentation and production.

In the future, the guys in Jurassic 5 need to do a better job picking their friends and their song subjects.

When the World Was Our Friend is for third-tier tone-deaf hipsters.

Bones' role as the accuser, sputtering anger at everyone around him, is wonderfully assumed here, and makes A Fool for Everyone an enjoyable glimpse at the life of an unloved rogue.

Replicants is solid, displaying the conflicted inner workings of a sonically agitated man, even if its restlessness makes the album feel too frenetic at times.

It's more like easy listening with a funk flare, and, like all easy-listening, there are times when it falls decidedly flat.

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

The members of Massive Attack are using the EP to continue to explore their old sound with new voices, in much the same way that the idea of splitting the atom is concurrently old and futuristic.

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.

Sonically, the lean disc is more in line with Weezer’s recent work and the overall mood is playful--with plenty of lyrical references to a radder era.

Much of Awake Is the New Sleep feels labored, lyrically and musically.

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.

Mostly, this record is yet another reason to wish that people with real talent would stop throwing it away.

The simpleness just keeps on coming until it's simply deadening.

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.

His lyrics certainly won’t help, but if he wasn’t a Stroke, this album could only be sold out of Fraiture’s trunk at open-mic nights in upstate New York.

Sounds like a band mashing all the current trends and ending up with nothing.

Ladies is a strong debut and, overall, it presents a pretty unique environment to get lost in.

The guitar work is straight out of the Velvet Underground/Television songbook, and the production begs for comparisons to the Strokes or Interpol. That's not to say being compared to these folks is bad, it's just that those comparisons don't reveal how unimaginative The Black Magic Show really is.

It's speculative fiction in album form, gleefully out of step with most sounds of today, demanding attention, but more importantly, keeping it.

What Darkel does offer is more of a good thing: songs that sound like the follow-up to Moon Safari, if Air weren't so progressive.

Shock Value isn't a perfect album, but it does possess various charms.

Somebody’s Miracle is a collection of pleasantly catchy, if unremarkable, pop songs.

Though there are some uneven points, particularly when Thornton tries to project straight pathos or regret, The Boxmasters prove once again that they are much more than a celebrity vanity project.