We are offered 20 more, a handful of these tracks bordering on genius, a few offering genuine yuks, and the rest sounding so half-baked they could be an ice-cream flavor.

The music, particularly Lenny Kaye's guitars, can be both gritty and lush, but it mainly functions to uplift the words and hold them closer to the ears. The problem here is that Patti's got our attention but her couplets are too often second-rate.

There's a pervasive lack of hooks, not to mention an eerie sense of anonymity.

The earnest but tepid Clear Heart Full Eyes, which as a solo album makes an excellent argument for sticking with your apostles.

The production is as overwrought as the antiwar themes. [Apr 2007, p.88]

A primary-color blast of major-key melodies, airy boy-girl vocals, ringing guitars, skipping rhythms, brass, woodwinds, and rolling piano, the rather exhaustingly charming third album from this Canadian collective radiates with the earnest warmth of a child's finger painting.

Her songs are feeling like Jason Mraz's leftovers. [Jul 2004, p.110]

Opener 'Ashes in the Snow' and 'The Battle to Heaven' invoke the CinemaScope bombast of Ennio Morricone, but even their added orchestral heft barely nudges Mono out of a windy, instrumental morass.

Remarkably, Bates captures outsized bombast while infusing the music with a genuine energy that verges on punk. Manson’s music hasn’t sounded this alive in years, which makes it so disappointing that he squanders a golden opportunity. ... Manson sounds increasingly out of touch and desperate to preserve a persona that he and his audience should have outgrown a long time ago.

The Gathering should be a hoot, at the very least, but this Baltimore clan's fourth release is more of a slog, shackled by monochromatic guitar churn and a slack pulse.

It’s disappointing, then, that this impulse of creative energy has resulted in a record that feels flat and strained.

This is the kind of bedroom folk pop E's done prettier--and weirder--before. [Jul 2003, p.111]

Haze's attempt to appear undefinable and resist categorization (as Dirty Gold's conversational interludes attest) is a laudable pursuit, but it leaves the record unfocused.

The human element is a diva parade that skates by like Lilith Fair on (dry) ice: opera-lite from Jan Johnston, squishy spiritualism from Dead Can Dance, the dread Sarah McLachlan belting the coda of DJ Tiesto's remix of Delerium's "The Silence." [Jan 2001, p.118]

Music this insistently okay should suffice as sonic Paxil, but there are less complicated ways to treat your depression. [Apr 2008, p.102]

Singer-guitarist Courtney Taylor-Taylor has an undeniable way with a sticky-sweet hook -- too bad most of them are buried in self-indulgent sludge.

It’s no surprise that the romantic tunes are shunted to the second half of the record. As they go, they go well.

The Adventures of Bobby Ray is a hip-hop Scary Movie, tossing off references (Vampire Weekend sample, Rivers Cuomo cameo) while struggling to establish a distinctive identity.

Legendary Weapons attempts a reinvigoration by employing session band 
the Revelations to muster up grooves that recall the sort of '60s soul songs that RZA once loved to sample. It's a quaint idea, but the execution is too slick to mesh with the raps, and fails to evoke the Wu's murky pall.

Snoop's 11th album unevenly celebrates his all-over-the-map persona.

War Stories feels more like a random compilation than a fresh exploration. [Aug 2007, p. 110]

To call some of these 26(!) word-and-riff bombs unfinished would be charitable; a few even seem unwanted.

Featuring 11 miniscule variations on Fireflies, the giddy worldwide smash that put home-studio boffin Adam Young on the map, this unrelentingly wide-eyed follow-up offers more genteel Christian rock reconfigured as techno lite.

Braxton’s tunes here rarely warrant her gusto, and the coupling of virtuoso performances with rather mediocre material squares with Sex & Cigarettes’s larger theme of the dissatisfaction that results from pouring one’s heart into an undeserving relationship. It’s a depressing album, but not quite in the way that’s intended.

It's when Jet explore the territory between their lodestars [AC/DC and the Beatles] that they go from being decent mimics to inconsequential imitators. [Nov 2006, p.96]

A joyless slog through mossy folk tedium. [Aug 2004, p.108]

Most of the energy of New English is poured into his (trademark?) ad-libs. The staccato yeahs and machine-gun sound effects do a good job of convincing you that you’re listening to an exciting project. But after a while, it just starts to make your head hurt.

Favoring excessive computer and crowd noise over the pair's concise hooks, the relentlessly bombastic concert CD accompanying the DVD combusts as if it were one 66-minute, fireworks-spewing finale.

Guest shots from rock stars like Tom Morello and Scott Weiland can't make up for a sorry lack of head-banging hooks... [Sep 2001, p.163]

Unfortunately, these hook-starved arrangements tend toward a static brand of ambient cabaret, which makes Amos' lyrics easy to tune out. Too many little earthquakes, not enough seismic jolts.

Despite a slew of tasty melodies... [it] feels a bit choked and cautious. [Oct 2006, p.102]

Though Kweli can't change his voice he was born with, he needs to figure out how to make it as compelling as his material. [Sep 2007, p.133]

The pop-rock of the album’s first half is relaxed, breezy, intimate, and dull; the twitching beatscapes of its back end are tense, fiery, theatrical, and void.

His return to more intimate recording can't conceal that there's nary a melody worth savoring amid the autumnal folkiness.

Mercifully, there’s no banjo--the Sons of Johannesburg are the less folksy, more decidedly middle-of-the-road band that recorded last year’s tedious Wilder Mind. That doesn’t save them from falling into 100 percent of all their other tropes, like substituting frenzied, overlong crescendos with truly grandiose stadium rock.

Gough's dewy little tunes are mere scribblings in the margins of alt-folk's dog-eared hook-book, while his too-cool-to-care singing is drip-dry dreary. [12/2000, p.232]

Racing through 11 disjointed songs in 30 minutes flat, Ra Ra Riot never give their material a chance to breathe. Instead, we're left with somewhat impressive ideas, squandered with impressive vigor.

The duo are too consistently subdued, and without their usual spectacle, Seventh Tree veers perilously close to dull. [Mar 2008, p.102]

Three albums in, the Stills still sound ambitiously confused.

With Jonathan Meiburg's luxuriant, lachrymose croon topping the slow-cresting violins of this tasteful rock ensemble, The Golden Archipelago will surely satisfy listeners in need of a melodramatic nap.

A collection of workmanlike whimsy... [12/2000, p.225]

Not Without a Fight bobs and weaves between chugga-chugga riffs and poppy lead licks, with Jordan Pudnik's well-meaning whine bouncing off Chad Gilbert's more assertive (and appealing) bark.

They're still not so great at turning their majesitc heft and pushy paradiddles into memorable songs with hooks. [Oct 2006, p.100]

It's easy to miss the bright counterweight that has kept his old-soul melancholy afloat in the past. [Sep 2006, p.100]

Minimized guitar bluster emphasizes his ample vocal assets, but Flowers wilts when the sunny tempos subside, revealing himself to be an AOR softie.

It's all quite mesmerizing, until you notice the overworked lyrics, which weakly describe heartbreak in terms of weather, stars, and, uh, hearts. [July 2008, p.100]

This isn't Watch the Throne, full of rich and weighty contributions from a man who is still enormously talented. It's rap music as a transaction, with a host of stars and hip names wrangled together to convince you it's not.

Their debut begins with a rousing arena-rock anthem called 'Death' and then delivers detached variations on the same subject for the next nine tracks with a professionalism that's simultaneously compelling and creepy.

For the first half of the album, this tested formula works as well as ever.... Moone runs out of flavor, however, when the Apples trade colorful and ebullient for derivative and listless.

Beaty and bouncy but less meaty, Palo Santo is for now an unsatisfying follow-up to a terrific debut.

Gossip lack the kind of anthems that demand a live document. [May 2008, p.100]

Overall the young rapper's glorious flare of an introduction has not been brightening. His latest, Summer Knights continues this trend.

Unburdened by Kanye's melancholia or Eminem's vertiginousness, Roth is perfectly likable, and perfectly bland.

These tracks lack the energy to power a glow stick. [Mar 2004, p.96]

The writing still can be vividly evocative, but the uninspired, folky arrangements make her words too easy to ignore.

Despite numerous cameos from his mates, Drew still sounds orphaned and adrift. [Oct 2007, p.96]

With a hot guest list (Ciara, T.I.), this is bound to bump the clubs, but beyond that, it's clown time.

Expectations is an insistent but uneven album that points toward greater musical ambitions than it achieves. The sound is pleasantly aquatic and soft-edged but fussy and overwrought, as though its architects were worried that too much downtime might spur listeners to click away.

Sloan returns with this more digestible 13-song opus, but their essential blandness remains unchanged. [July 2008, p.104]

It leaves us with a streamlined New Romantic sound, but one that at times feels like emotional Teflon.

When consumed passively, as ambient music, his conceptual flaws recede into the fuzz of his production, a raw mush of sound that provides an appropriate and occasionally great backdrop for refreshing your Tumblr dashboard, at least until it delivers a more engaging artist to look at.

Acid Tongue is glossed up at the expense of Lewis' charming flaws.

The fact that the album's best moments are in the details--a fiery lick, a wailing vocal ad-lib--speaks to the singer-guitarist's recurring problems: secondhand song structures and little to say beyond self-helpy reiterations of lyrical beatitudes.

The problem is that the rantier Bemis gets about poseurs, the more he forgets to write hooks for his invectives, which strive for Real Boy's Broadway-punk propulsive grace, but strain under the weight of unsingable lines.

My Bloody Underground emphasizes the band's trippy side, often at the expense of Newcombe's undervalued tunecraft. [May 2008, p.96]

Their songs excavate new depths of frivolity. [Aug 2003, p.119]

Libertad does improve slightly on the mostly hookless choogling of the band's 2004 debut, "Contraband," with songs that are punchier and a bit more memorable.

Hey, if the Spank Rock and M.I.A. collaborator wants to two-step around in just a tank top, rude bits to the wind, that’s her prerogative--but there are consequences, and that’s where I Love You struggles.

More corny than convincing. [May 2006, p.91]

Her attempt at convincing us she's a loving wife and mother of two, a savvy feminist, and a satirical mastermind mostly comes off as disingenuous.

Points added for the tiered release options, including a tour laminate for the most devout, and sticking with the drill-press guitar thing. Points deducted for inventing nu metal--still more for songs that won't let an audience forget it.

An over-the-top homage to sex whose emotional age equals its bloated number of tracks: 15. [Mar 2004, p.93]

Across two epic, messy tracks, the pair go around the world: classic ambient house, dated trip-hop, thundering drum loops, weird dub, even down-home picking, yet stay nowhere long enough for anything to really take hold.

America presents the most contemporary, Top 40-friendly version of Thirty Seconds to Mars to date. Bombastic drums and guitars have largely been replaced with fairly tame looped and programmed beats and ominous synths, basically reimagining Thirty Seconds to Mars as the glossy grungetronica of Imagine Dragons. Leto still screams like a banshee, but for once the sounds backing him don’t match his fury.

In most of these dozen tracks (not including a ponderous intro regarding the necessity of risk and a slow-jam sequel to Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind") Keys seems uninterested in breaking new ground, snooze-controlling her way through a series of familiar piano-soul platitude.

On Excuse My French, he's outshone and undervalued.

Carter Tanton -- of the now-defunct Tulsa and still-thriving Lower Dens -- style-jumps so restlessly that his second solo disc sometimes feels like a multi-artist playlist rather than a one-man show.

Devotees will probably find it terribly amusing. Everyone else might want to hit the bong pretty hard beforehand. [Dec 2006, p.102]

There are light nods to the times—single “Love So Soft” lightly updates Thankful’s Christina Aguilera-penned “Miss Independent” and Breakaway’s “Walk Away” with a half-time chorus, and tracks like “Didn’t I” and “Heat” recalls Adele’s collaborations with Max Martin. But the rest is stubbornly old-fashioned: sloughing off the flakiness of the millennial male while extolling the virtues of taking it slow and pushing for commitment.

Flashes of fun appear--dig the glam-Sabbath stomp of 'Inconvenience'--but most of Dark could use more color.

The problem is that Bada$$ seems to have missed their lessons on levity. His style--often-poetic lyrics rapped in a blunted monotone over moody production--is skilled, but never very fun.

Blunt and crass, 2013’s Black Panties is all about selling nostalgia for a bygone age of hard-body sexist black machismo that Barack Obama is, in his own quiet way, helping to deflate.

Rise Up doesn't always meet the occasion, but it's Cypress' most consistently listenable album in 15 years.

There Are Rules doesn't contain a single tune that lingers afterward.

Where the album fails to eclipse its predecessor, and where it fails to match the band’s new Brooklyn buddies, is in Marcus Mumford’s vanilla songwriting.

Styles plays all his roles gamely but unthreateningly.

A couple of songs succeed on their own terms, like "Finally Begin"--destined for a rom-com trailer--but most float unmemorably down the highway of not-quite-modern rock.

It's an overly gauzy, booming-echo epic that doesn't leave much trace after it's over.

Much of the rest recalls '90s rave and jungle at its most shamelessly glossy.

There are glimmers of melodic gems--but that’s all they prove to be, sagging beneath the weight of these overstuffed songs.

Clef sounds more invested in his music when he's appropriating other people's songs. [Jul 2002, p.109]

Too bad that the production here is decidedly mortal.

Sez So doesn't particularly benefit from the brighter light. It's all fun and harmless garage blooze--the bottom-heavy slow-burn 'My World' is a standout--but it's ultimately as trifling as their '73 debut was essential.

She represents a highly commercial compromise between Amy Winehouse's genuine soul danger and James Blunt's sclocky pop safety. [July 2008, p.92]

Tom Araya's shriek has grown ponderous, and not until rosary-ripping closer 'Not of This God' do the four mid-fortysomethings bypass their rigid polkacore hopscotch for a devastating groove.

It's slight and, even at its liveliest, inconsequential. [Jul 2007, p.92]

This polite Americana mistakes solemnity for seriousness.

His interpretations seem both timid and presumptuous. [Oct 2004, p.120]