Pacific Daydream is pretty much just fine--34 minutes of unambiguous, catchy music, competent enough to land on the good side of Weezer's discography without reaching for anything more.

Born to Die's highlights are both slightly more numerous and slightly more effective--but it's still a very strong, successful record, whether taken as an addition or a follow-up.

It seems that Blue Lambency Downward while sonically easier to comprehend has become Kayo Dot's most diversely opinioned album.

It is meant to be fun, catchy, sexy, and danceable, and while it isn't groundbreaking by any means, it succeeds in reaching all of its goals.

It’s sonically daring, and challenges itself to be both unique from the scene and true to its creator.

Devoid of any country heart, country soul, or country swing, if Bon Jovi had started out a country band and decided to play mainstream rock, this is what it would sound like.

There are a handful of potential hits on Distortland, still they needed some structuring or at least a more powerful instrumental to be compelling.

This album sucks and is probably the band’s best and worst work yet. Sleep Token have conclusively proven themselves to be wholly incompetent songwriters and everything here is almost offensively boring.

Their experimental ambition and artistic integrity is extremely promising, and with a little more focus, direction, and experience, they could be something special very soon.

Using neanderthalic rhymes that MC Hammer would be proud of, the lyrics are in your face and exclusively concern rock ‘n’ roll, girls, drinking and partying.

Regardless of its intention, whether vapid or passive-aggresively referrential, SHE IS COMING is really, really fun. It bounces from eye-roll-inducing to warmly dazzling without asking whether or not it should.

A bit more focus on expanding the sound, might have created a more encompassing atmosphere at least. So, if you want a handful of new Ministry tunes to head bang to, you can find them here. If not, maybe next time.

The songs just are just way inferior this time around. My December’s fourteen tracks (including the hidden "Chivas") sound like rough sketches fleshed out with Breakaway’s light rock arrangements.

AmeriKKKant falls on its face pretty fast.

Battle Studies, by comparison is relaxed and laid back, it’s feet in the air and stripped of extravagance with Mayer simply doing his thang with ease and pazazz.

Introducing Joss Stone has the sound of an artist who is beginning to go places, not of one coming from somewhere or standing still.

This disconnect between intent and delivery is explicit the entire album through. From the harried, unfinished-sounding "No Mistakes" which is built on a skeletal Slick Rick sample and almost nothing else, to the choppy breaks for chorus in "All Mine", to "Wouldn't Leave" which is basically a Francis and the Lights demo with a Kanye scratch vocal quickly added in.

It’s clearly leagues below what they’re capable of, but they’re at least moving forward with the styles of music that they want to create, uninhibited by expectations rooted in the past. This is essentially a synth-pop album, one that is at times exciting and unconventional and at other times tasteless and rudimentary.

For about nine songs, Experience is good.

The multi-genre approach of The Colossus is refreshing.

Enjoyment for this sort of album can be derived from two factors: being, your toleration for pandering, and your toleration for complainers. Given the circumstances, I’d advise you simply look past either point and enjoy the music superficially, but if you’re finally sick of The Weeknd’s melancholy, now might be the time to look elsewhere.

Silversun Pickups’ fifth full-length sees the band craft another very enjoyable alt-rock album, but it’s one that is full of holes. For every catchy melody, they seem to abandon their creative spirit. When they aspire for the stars artistically, they can’t seem to locate their tune sense.

The ambitious sound of The Bright Lights of America is a dreadful fifty-two minutes long; with an average song length over three minutes.

Skyscraper is filled with those types of Banks lyrics, the kind of trademark brain-vomit that produces words that sound cute together but lack any semblance of cohesion.

All of these tracks are listenable and easy to digest- some are just notably better than others.

As it is, it's a very fine record from a band who are seemingly growing in stature, confidence, and ability by the day.

It's a staggering return from his alleged creative crisis, a terrific addition to his discography, and a wonderful addition to an already fantastic 2010.

Shockingly good but reassuringly gimmick-free, The Devil You Know is not only the best Dio or Sabbath release in over a decade but a front-runner for heavy metal album of the year.

While I may appreciate this album despite some of its fundamental flaws, I'm still not exactly clamoring for another Chili Peppers record. As stated before, I'm With You doesn't suggest a future for the band: instead, it showcases one stuck in the mud, capable of churning its wheels but not moving forward.

This album is audible therapy, complete with several cuts of Eminem apologizing, taking responsibility for being a terrible rapper, and promising to get better.

The more muscular sound apparent second time around assists the much-discussed lasting value of the sextet, making this album as much of a grower as it is immediate.

What this all boils down to is another solid outing for the group.

It is simply a good collection of good songs, put together by talented folks to showcase their obvious talents.

It has always been those smooth, lush arrangements that have allowed Sarah to wear her heart on her sleeve without turning every song into an oppressively cheerless engagement, and that is still the case on Laws of Illusion.

It fails as dance, as rock, as pop, and as art-rock or art-pop. Really, should we be settling for an average, inoffensive midpoint between all these, given all the music that exists in the world?

We've been left with a blatant emulation of a tired sound by a band that seems so uninspired that they couldn't even be bothered to make enough effort to differentiate their own songs from one another.

For an album called Out of Control, it's astonishing just how bland and devoid of personality or expression this is.

Yes, it is undoubtedly inferior to its predecessor, but it instantly delivers an enjoyable crowd-pleasing package.

This is a mainstream metal band that probably puts just as much emphasis into their marketing as they do their music, but, like it or not, they’ve also released their best album so far and it’s actually pretty entertaining.

Re-Mit, while able to hold its own in some quarters, is not the best of The Fall by any stretch. However, some of the strange humour and twisted narratives, sorely lacking from their last release Ersatz G.B., are back.

There are more than a few signs that the band will find the middle ground between the music that prospers live and the music that shines on record; Heirs is a frustrating reminder that they’re not there yet.

Most of these songs are melancholy and soft, waiting for a darkened sky to play to.

Musically, many of the songs here are not as melodic as the ones on TSAF and rely a bit too much on those blueprints. Nevertheless, the lyrics matter most in my opinion, while the music is just as engaging and easily sucks you in its universe. Dig it!

Just as Mosaic flows in easily, it flows out the same way.

This album has the feel of a “for us” record, one that rewards the band for making it and decides that it’s okay to create something deeply personal and a little self-indulgent.

The end result is that The Unforgiving is easily Within Temptation's most ambitious record, an album that benefits from an increased energy level and strong songwriting in order to deliver a collection of the band's strongest songs to date.

Time To Die has its heart in the right place, but the product is not as nearly lovable.

To be fair to the songwriters behind this record, "Make You Cry" is actually the worst thing here - when the sound abandon the '90s and either tries to sound like the '80s ("Heaven" is pure Stock, Aitken, and Waterman), or to be a bit more modern, the quality remains solid. But therein lies the one major flaw of 3 Words - it's simply not consistent enough in terms of sound.

Nightmare is a completely different offering; even though it still has highly questionable moments, it's obvious that a genuine effort was put in, and that's enough reason to listen.

Each of the album's thirteen tracks passes by without any fuss or fight; every song blending into one long blob of grey matter that leaves such little impression in spite of repeated listens.

Although the album barely brings its head above the water-line marked "passable", it's still too slick, too unified and too perfectly structured to convince you that apart from the vocals of Stanley and Simmons, the rest of the album is nothing more than a hodge-podge of contributions from various pony-tailed musos from somewhere sunny.

Get Hurt may go down as The Gaslight Anthem's worst album to date, but that's not much of an assessment: a difficult Gaslight record is still a really good album, and it's commendable to experiment, evolve, or otherwise try something new.

Where the album ultimately succeeds is in its song-craft, with everything from its diversity and song structures clearly improving, without significantly forsaking the trio's effortlessly catchy and engaging melodies.

Ultimately Kids in the Street will go down as a solid album that is an ambitious and interesting grower... Nothing more, nothing less.

By pop standards you could do a lot worse, but ÷ is not an album that will test the ceiling of Sheeran’s tantalizing potential.

Overall, All Visible Objects acts as a love letter to the early ‘90s techno/trance/rave scene, albeit in a pop-instilled way. Moby pays his respects to the respective era, blending various sounds from his discography into what plays like a smoothly sequenced, nostalgia party mixtape.

Nothing is just what it brazenly titles itself as – an empty record, one lacking the sometimes questionable but more often than not intriguing experimentation and oddball weirdness that might not have made their earlier records great, but at least made them interesting.

As a whole, the album is a well-executed pop punk album and shows that Yellowcard are better than the average band.

IV Play succeeds in spades with its production and songwriting.

So while Stronger has its redeeming moments, they mostly come when Clarkson does what she is renowned for doing and has already done better. It is a little too heavy on the balladry and serious tones, which are the same things that doomed her other two slightly lesser received albums.

Born to Die is a brilliant album, but it's one that leaves room for a few improvements, and inspires confidence that they'll happen.

The [line-up] present on Ersatz G.B. were also present for 2008's Imperial Wax Solvent and 2010's Your Future, Our Clutter, records that showed enough touches of class, craft and ingenuity to reassure The Fall's notoriously hardcore following that the future was surprisingly rosy.

Gravebloom is a fun album. Honest. But it’s also a rehash, plain and simple. Nothing done across its eleven tracks hasn’t been done on previous Acacia Strain records.

While there's little substance to be found on 48:13, it can either turn you off from the beginning or get under your skin, making for a harmless listen where you occasionally bang your head to the catchy highlights.

Abnormally Attracted to Sin is, by quite some distance, her weakest album yet.

Just as the Arctic Monkeys do not belong in the American desert, Hard-Fi has little to no place at a London rave. It is such a waste really, since the catchy songwriting nous that still makes Killer Sounds bearable, is also why it is such a disappointment.

The record’s energy is impressive; the craft, even more so. What it doesn’t have, though, is any sense of vision, nothing of that dangerous excess or discovery that the best Cut Copy provides in spades. Instead, Haiku From Zero ends up being a bunch of great songs and little else.

Requiem for Hell is anything but acceptable. It's lazy, trite, mundane, dull, and every other superficial adjective that's been thrown at the genre.

While an interesting concept, neither CD contains enough strong material to match up to either of her previous releases, and at times, the constant barrage of R&B cliches and adult-contemporary production make it sound like Beyonce is rapidly transforming from hot, hip pop goddess to your standard bored diva.

If you despised Sigh No More, then you will find nothing here that even attempts to change your mind. If you found the band's debut to be charming and fun, then Babel is absolutely worth your time and money.

In the Lonely Hour is less meaningless and vapid than a song as unapologetically hammy as “Classic,” but the result is unfortunately the same.

The album is pure homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity nonsense that strives to be different and to take you “somewhere else” but in the end really just ends up being hilariously bad and hilariously derivative of his past work and despite the frequent “so-weird-it’s-almost-cool” moments it still just plain sucks hardcore.

For much of Paralytic Stalk's first half and even for most of the more unhinged second act, Kevin Barnes strikes a near-perfect balance between pop mastery and a delightful sort of weird.

It is undeniably a step down from her excellent 2009 release, with too little suiting such a distinctive artist.

Almost all these songs are dynamically stolid and melodically immemorable to the point of interchangeability; the drum parts are phenomenally disappointing coming from a musician as talented as Jimmy Chamberlain; Corgan’s voice still sounds like old tarmac with inconsistent numbers of cars passing over it; and every song follows an identical progression from midtempo verse to homogenous chorus.

Not Without a Fight lacks the kind of hooks, fun riffs, and sing-along choruses that made the band famous and it also lacks the solid song writing that helped their last album not become a horrible failure.

While any change from that tired normality is appreciated, it’s disappointing that so much of this is mediocre, that so much of this imitative, that so much of this is overblown, and etc.

With The World I Want To Leave Behind, Moneen have grown up and taken a turn towards a more mainstream sound. The concern has to be whether they have turned too far and become just another run-of-the-mill radio rock outfit.

While it is still caught a little in-between moods and is clearly front-loaded, ‘The Optimist’ feels more instinctive than ‘Fantastic Playroom’, and is ultimately a step up because of that.

As expected, Duck wants to please everybody and this is the reason it fails to take off. ... They prefer the safety of the comfort zone, although they fare much better when they show some grit.

[Forever] ends up being a stitched-together collection of hackneyed, banal platitudes laid over tongue-bitingly asinine hook after hook, all so mewling and flabby there’s little to grasp beyond feeble stabs at nostalgia.

There’s just so very little here to work with, and even as a listener who’s dying to find things to like about this album, every minute spent revisiting it feels like a minute wasted. I sure hope they have it in them to rebound from this disastrous release.

This time around, deprived of their usual energy or lyrical quotient, they are nothing more than a momentarily likable diversion.

Walk It Off combines songs that attempt an idiosyncratic progression, but fail to expand upon things like, say, songwriting, with songs that struggle to capture a bright ol’ Indie Rock flame that was once there.

This record is brooding and shadows, joy and smirks, a blood-red dusk on a quiet desert evening; all emotion and sparkling instrumentation, confident of where it wants to go and even surer on how to get there.

In the end this is a nice EP to play and a timely release considering the season and what they're releasing it right before.

This delusional “growing up is bad” aspect of Bangerz is part of what makes it good, because it means that Miley can pull off things that shouldn’t work.

For all its inadequacies, Dignity is a solid, cleverly-constructed pop album.

The biggest failure of these songs, and the most confusing thing about this album, are the melodies.

Yours Truly, Angry Mob is such a sloppily put-together album that it almost seems intentionally bad.

Stripped of all excess, These Systems Are Failing delivers like very few others do in Moby’s discography. It will no doubt divide a part of his fan base like Animal Rights did, however, it won’t be as shocking as in 1996.

The very elements that made No Doubt popular in the first place have disappeared.

When they are on, they are very good, as their relaxing – yet strangely dance-worthy – grooves seem almost effortless. Yet, way too often, the duo simply bite off more than they can chew, meaning that when they are off, a 2nd listen almost seems like a chore.