Unsurprisingly, everything on Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is sublimated beneath Case’s vocals: music, momentum, the need for tunes.

Not a dud, certainly not a work of cosmic art. It’s meekly above-average.

Beam seems to have smoothed over some of his rough-hewn ruralist poetics in favor of undeveloped blandishments and sentimental homilies.

Maybe if this album had been released in the mid-eighties I’d be falling all over myself to praise it, but these days there’s just too much stuff around that’s surpassed the music here in originality, drive and smarts.

Review 1: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1468" TARGET="_blank">The Black Album&#146;s failings fall upon Jay-Z&#146;s shoulders as much as his producers.</A> [Score=64] Review 2: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1469" TARGET="_blank">The majority of the beats here are mediocre.</A> [Score=38]

A rudderless piece of work.

This album is an incredible disappointment- right when Wire was beginning to build up momentum; there&#146;s not even enough new material here to fill a third EP, and the recontextualizing of the Read & Burn songs hardly makes it more worthwhile.

Gone is pretty much everything they&#146;ve learned in the last eight years or so, ditching all the progress they&#146;ve made in favor of just making another Modest Mouse record. The results, needless to say, are disappointing.

So frustrating then, for such a multitalented rapper, to have his supposed magnum opus weak, stale, and far more aged than we’d expect.

You Could Have It So Much Better... is plagued by the same averseness to surrender that hamstrung their breakthrough eponymous debut.

Morph the Cat is too complacent, too enamored with its own lacquered contours.

Put it this way: do you think "Panic (Hang the DJ)" with its unique branch of bitterness, provincialism, and notions of white pride was the Smiths' best song? You'll be like a hog in shit here, then. If not... avoid. Like the plague.

The main, fundamental problem with this album is that as good as the melodies are, it really does fall flat in trying to get you to feel anything.

Abandoned in the spotlight, Doom appears to falter, though again I think it’s just because we’ve grown so accustomed to cherry-picking his lyrical gems from a well-blended stoned barrage.

So we've got pop music too lightweight to do much more than fancy up the background and a conceptual underpinning, that, due to the seamless way it's blended into these songs, is near imperceptible.

It’s abundantly clear that Ward is an indie-rock songwriter--a pretty good one sometimes--who doesn’t bring a whole lot else to the table.

The cover of Blondie&#146;s &#147;Heart of Glass&#148; is pretty inventive.... Unfortunately for the group, the album doesn&#146;t approach these moments of sublimity nearly enough.

If the original and inspiring Icarus Line take on itself had been continued from the beginning or, better yet, the record had been shortened, we&#146;d have a masterpiece on our hands. As it is, a much better outing than Mono and a brilliant song in &#147;Getting Bright at Night&#148;.

Honestly, the first few listens are the worst; Cedars grows on you to the extent that you get past its often-horrendous lyrics after a while and learn to appreciate its strongest moments.

It doesn’t feel right to be beating Will Oldham down for doing something that is so distinctly his own, even though he is doing it again and again to a greater or lesser extent.

While not entirely mainstream, Tones of Town is also not all that interesting.

My problem with Stewart, his band, and the new Fabulous Muscles is that all too often his desire to provoke seems like an affectation.

Color me unimpressed.

Over the course of eleven songs of grim predestination, virtually no modernizing or even identifying signposts are allowed to disturb the terrain.

Their music though—and probably the reason they’re used to such great effect in “Friday Night Lights”—actually feels more compelling as an accompaniment to visual drama, in part because the internal drama of the songs themselves are really specific and their presentation is a little tired.

The majority of the album is comprised of covers that don&#146;t deviate enough from the source material to validate their existence.

You can actually hear the moment when the album turns sour.

The sheer amount of misfires makes Songs for Christmas impossible to recommend to anyone but the devoted Sufjanite.

On the whole, Animal Years seems dashed off. Of course, dashed off by a clever songwriter with a helluva voice makes Animal Years a decent album.

Feels like Interpol-by-numbers.

On many of the songs here, the accompaniment sounds like an afterthought, adding to the bedroom-recording atmosphere.

The Grey Album isn&#146;t much more than a well-executed novelty, nor does it illuminate some genius hidden deep within The Black Album.

Murray’s Revenge feels tired, the work of a mind either distracted or unwilling to commit to any one thing.

Nas caps a year of NYC-based disappointments with quite possibly the most crushing one yet.

On The End is Near, the group seems to follow the same pattern as before, but with less than appetizing results.

One of the most deafening blasts of mediocrity to be heard this year.

The Reminder is rarely exciting or thrilling, and never revolutionary.

This is a goofy record of bubblegum punk, with Queen lapping at its edges and enough good tracks to justify the smattering of empty screamfests.

So the form of vaguely electroclash pop delivered with frighteningly robotic efficiency has been mastered, but the content itself is the problem.

A one-paced affair, enamoured with drawn-out ambient intros, crystalline guitars layered with reverb, four-note rumbles for basslines, choruses that go on forever and occasional, half-hearted stabs at “groove”. Meaning that it sounds EXACTLY as you would expect U2 to sound.

A record of flippant, tossed-off, uninspired, only sporadically involving chamber pop that feels, dare I say, half-hearted.

Stoltz's musicianship and songwriting are engaging and technically inspired while remaining loose and comfortable. It's just there are too many obvious references.

Because of the Times validates the theory that the Kings of Leon are merely the Eagles in wolf’s clothing (or the Strokes in overalls), being that the album’s collection of tales, focusing solely on hard-living and harder women, are but hokey pulp fictions disguised with mellowed sincerity, played out on mythical dirt roads and overgrown farmhouses.

Pick a Bigger Weapon would’ve made a truly killer party album, but two factors hold it back--no one cares about Riley’s politics, and he’s not nearly as clever as he thinks.

Sure, there are flashes of undeniable brilliance, but most certainly not the full wattage of the awakening sun as advertised--far from the record Chasny's capable of making.

The musical missteps wouldn’t be so bad if Broder’s voice didn’t often betray him.

Certainly Want Two is the weaker and less tuneful of the siblings, strings, horns, pipes and choirs distracting attention from the occasionally dirgey and indulgent (but still grandiose) melodies.

Predictably, the Orchestra works considerably better as a symphony band than an orchestral accompaniment.

The price of diversity is cohesion and there are points where Maths + English veers wildly off track.

Jesse Lacey... still conjures up arresting images but they rarely add up to coherent songs—and nothing consistently cuts to the bone like Deja Entendu’s highlights.

It&#146;s not mush, it&#146;s just not quite as gleefully obvious as Mclusky Do Dallas was. But, by the same token, they&#146;re not just treading the same ground.

Even if Hypnotize is full of missteps, its existence as a separate entity is what makes Mezmerize nearly perfect.

Cassadaga falters in the same way I’m Wide Awake did: by trying to present his views as universal, it just exposes how Conor Oberst can’t handle the Truth.

Ultimately, Meltdown isn’t as dramatic a failure as its title seems to be begging me to pronounce it--in fact it isn’t really a failure at all. It’s just a crucial dip in momentum.

This is the kind of post punk that loves The Specials and XTC rather than Wire and Joy Division.

The handful of slower songs drag more than they have a right to, and fail to hint at any depth or versatility that’s missing from the straight-ahead rockers.

As accomplished as Radian's sound is, Juxtaposition has trouble conveying new ideas throughout the album.

In the end, we can&#146;t ignore that The Hives&#146; best moments are those borrowed (or just plain pilfered) from punk acts that preceded them.

Brock’s idiosyncratic worldview, so much a part of what made Modest Mouse special to begin with, has left the building.

It&#146;s obvious that the group can write straight-ahead rock/pop songs, but only chooses to tease the listener with short glimpses of their ability in this regard.

His new album isn&#146;t quite as good as Disposable Arts, but it&#146;s similarly engaging--he is both confident and insecure, and this incongruity defines his music.

Most of the tracks here fit into various categories of coffee table mood music; Lerche has a great knack for melodies, but seemingly not much of an idea what to do with them once he&#146;s got them all lined up.

Love Kraft is taken down by sludgy pacing and a paucity of ideas.

There are few of the stop-in-your-tracks lines or extended metaphors of previous works.

Trying too hard to mimic his band’s tried-and-true telepathy with only karaoke-level results, it's easy to see he thinks he’s run out of ways to experiment.

From Every Sphere is frequently let down by Harcourt&#146;s mediocre songwriting.

Once you vacuum out the fluff there&#146;s barely half an album left.

Idealism has some fun with memorable new electro (“The Pulse,” “Home Zone,” “Idealistic”) and nu-rave cuts (“I Want I Want,” “Pogo”). But these guys can’t possibly think fans will believe this fifteen-track behemoth, mostly lacking in subtlety and invention, is the big party they half-seriously claim it to be, over and over and over again.

The disappointments just keep on coming.

The result may be, in a manner of speaking, the most consistent Atmosphere album to date. That is, You Can’t Imagine is consistently okay.

This new sense of excursion comes with its costs, and like many of their predecessors, it robs this Toronto band’s tunefulness in the name of unnecessary experimentation.

The album certainly holds enough strong melodies and well-written songs to elevate it above the majority of Harrison&#146;s uneven solo career, but is somewhat brought down by Lynne&#146;s posthumous production.

Tracyanne Campbell has a glassy, gorgeous voice, but it’s also a curiously inexpressive one. When she’s left to carry less than strong songs alone, they suffer as a result.

Shouldn't he be trying something a bit more ambitious by now?

Sullivan and Cox are attentive enough to make room for understated fiddler Claudia Mogel, who keeps the band’s country flame burning when they flail and strut. None of this, though, is enough to strip the album of a staleness and fatigue

There isn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that this collection plays it way too safe to satisfy the über-devoted.

Clor’s singer and main-man Barry Dobbin unfortunately posses the kind of high, straining voice that grates to the point of making you want to punch him on the nose, and when combined with the incessant business of the band’s undoubtedly clever and accomplished music it makes this eponymous debut feel like an effort to listen to.

It quickly becomes apparent there is a lacking element in many of the tracks on the album. Memorable melodies. What remains are non-descript tracks that feature synthesizer melodies that go nowhere and cribbed samples from records.

Genuine hooks are oddly scarce.

While Tres Casas is a large step forward for Molina, and a better album than Segundo, paradoxically, it&#146;s a less enjoyable one.

Some of the most listless, unaffecting music the band has ever penned.

They make a better Shins than a Stooges. For anyone looking for a relative of the former with an interestingly rough sound and loads of potential, the M's are good to go right now; but the rest of us are stuck mining gems from amidst muck, like normal.

This is an album not entirely worthy of the patience it requires to be appreciated track by track.

The only perfect choice here was to make an album full of ballads. It could have been a violent reworking of age-old texts. Unfortunately, there’s not enough violence here to fully rend and flay, just enough to bruise.

Really, though, Cabic needs more “Red Lantern Girls,” a gauzy folk workout that hides and seeks until a brutish electric guitar prods the rhythm and heads for higher ground. It is everything the rest of the album is not: aggressive, terse, and surprising.

Out of Breach isn’t without its charms, but with an opening statement as assertive, exiting, and promising as Afro Finger and Gel, it certainly feels a little disappointing.

They want to be every band to every bloke, shuffling between genres in an effort to jack all and master nada.

Starting at the midpoint, "Twosley," Maritime starts to drag.

This is a band that, rightfully, just sounds tired.

While I’ll stop short of saying that [co-producer Neil Michael] Hagerty ruined this record, I can definitively say that I’d love to hear what it would have sounded like before he got his hands on it.

Everything on Winds Take No Shape is done with such mechanic precision that there&#146;s little room for any sparks to ignite this mythic fire.

Musically the record comes off as simply a rote (if spirited) rendition of the best records from Rainer Maria or 764-Hero, which certainly isn’t saying much.

The explorations of Security aren’t exactly shattering, but they’re refreshing.

The music is still missing one crucial element&#151;hooks. There really aren&#146;t any of which to speak, and no amount of production skill and instrumental finesse is able to mask that.

While it's admirable that The Secret Machines are trying to solidify their niche as the go-to guys for soundtracking laser light shows (or at least My Morning Jacket for indoor kids), Ten Silver Drops is a sideways moonwalk that won't get them any further away from the planetarium circuit.

This album is difficult, complicated, pretentious, infuriating, inconsistent, and asks more questions then it answers.

Music that&#146;s easier to admire than love.

The rest of More Adventurous is mostly what you would have expected from Rilo Kiley before the album's bracing beginning, only now it carries the stench of promise unfulfilled.