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]