The album is just a bunch of incredibly inoffensive hard rock masquerading as metal, and while its not good by any stretch of the imagination, it isn't a travesty to music either.

With a hackneyed focus on forcibly juxtaposing several random styles into their main rock sound, the stupidly long track names, and the uninspired hard rock instrumental work we get on here, essentially the album comes across as a tasteless meme.

The production quality is a crowning grace throughout the album in the face of some very dodgy writing and bad musical choices.

This is just lazily done and disappointing considering it’s been marketed very well to appear mysterious.

At a mere thirty-six minutes, it’s not a stretch to see Britney Jean as a half-baked effort, more of a commitment to be completed and shipped off than the labor of love it was touted as.

For as poor as Man of the Woods was, at least it was ambitious…unlike whatever this amorphous clump of hackneyed trends is.

The record's ADD can be felt with every unbridged leap between ideas to its shocking lack of transitions, and the whole time there is this pervading sense that Heritage doesn't really have anything to say at all.

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

There you have it; young lads just starting out make poor-to-average debut record. Not an unusual occurrence, and no doubt a thousand other albums released that day were no better or worse than 180.

Dig Out Your Soul isn’t the worst record Oasis have produced, but even the heavily shat-upon (an unfairly so, in this writer’s opinion) Heathen Chemistry was comfortable within its own skin.

While it's not without its obvious highlights, All Hope is Gone feels too much like a demo with professional production values to make me recommend it as an album.

It’s big and postured and goes by without saying anything of significance. A lot of the blame for that goes to Brandon Flowers, since he is the voice of The Killers and all, but it seems like his band, drunk with success, doesn't have the slightest idea what to do next.

For metal devotees seeking heaviness and shred paired with otherworldly curio, Crack the Skye is the be all and end all, but for anybody without a Celtic Frost tattoo, do not follow "the wise man's staff / Encased in crystal."

What we’re left with is a somewhat novel approach that’s bolstered by improved songwriting, but ruined by a sheer lack of direction--or anything interesting to say.

Strictly speaking, it's a Gorillaz album in name only. You could commend Albarn on one hand, but then slap him with the other; the use of a 'rolling studio' and the latest in technology is inspired, but it ultimately represents the downfall of the album.

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

It's not that it's post-rock-by-numbers, although at times it really is, but more so that it doesn't even sound like there are painters behind the palette.

What we get is listless by the numbers "latin rock", dull, sleepy ballads, and overblown Diva numbers I wouldn't wish on Whitney Houston.

Of course, nothing on This is Forever is really new territory; the 80’s influenced synthesizers, the electronic drums, the monotone vocalist, it’s all been heard before. It’s all been done so much better.

Sure, Blitzen Trapper attempt to vary the formula a bit--there's the jangly campfire number, or that one about astronauts--but when it comes right down to it, everything's all the same.

Korn feel tired, bland and dated.

Ufabulum is perhaps not a terrible album in any respect, but at the same time it simply is an incredibly boring one.

X is a vapid and overly confident album that feels more like regression than progression for Ed Sheeran's indie folk sound.

For its faults, Gallipoli is nice. It’s pleasant. But it’s the type of nice that makes you wonder if there was any substance there at all.

Small Craft is an attempt to puncture that bubble, but doesn't quite do it; but, hopefully, if Eno's focus is still there, the next one should. I'm at least optimistic that it will.

This isn't a slight dip in quality, it's an avalanche.

The flow of Times of Grace's debut is so jagged and stop-start.

The artificial sense that permeates as a result of the album's forced nature may be its largest detractor, and it is one damning flaw whose shadow Human Again can't seem to escape.

Audio, Video, Disco has neither creativity nor moxie, except in the sense that Justice is damn determined to give homage to the worst excesses of macho rock posturing.

Fans of the band are either going to be blindly loyal, or extremely disappointed with this release. Meanwhile, those who felt that Editors were overly generic will either be interested in their new direction, or simply feel they are now generic in a different genre.

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.

They’ve crafted a record that feels more like imitation than originality.

Zach Hill is a talented drummer, with some great ideas, but certain elements of the album just tarnish all of the positives. This album is even unlistenable at moments.

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.

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?

Despite being Simple Plan's poppiest release yet, it is also their least catchy, indistinct and forgettable.

Ultimately, jj has the concept and the intrigue down; if only they could get their music to match.

J. Cole’s raps, but KOD sounds like someone who is either unfamiliar with drug abuse, or is completely unsympathetic to the dynamics of drug abuse in America.

Graduation is consistent, yes, but it's consistently boring.

In the end, Fucked Up aren't nearly as good as Refused were thought to be, but hey, Refused aren't even as good as they were supposed to be, so Fucked Up may yet be remembered as revolutionary.

As a lyricist he’s dull and unimaginative and as a singer he’s extremely limited: both facts detract considerably from the obvious passion he exhibits elsewhere for his music and his politics.

The band sounds like they're simply trying too hard to keep up with their more contemporaries, and it shows; the song writing is poorly executed, the syrupy hooks are, for the most part, dull and unimaginative, and the band fails to cover any ground it already hasn't before.

Despite its long gestation period and pristine production, it sounds as though no one believes in What Matters Most less than Folds himself, and this bleeds through every single vocal performance and instrumental arrangement on the record.

It does nothing to distinguish itself from other BR releases and some of the premier punk albums released in the past few years, but it also can immediately trump most of the stuff being put out these days on the virtue of BR's tight and likable style.

Ultra Beatdown features the same guitar riffing, theatric singing and the rest of that stuff that doesn’t matter in regards to Dragonforce.

Almost every song is terribly alike--each featuring the same hallmarks Nadja’s become known for, besides their most important aspect, being their relentless creativity--and this bland similarity becomes taxing.

To summarise, Man of the Woods is an astoundingly poor, inconsistent, and sloppily constructed outing from an artist whose defining feature has been his ability to cleanly reinvent his image.

I can forgive a couple of transgressions if Teenage Dream redeemed itself with songs that were more than trashy, one-dimensional pop, but, alas, the rest of the album is just as predictable as the VMAs and only marginally more entertaining.

Too often, the melodies are listless, the song structures are underdeveloped, and the album’s weaknesses are masked by waves of synths and ambience that add nothing to the experience other than time – and that, unfortunately, is time that we’ll never get back.

Unfortunately, he forgot he cannot sing or write coherent lyrics.

Del sways wildly between hit and miss. And Eleventh Hour, for all its boisterous and awkward handling, fails with a resounding thud.

Much like the average modern-day Playmate, Dirty Work is essentially a manufacturer's dummy: air-brushed; soulless; custom-built to exacting specifications; aesthetically-pleasing but ultimately empty and devoid of any real distinctive character. At the risk of butchering a metaphor, All Time Low are New Found Glory with grotesque, misaligned implants.

As it stands for now though, Red is a mixed bag, and it's up to you to sort through the majority-holding bad in order to find the good.

The massive dip in quality towards the end, including the progressive worsening through closing, bonus and hidden tracks, is disappointing, considering how well the album begins.

Like Radiohead and Panda Bear before Bon Iver this year, it's not a problem that Vernon hasn't created music in the same style of the last successful album: the problem is that he isn't able to make that creative jump to a new aesthetic, or direction, successfully at all.

Vaxis II: A Window of The Waking Mind takes everything questionable about Vaxis I’s overall charming forays into stadium rock, castrates it of any semblance of grit, urgency or personality, and subjugates its once formidable trove of catchiness to an almost impressively bland slew of commercialised hard rock templates that, in conjunction with the record’s militantly pop production, render it a gormless caricature of everything once endearing about the band.

Although the guitar sounds are very pretty and sublime it’s tough to listen to an album where the songs follow the same exact boring formula.

Magnetic generally lacks the catchiness and vitality of past efforts, as the band tries in vein to reinvent the wheel but fails to accomplish anything as impressive as ‘Iris’, ‘Here is Gone’, ‘Black Balloon’, ‘Let Love In’, [insert hit single here].

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.

These songs all sound like Gaga, but they're more abrasive, less focused, and that's not a good thing.

Sadly, ‘Coloratura’ is not enough to save the LP from being a mess. In the end, you can’t even say you are disappointed anymore. This is who Coldplay are now, producing the most casual music for the most casual listeners possible.

Aside from its opening track, which I’ll get to, this album is essentially a blank space.

The cheesiness, loads of filler, and overly glossy production are still present and hinder much of what the album had the potential to accomplish.

Midnight Memories takes the slight progression of Take Me Home and demolishes it.

The result is an album that is being asphyxiated by an extremely strong hand, and that proves to be the death of it all.

Truthfully, Super Collider is just a Megadeth album born of complacency and issued with only the faintest interest in remaining relevant.

Monogamy falls somewhere near the bottom rung. The indie game has changed. Without the Cursive name behind him, Tim Kasher is, sadly, not much of a player.

Overall, The Nothing is a huge step back for the band. The Paradigm Shift and The Serenity of Suffering were far from perfect, but they rode a line that balanced a contemporary vision with their stapled characteristics. This tries dearly to be nostalgic yet fresh, but the finished product just comes across forced and derivative.

It’s not bad in the sense its unredeemable, just in the sense that it fails to do what it wants to really, really hard.

Fly From Here attempts to offer, amongst all this, an image of Yes that isn't hampered by the past, with five tracks smuggled onto the end of the record but having no narrative relation to the 'epic' that sells it.

Tomboy doesn't speak loud enough for us to hear it. It hums, rather; it mumbles. It actually can't speak.

I can't help but admire the wondrous technicality of the band members, but I wonder if they could have deployed it in a more tasteful way.

Using Shallow and Waterworks as benchmarks, this doesn't even come close; it's glaringly obvious that the addition of a third member has wreaked havoc on the formula.

III is acceptable only to the loyal fans, as it ultimately does little right and sees Periphery at an all-time creative low, failing to improve on any of their faults. For all the instrumental complexity and quirky songwriting choices, it will just sound forced to most.

Not much is worth listening to here; the record's second half saves the abysmal first, yet never approaches the greatness they're capable of.

You will hear the first song five times on this album and the second song twice. Some might argue that mellow synthpop brain-emptiers of “The Darkness” and “Lifeline” constitute independent third and fourth songs, but these are such bland re-re-ree-renditions of A. G.’s longstanding crusty pop Cookbook that flattering them as autonomous entities demands a greater creative effort on your part than the man himself was ever minded to put into them.

Culture II sounds like a satire of every other rap album released by a major label these days, catering to the lowest common denominator of casual music listener. As a business decision, it’s genius; as a piece of music, it’s little more than an elaborate consumer scam.

Album Title Goes Here is simply, and honestly, a pointless release, a record designed for two very different crowds, yet lacking the ammunition to even moderately please anyone.

It’s the first track that commands serious momentum, though the closer “50/50” isn’t too shabby either. ... Its novelty burns off by the halfway mark, but there’s a strong sense that here, at least, was a direction worth doubling down on. Kudos. The rest of the record is an over-calculated mess.

The real problem with The Money Store is MC Ride's consistently incoherent mumbling and meme-of-the-day approach to making hooks.

Interview Music is a record as dense and conflicted as the frontman’s gobbledygook would have us believe he is as a writer. Whereas before his depictions were flavorful and bolstered by solid REM-like rock songs from his surrounding team, here highlight pickings for intelligent insights are slim, and Idlewild as a whole sound lost and in the process of aging horribly.

As with anything, there's catch; the 'good' only lasts four songs and about fifteen minutes out of a fifteen song, fifty-five minute record.

Arch Enemy seem content with resting on their laurels, and while that may please the kind of fans who are upset that In Flames haven't be repackaging Whoracle for the past ten years, it ultimately lacks substance.

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.

...Of The Dark Light simply suffers from a lack of purpose, as if it was penned and recorded just to fulfil the band’s onus to Nuclear Blast. Entire cuts come and go without having done anything worth remembering, and the ones that stick in your mind often do for the wrong reasons.

Despite pulling out all the stops towards the end, The Cost is everything The Frames usually eschew: it’s bland, it’s monotonous and it barely achieves a tempo shift across forty-four minutes.

It is overbearing, pretentious, huge, and begrudgingly catchy, but most importantly, it unveils a band without direction.

Back on My B.S. disappoints regardless, making it a point of no contest that the Busta Rhymes of old is gone forever.

Sure, there are a handful of half-decent cuts included here, but even they have limited lasting value. Meanwhile, the filler (arguably half the LP) is mind-numbingly boring.

The truly interesting thing about this is that, for such a spacey album, it’s among the shallowest things I’ve ever heard.

It’s a shame Eno had to make so much of The Ship’s artistic vision. Divorced from pretence and divorced from the rest of the album, his final moments here are enjoyable.

Danger Days definitely isn't worth it. If nothing else, it makes me interested to see where they'll go from here, but I find it saddening that the most likely future for them seems to be a breakup after this uninspired mess of an album.

The end result is that even when stumbling across an interesting idea, Francis botches it by coming off as childish, attention-seeking and occasionally repulsive.

The dressing is a little different this time around; a few more jokes, a couple catchy tunes (this is most definitely not the worst Weezer album ever), but once again Weezer are content with churning out sugary pop tunes that go down easy and unimpressively.

Anywhere I Lay My Head is a vanity project made by Scarlett Johansson, for Scarlett Johansson, and what's more, it sounds suspiciously like a desperate cry for credibility from a woman who doesn't actually need any.

Despite its competence musically, Tickets to My Downfall’s cookie-cutter, antiquated presentation and MGK’s blatant ignorance make it a truly punishing experience to sit through. Punk by definition is supposed to be something that comes straight from the heart in all its raw ugliness, but this album is the anthesis of that and doesn’t even try to hide its overt shallowness.

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.

The New Game signifies Mudvayne's transition from elite metal juggernaut to their inevitable fade into obscurity.