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.