The music is the same. As immediate and worthy as some of these songs are, the chugging guitars and oar-bank handclaps and background HEY!s don't sound like the work of a band that really likes this music and wishes it'd been around to make it at the time and probably deserved to be, the way the Donnas' old jailbait anthems could; they sound like bad one-liners.

There isn’t an ounce of life in Curtis.

There are hooks aplenty, but they’re mushed into a production job that’s so caustically lacking in detail and depth, so over-inflated and etch-a-sketched in timbre, that it’s almost unlistenable on anything but the most rudimentary of laptop speakers.

The little things are annoying, of course, like the “that'll do” pointless pop culture punnery namedrops that litter (“Starz in Their Eyes”/”Alicia Quays”), or the way they take up so much time with vocal samples from (old documentaries/self-help tapes) in the same way that a struggling student quotes increasingly large and irrelevant passages of text in a desperate attempt to meet a word count.

There’s no moderation on Cookies, no inner temperate telling the lads, "Enough’s enough," whether it’s following yet another crack about getting paralytic on drugs, another glammy, mascara-running-from-the-sweat-and-effort guitar solo, or that nth attempt to be cheeky.

We Are the Night isn’t awful, but you can hear the rigidity of its formula, like the motorik title tune that burps up its eponymy every few seconds along a signless, moody highway.

A record that's so deathly serious that each of it's ten songs could be associated with its very own biblical plague.

It’s all just too "over-" - overcooked, overheated, whatever you want to call it.

They ape New Order's "Movement," surely that combo's most static and dullest album. Dengler and rather good drummer Sam Fogarino don't get many chances to shine, letting guitarist Daniel Kessler create the kind of textures that often get mistaken for progress.

New Young Pony Club claim they can give us what we want, but they haven’t got a clue what we need.

A couple of times on Uncle Dysfunktional the Mondays break out of their past and attempt to come to grips with more contemporary forms, but it’s less than convincing.

His career for the last decade is basically that of a chicken with its head lopped off, running around the coop unawares whilst coughing up a never-ending stream of blood. If you couldn’t guess, Eat Me, Drink Me is where the fowl finally falls over and collapses in a pile of its fellow poultry’s fecal matter.

The Horrors aren’t horrifying and Strange House is nowhere near strange enough.

Adding a set of young female characters to this drab mix only accentuates that a concept is needed to bolster the actual music.

There are no great songs to speak of on Dumb Luck, and in fact there are just a few that I would hesitatingly call “good,” or more important, “memorable.”

Despite being four years in the making, Traffic and Weather finds Fountains Of Wayne offering more of the same and yet decidedly less, working your nerves to the point where you’ll wonder whether you ever truly liked them in the first place.

There’s simply no charm or subtlety on show here, and not even any cheeky, bona fide pop thrills in the vein of “Everyday I Love You Less & Less.”

Mika makes music that sounds like vegetables with all the flavour boiled out of them. Blandness born out of a fear of doing anything new, interesting, or provocative. Blandness born from a fear of alienating a single person with a single piece of conviction in your music.

This is the band’s most listless, amelodic effort to date.

The Cost is bleached of any sort of lifeblood, stumbling out of the gate and moping towards the finish line.

Alright Still is nothing more than pop for people who hate pop music, poptimist Quorn, phony music for people who can't let go of their inhibitions (indie-bitions?) and have to have their music classified as REAL.

Just go buy an album that isn’t this one.

Mos Def sounds positively lifeless and distant.

On his few appearances on “The Re-Up,” Em sounds completely lost, grasping for a new subject for his roving mind, or even for a reason to keep rapping.

Its artistic detours are even more jarring than those of Worlds Apart. The good news is that its quality is far less erratic. The bad news is the reason why: it's almost uniformly awful.

The biggest problem might be Rice’s vocal technique. On O, he had a tendency to endearingly strain for notes he couldn’t reach. Now, it sounds like he’s purposefully written songs to allow him to overextend his thin voice.

An irritating listen.

There’s no such dirty, beautiful reality on his new album, just grand empty gestures backed by production polish and symphonic schmaltz.

It’s not that this album had to be catchy. But when an uninventive melody is rehashed ten times to the point that you wonder whether literal keys and strings are missing from the band’s instruments, what you get is a diffusion line of a product that wasn’t even selling well in the first place.

Great ideas abound--it’s just that they stumble on their face.

They make two kinds of albums. File Riot City Blues under "Shite."

The solipsism and trite accounts of benders from the first album are still there, but the music has gone exceedingly soft.

By making a bad album that also tries so assiduously to distance themselves from the backpacker movement that they unintentionally pioneered, they may have cut off their most fervent and loyal supporters and the chance of gaining a mainstream audience.

There’s hardly an honest word on In My Mind; any sane listener’s bullshit meter should red-line after about fifteen minutes of it’s textured repulsiveness.

Facelessly competent, they make self-important, self-consciously literate guitar rock past its sell-by date via a simple recipe: mix together some late-period Death Cab for Cutie, some OK Computer-era Radiohead, and add in a few Doves and some Decemberists.

Keane have talked up Under the Iron Sea as being bleaker, more raw than their debut album. It is about the things they have seen over the last two years, the problems, the horrors, the sin. But Keane have not been uncovering the carcases of napalmed babies for the last two years. They’ve been playing music.

Past a handful of listens this becomes quickly uninspired.

Sounding (at best, mind you) like an uninspired Afghan Whigs tribute band, it recycles motifs, melody lines, production tricks, and lyrics from the back catalog. Part of the problem lies in the production--it's far too muddled, loud, and flat--but even the most gifted producer would have trouble making a good album out of the Dulli-by-numbers on display here.

It's hard to imagine another album in 2006 doing a worse job of justifying its existence than Blood Money.

"Progressive" doesn’t mean clocking in at over seven minutes no matter what. It doesn’t mean hitting every goddamn skin, tom-tom, and cowbell on your drum set. Being "Progressive" doesn’t justify an album cover that looks like a stoner stumbled upon a documentary on Mayan civilization. I’m not sure, but I think "Progressive" is about growth and change.

It’s not that Wolfmother are all that bad. It’s just that everything there is to say about them is best said by immediate reference to another band and Wolfmother always come up short in the comparison.

The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living is an exercise in empty nothingness. But it’s not Bacchanalian coked-out excess nothingness, it's the joyless hollow-eyed actions of a man who is waiting for the next fix and doesn't care what bullshit has to come out of his lips in order to get paid.

Fans of Verlaine's Television-era storytelling will be disappointed to hear him so simultaneously unchanged and unforthcoming.

Wholly forgettable.

A dull, droning bit of mainstream rock.

Even The Bravery, easily the most similar band in approach to White Rose Movement and rightly derided for their style over substance rehashes of the past, at least had a couple of memorably fine songs. The White Rose Movement, on the other hand, have the style, but little substance to back it up.

No matter how many literary allusions or whimsically witty turns of phrase he packs into a verse, The Believer lacks the balance and blood of his previous work.

Morningwood does a great job at imitating, and they have spirit. But their spirit does not translate well to good listening, nor does it provoke the underwear-dancing and air guitar it hopes to achieve.

If music is best judged by its immediate effect on the listener, this record succeeds and cannot be forgotten. In this case, that's not a good thing.

It’s not that change is bad, but Wolf is moving into areas already well covered and away from ideas that beg for more exploration.

Relentlessly benign.

While the drop in adrenaline has left room for some good ideas, they’re not fleshed out well enough, and with the lack of a single flat-out rocker, there’s nothing to get excited or exhilarated over.

One of 2005’s most thudding disappointments.

There’s just not much to get; these 9 tracks awkwardly move from one improvident moment to the next, collectively assembling a record that might elevate the mood of an extreme skiing video but does little to lift conciseness.

Easily Strait’s worst album in over a decade.

And the thing is, an over-reliance on pastiche wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that a) they’re running in grooves created by the wheels of the bandwagon they’ve arrived too late to jump on and b) they tackle it all in the most hopeless, hapless, school talent show cover band style of derivation imaginable.

“Wires” does grow in stature with familiarity through radio exposure, and “Trading Air” could easily have the same kind of airplay success, but I can’t understand the mindset of anyone who’d want to play them over and over again when so many other, more exciting and intriguing things exist.

Make Believe seems so simple compared to [Weezer's] other albums.

Maybe their edge was lost in the lukewarm production. Maybe it was lost in Barney’s lyrics, which are as utterly meaningless as they have been for years now. Maybe it was just lost altogether.

Completely forgettable.

His music has lost a large degree of the vitality that it once held.

Doves’ strength lies in their careful sculpting of the sonic and the emotional, and here they’ve restrained their palette and scope so much that the result is grey.

The realisation is obvious: a happy, contented, motherly Tori Amos is as irrelevant, sterile, and airbrushed as her face is on the cover of this album. Tori: it’s over.

The Others are one of the worst bands I have heard in a long, long time.

His beefs have become so infinitesimal that he’s started to unconsciously parody our LiveJournal culture, a minor event or misunderstanding generating reams of dialogue, running commentary and painstaking minutiae. In short, he’s no more compelling than one of those non-famous drama queens in your life you already find insufferable, just another loser who blows up non-events, and it’s transformed the long-running Eminem Show into the most myopic, hand-wringing, self-reflexive stuck-in-the-mud soap opera of our time.

If you’re a fan of the genre, don’t bother with Dangerous Dreams unless you’ve absolutely exhausted your current dance records.

Unfortunately, while Kweli’s message is spot-on, his delivery of that message is highly flawed.

Were Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned released in 1999 when everyone else was releasing their mediocre post-big beat follow-up album, though it would still be unlistenable, it would also be excusable.

The evidence now seems indisputable that Wilson is completely, totally, finally spent as a creative force—as it is, we’re treading dangerously close to “How many failed collaborators does it take to produce a half-decent Brian Wilson album?” territory (answer: you can’t count that high).

By track three, something awful is apparent.

This album is 80% total shite.

The problem with D12 isn’t that all of them are crap, its just that they’re not given enough room to breath and prove themselves to be better than average.

Muse write... the same way Metallica write, i.e. just compiling bits of ‘music’ then sticking them together, except they’re more impressed with their fragments (though they’re simpler and duller and even more remarkably similar to each other than Metallica’s), so they make them go on longer and repeat them more times.

Panic Movement is far too samey and too much emphasis is put on the lyrics, which are not the Hiss' strong suit.

A boringly functional record full of tediously average songwriting.

Friends: believe me when I say that the combination between the two disparate elements–unbearably goofy synth-pop and sub-par commentary on various parties’ political shortcomings–is indeed a deadly one.

Don't bother.

Serving as nothing more than a temporary diversion or side note to his fully realised work, this is worth a cursory listen for the insight alone.

If these songs have a certain melancholic charm, it has been obscured beneath an impenetrably bland sheen.

With a snoozilicious country-rock sound that makes even the Eagles seem crisp by comparison, Kozelek appears to have temporarily mothballed his greater sonic ambitions and opted instead for a niche as a latter-day Mazzy Star for boys.

Insufferably vacuous.

All in all, Birth of a Prince seems more like a stepping stone to better things than a fully fledged work in its own right.

All but a couple of tracks here are dipped in the melodramatically thick strings of the opener- and the sum result is that it’s almost too much to take the whole LP in one sitting.

This is a dismal failure.

Hocus Pocus is comprised mostly of fleeting moments of brilliance where it all just coalesces for a moment, and then returns to its MOR state of undeveloped garbage.

There’s a glistening veneer of contented happiness coating the record, as if some adult-oriented radio programmer gleefully shat on it, but the tragedy is that Phair is wholly complicit in this utter waste of talent.

Do you have any idea how dull it is listening to someone being calm and content?

A dull compromise of artistic intent and marketability.

For once, Madonna has stumbled not because she reached too far, but because she didn't reach far enough.

Like many comedy albums, it delivers initial laughs, with few surprises for continual listening.

Thickfreakness is an unrelentingly dour record - perhaps this music was best left in the past.

This album is flat boring musically and sonically.

Mostly consists of generic rock, the sparkling production wiping clean any trace of roughness or originality in the group’s sound.

This record is Weezer-lite, emo-lite, corporate radio, MOR rock junk.

Languid, lifeless, and generic.

Lacking individuality, distinction and imagination, this album is over-produced, overlong and over-indulgent.

If The Blueprint proved that coming back is easy, The Blueprint 2 proves it’s difficult to stay on top.

Mediocre to its very last note, it reminds you that mediocrity is indeed far worse than simply awful.