What disappoints most about Full Speed though is how despite the slick sheen, its lasting impression is characterized by a lack of ambition or awareness.

He's trying to remind you that he's still tough, though these lines mostly just conjure images of Travis Bickle in the mirror: a guy alone and clueless, snarling at imagined enemies that can't talk back.

The problem bedeviling the first new Chic album since 1992’s Chic-ism is one of definition: What does Chic mean in 2018? To Rodgers and his collaborators, it means a Daft Punk album whose processed vocals and acoustic elements collide to abrasive effect; it means a tighter Maroon 5 album. Yet Adam & the Levines are nowhere in sight, nor indeed any major star with the exception of Craig David, Elton John, and Lady Gaga, the latter intoning the lyrics of an unwise remake of 1979’s “I Want Your Love” as if she were Minnie Mouse imitating Grace Jones.

Never transcends the level of a cheeky bumper sticker. [Aug 2006, p.82]

Spheres does just what they need it to do: land two or three easily digestible mega-jams to punch up the next concert setlist. ... The rest is, well, the rest. Four of the 12 tracks are interludes or faceless dance instrumentals. ... There’s just very little anchoring these songs. No sense of purpose, cohesion or emotional reckoning.

The best you could say for Lil Xan is that he can be serviceable: “Saved by the Bell” and “Shine Hard” are catchy enough, and at least fully-formed ideas. The album may be bad but it is not especially so. It’s paint by numbers and as such blends in with everything else. You might hear it at an Urban Outfitters and confuse it for three other recent rap albums you’ve heard.

He's just retracing past missteps. [Dec 2006, p.100]

No World For Tomorrow should ensure that 21-year-old dudes in women's jeans will gooble up reissues of "2112" for years to come. [Nov 2007, p.116]

The Offspring's nervousness is palpable in their protestations of relevance and liveliness, but no matter how fast or loud things get, there's no energy or wit, nothing to convince you this band could win, or even prolong, a fight with oblivion.

They burden their appealing, childlike take on Brechtian cabaret's cold raunch with so much lush production... that it's as though Palmer is being drowned by a gallon jug of overpriced perfume. [Jun 2006, p.79]

Despite some bold, funkdafied grunting, it never really gets up off the downstroke... the bar-band bluster only blunts her individualism, making for music that's less Take Back the Night than the Night Belongs to Michelob. [Oct 2000, p.184]

Does its best to earn a few Daft Punk comparisons. [Aug 2006, p.82]

Wordy but somnambulant. [Sep 2006, p.112]

These trebly, trenchant Brits have truly gone pear-shaped.

As a lyricist, Fallon has moved beyond bald cliché to bland commonplace.

The second record falters with a clunky combo of Celtic rock and leaden hip-hop rhythms that squashes the fragile, hook-free tunes. [Jul 2007, p.100]

A better-than-decent, ultimately pointless live set. [Jun 2006, p.82]

Too often [Woomble] is an impotent voice struggling to cut through the clutter. [Apr 2007, p.88]

Under the Boards, finds [Conley] in a surprisingly dark and newwavish mode, bobbing through spare, angular arrangements that overemphasize the off-key bleat that's his albatross as much as the band's signature.

Sadly, nothing else on the Whip's debut matches that electrifying outburst, as the Manchester, England quartet downshift into a less savage, more sensitive sound often verging on generic synth pop.

If only she was as shameless lyrically as she is musically, she wouldn't be feminist (who cares) but she'd simply be worth letting in your ear.

The result is alternately audacious and befuddling.

His lonesome drawl may sound arresting when it's 3 a.m. and you're stumbling home from the bar, but maudlin tunes like 'You Don't Feel Like Home to Me' and 'Some Tragedy' need more than quietly strummed minor chords to sell their hard-luck laments. [Oct 2007, p.104]

More Than Just a Dream steps backwards--where its predecessor was shockingly felt, this settles for something more distant, theatrical, grandiose.

They [Adam Young's fans] deserve better. We deserve better. Come to think of it, Adam Young deserves better.

[He] has a goofy sense of humor and an excellent feel for the dance floor but virtually no knack for song form. [Sep 2006, p.114]

It all rings hollow due to how thinly sketched out the writing and production is. Much of it is awkward, directionless, and, at times, just confusing--showing an artist grasping at a million ideas and hoping to grab one, with none of it being done in any interesting or shrewd way.

With her bandmates providing roughed-up backing that's neither appropriate nor compelling, Persson comes off like a stylish girl with unnecessarily ratty hair. [Nov 2006, p.97]

The New Classic establishes the Australian artist as a competent rapper with a decent ear for hooks, but that's about it.

Pierce's flimsy voice and material buckle under the weight of the Technicolor bombast on Let It Come Down. [Oct 2001, p.127]

Meat's voice is there, the cover art rules, but something vital is missing. [Nov 2006, p.102]

You don't really hear that stylistic growth, though, on this slab of down-tuned chug-and-glug, which finds the band returning to the grim recriminations of early tunes like "Mudshovel" and "Suffocate."

His fifth solo album, which is rife with clichéd storytelling, shows signs that another makeover might be in order.

Doesn't build much on the Buffett ease and placeless island rhythms of Johnson's previous albums, but hey, ambition is for the ambitious. [Apr 2005, p.102]

The sourness of their newfound perspective might be one thing if the music sounded any good, but doesn’t. Arcade Fire have re-committed to running away from their once sky-scraping stadium sound, further experimenting with the island sounds and disco grooves that bloated 2013’s Reflektor.

No. [Jan 2003, p.99]

Whether the album’s title is a plea or a warning does not matter, as the effect is the same: The Chainsmokers have one song, and if you don’t want to hear 12 versions of it, please do not un-click the latch holding this box closed.

Playing to splintered attention spans, This Is War insistently splices bits of other artists' work into a facile crescendo of mega-angst and ephemeral drama.

Britney Jean may chart respectably because it leads the most musically uneventful December in years, but it will soon fade like "Perfume," because there's zilch in the way of humanity here.

Amid spoken-word interludes and I'd-like- to-buy-the-world-a-Coke-style choirs, only Lee's innate melodic gift saves him from total embarrassment.

The emo-punk angst is cut with little of the band's trademark wit or ingenuity: Most of the songs plod bloodlessly to an inevitable, pointless climax of noise, sour humor, and teen nihilism.

The rest of the album plods with formulaic, hormone-heavy Kelly Clarkson outtakes, or perhaps Liz Phair during her bleak, sparkly descent.

If singer Justin Warfield had a sense of humor about himself, that wouldn't be such a bummer; as is, Forever seems to go on for about that long. [Nov 2007, p.124]

The result has to feel like a studio adventure! Whereas Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories was lavishly rich, Smith’s treatment of his session players manages to flatten all human serendipity and rhythmic nuance.

Witness is an album full of bizarre choices--both the DJ Mustard and Hot Chip-produced tracks are, for some reason, ballads--that has the inherent appeal of a spectacular failure, but that’s about it.

For such a propulsive controversy-magnet, her new album is awfully toothless and indistinct.

Here's the Crystal Method with a not-so-fresh batch of rave-rock jock jams seemingly designed to advertise a car you can no longer afford.

Its smug, unexplored sense of intellectual superiority is pretty much all it has to offer. Musically, it’s an hourlong misallocation of the considerable resources that made a nu-metal minor classic out of 2000’s Mer de Noms.

The Moon and Antarctica does show Modest Mouse willing to change. Too bad it wasn't for the better.... Mistaking subject for style, Modest Mouse has chosen to accentuate on a tendency to drift rather than an ability to write emotionally effective songs.

We get big-budget bloat, lifeless lines, and none of the warmth or reality that would cause any label to take interest in the first place.

The most standout feature of Nine Track Mind might be its rhythmic consistency, an exercise in deceleration.... inoffensive dross.

Sir Paul McCartney has made an utterly forgettable, featherweight record designed primarily to appeal to Sir Paul McCartney.

Some songs feel unfinished, especially on disc one. Much of the production on both halves is terribly derivative and some great samples get mangled.

Bring on the Comets is ultimately a bland regression. [Sep 2007, p.138]99

Kreay indulges the full breadth of her influences, turning Somethin into a series of wan genre studies.

Buying the latests CD from a novelty act is like sitting on the same whoopee cushion twice. [Oct 2000, p.180]

One jaded plod after another. [June 2001, p.155]

There is nothing new to be learned from this album burdened by crudely formed raps about his already exhaustively covered life and deeply muddled politics. ... Still, the music at times almost makes it worth it.

Clinging to the guest stars is crucial to getting through this thing--pros like Courtney Noelle provide basic hooks where the headliner's own horrible mantras ("I got so much," "Fall asleep") fail completely.

Maybe the Ting Tings have pulled some sort of Lou Reed maneuver here. Maybe this is their Lulu.

Hotel California is inexcusable. It may be the least creative major-label rap album in recent memory.

A tepid effort that bogs down their previously rugged and introspective rock with power-ballad vibrato, lurid over-orchestration, and petulantly vague lyrics. [Feb 2007, p.83]

Greenspan turns the pathos of 2004's Last Exit into nearly intolerable bathos, with the beats now noticeably dragging. [Oct 2006, p.98]

Turgid even for the genre, Artwork will make you hate yourself for singing along with tricky standouts like 'Empty With You.'

The failures of his latest effort don’t simply center on that side step from audacity to reckoning. It’s in how that move has somehow left him struggling to write a listenable song.

His tunes and/or jokes plop out like forced turds. [Mar 2005, p.92]

[The Datsuns] now sound unfit to carry the Donnas' jockstraps. [Oct 2004, p.120]

These hammerheads still sound like the touring company of Grunge-a-Mania. [Jan 2004, p.100]

Spastically twee, painfully saccharine. [Jun 2005, p.108]

He tries hepcat jazz-piano bop and balladry with pitiful results. [May 2006, p.91]

People from New York trying to sound like people from England trying to imagine what Neil Young would sound like if he were in Coldplay. [Oct 2005, p.137]

While Transplants' self-titled debut caught the trio at that moment when the third-beer buzz kicks in... the new record seems to have picked up several pints and bong hits later, when shit starts to get grisly. [Aug 2005, p.96]

Listening to this disc sorta gives new meaning to the phrase virgin sacrifice. [Oct 2005, p.142]

Everything presents a harder-edged JT, who tries a little of everything over 77 minutes but adds remarkably little to the pop landscape.

But it's not Eve 6's purely commercial aspirations that makes them so horrid...

Maybe the entire album is a meme itself, a grand existential joke critiquing the all-conquering rise of Internet culture by parodying its overwhelming randomness. Whatever it is, though, it's a bad rap record.

Over brutish synths and hammy bleats, the puerile brosefs' third album shares, among other witticisms: Gonna have a house party in my house.

By the time one gets to the final track, a head-scratching take on Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," the overall effect is a decidedly uncomfortable numbness.

You've heard these overheated tales of wild girls and outlaw boys many times before. [Mar 2007, p.97]

The music, such as it is, is a river of fat-free, dirt-free, melody-free jazz Olestra. [Feb 2002, p.112]

It's "disappointing" only because it isn't dreadful in funnier, more interesting ways.

X's overlong albums have always been exhausting, and this time he sounds bored and fatigued. [Sep 2006, p.100]

Sounds like the Band in a coma. [Jul 2006, p.82]

Soul-free, thirdhand melodies housed in songs that any halfway decent bar band would reject without a second pass. [Feb 2007, p.85]

Apparently, this American movie is the story of the predatory woman who comes to your house, whaps the crap out of you, and makes you play the same song over and over again. [2/2001, p.107]

There is Michael Jackson bad, there is Ed Wood bad, and then there is BAYTL, a union so unholy that it cries out for a show on Bravo.

They make each shimmer of postnatal whimsy seem like an eternal gulag of the spotless mind. [Sep 2005, p.109]