These Los Angelenos deliver a brash follow-up to 2006's platinum-selling "15." Spewing filthy oaths and sweet promises, sometimes in the same line, frontman Josh Todd does his best to give misogyny a good name.

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.

Overall, The Bridge has a very Reagan-era vibe, and not just due to appearances by KRS-One and Big Daddy Kane.

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

The result is a bigger, slicker record laced with potent "American Idiot"-style Bush-bashing, a handful of emo-heavy relationship ballads, and very few surprises. [Sep 2007, p.138]

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]

The sound is now clearer than on either predecessor; the rapping likewise. And here come Jane's Addiction and the Smashing Pumpkins--this is a slicker, grander record than Significant Other. [Jan 2001, p.112]

A familiar blend of big-riff rockers and pseudo-sensitive power ballads, Dark Horse won't win the Canadian band any new fans--or will its hearty endorsements of oral sex disappoint the devoted.

Stupidity this willful has its limits. [Nov 2006, p.98]

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.

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

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.

What elevates this bove a cheeky tribute is the unselfish sweetness that Schwartz mixes with his smarts. [Feb 2008, p.94]

Dreary production from hometown benefactor Eminem does little to liven things up. [Aug 2006, p.82]

They've de-funned rebellion and turned it into a task. [Oct 2004, p.109]

The King & I wastes too much energy centering a known relationship on these formless descriptions, a flaw that turns a 72-minute project into a poshly produced endurance contest.

The Peas give fun a bad name. [Jul 2005, p.104]

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

The Miami-born, Paris-based socialite subsequently wastes most of her somewhat-dated debut album boasting about MySpace friends and fiddling with torturous, Ed Banger-produced synth pop.

No. [Jan 2003, p.99]

Eye Legacy renames and remixes several Supernova tracks and finishes off some previously unreleased jams with diminished results.

On the band's seventh studio album, Incubus fully embrace surf-bum balladry.

Fox gets tripped up by uninspired rap-reggae mashups, electro-pop beats better suited for Nelly Furtado, and rhymes that dwell on designer labels and raunchy sex. [Mar 2008, p.98]

Peas leader will.i.am mixes up house and disco beats, Chic and Slick Rick samples, wonky Moog hooks, crunchy guitars, and '70s funk bass into one of the year's wildest sonic stews.

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.

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

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]