His music could be a good deal better than it is.

There is an immediacy and zest to the Rakes’ latest effort that is commendable, but it’s not that memorable.

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

Let’s Just Be is as poppy and willfully idiosyncratic as Arthur’s older work, but is both more conventionally arranged and more loose-limbed than ever before.

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.

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.

All at Once is still challenging, but it’s a challenge without much reward.

Because of You mostly reminds us of the Ne-Yo Problem. He wants to be bad, but chickens out at the last minute.

While charming, it’s still a little too forgettable to be really exciting on its own merits.

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.

While Sennett is often compared to Elliott Smith, at least vocally, there’s far more Badly Drawn Boy in his persona; his voice warbles meekly about waking up with the sun, eating butter, and smiling oceans, even while the egotism lingers.

The album’s beauty lies largely in its simplicity, but so too does its weakness.

It can get very very dull.

Decemberunderground carries a distinct whiff of missed opportunities.

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.

There’s precious little to get, well, excited about here.

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

Even with Kozelek's laudable work on this outing I feel that something more robust could have emerged had the roots been original.

The result aims for a “shitty is pretty” messthetic that is more novelty than anything else.

The clear, crisp production and epic atmospheres are a huge departure from the sisters’ previous two albums... But otherwise things are ridiculously the same.

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

There's no denying that Pollock has an uncanny knack for distinctive melodies, but the album's main problem is that she often misjudges the parameters of 'pop' and in doing so errs on the side of safety.

What The Future Embrace lacks in terms of consistency, it makes up for with the feeling that Corgan has turned a corner, that his return to musical credibility is well underway, and isn’t nearly as inconceivable as it was one year ago.

Right now, it's an album I'm unlikely to play all that much now that I'm done reviewing it.

RJD2 has made an record that simply doesn’t play to his strengths.

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.

Hotel Paper treads the line between rushed brilliance and rushed dross.

This record is still an example of mediocrity.

Review 1: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1476&PHPSESSID=cae64c01fc4f0115d70d2aaefcf8ddcc" TARGET="_blank">It's as lost and macilent and alluring and eager to please and disturbingly empty-eyed as she is.</A> [Score=67] Review 2: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1477" TARGET="_blank">Ultimately, In the Zone suffers greatly from Britney's uneasy transition from teen tart to sexually powerful woman.</A> [Score=47]

Although the album is far from a failure, it rarely reaches the peak of its creator&#146;s potential.

Devil&#146;s Workshop is not awful, but its steady flow of roots rock near-misses is, at the very least, disheartening.

Again is an opportunity missed by such distance as to become pointless and even irritating.

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.

It begins to wilt with tedium as it continues, as the drum machines and synthesizers give way to unimaginative organic instrumentation and bland, stale melodies.

Is it alchemy or robbery? Inspired or insipid? Who knows.

This is a definite upswing from the steaming pile of crap that was Binaural, but not the return to form that older fans of the band may have been hoping for.

A warm, accessible listen, it&#146;s hard to say anything too bad about Obrigado Saudade, which may be its biggest fault: it&#146;s too clean, too comfortable.

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.

It can safely be said that Dresselhaus has nothing to learn about the instruments of technology, but a lot to learn about the ability to write a catchy tune.

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.

Five decent tracks (only three new) does not make a good album, and that is why Street Dreams only improves on Fabolous&#146; debut marginally.

This is a pretty uninspired piece of work.

Athlete&#146;s sound is a wondrous discovery for young teens just getting into &#147;chart indie&#148; or jocks who feel open minded for listening to something a little more complicated than Oasis. For anyone else really, Vehicles & Animals only offers up a smorgasboard of odd, inventive pop music that&#146;s only odd and inventive enough to try and sound less like everything else.

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 great study in songcraft, but not a consistently exciting listen.

He calmly circles the same career themes with the same warmed-over, palatable guitar weavings: girls are scary, girls are sad, getting older is weird, home is nice.

The material lacks the gauzy groove of Gotham!, replaced by techno-savvy beats and a synthetic sheen so soulless it C3PO’s all of the group’s human swagger.

The Weirdness comes off as another solid yet daffy Iggy Pop solo album. The performances are energetic, but Watt is a virtual non-factor.

The disappointments just keep on coming.

Kill Them With Kindness might be a rewarding listen, for example, for a Stars fan, but then again it might be better to stick with the more familiar originals.

The last decade has bled the band dry of energy and verve meaning that where once these songs would have been pop classics, now they’re tastefully tuneful AOR.

Whether the songs are merely half-developed or the sugar-sheen production simply washes them of any potential grit, it seems apparent that the dreaded second album curse hath struck again.

Kingdom Come is Jay-Z at his least inspired, and, yes, that includes the R. Kelly collaborations.

I don’t like it. I don’t hate it. And that’s the truth exactly.

Color me unimpressed.

God love her, but Faith and her handlers just can’t seem to tell the difference between good and bad songs.

Tamborello’s incorporated the extended song structures of minimal into his newer constructs without the genre’s scope for subtle detailing and nuanced alteration.

Ultimately, that’s the problem: No one can really decide where to take these songs, so everyone takes them everywhere.

Ill-advised collaborations and uncharacteristic subject matter mar proceedings, particularly the record’s dragging second half.

It’s a natural inclination for LeMaster to experiment, but it makes the songs often difficult and unengaging, giving off the impression that they’re half-formed.

Precious, effete and insubstantial.

Uneven by and large, and below what we all know R.’s capable of, this one mostly shoots blanks.

We can only parse this album as that of a brilliant group still trying desperately to reconcile its awkward youth into an identity, but only managing to hide behind a few ten-year old audio masks.

This record is worth having, but offers little more than a slow orbiting tour of familiar Boredoms territory.

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.

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.

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.

Cale faces a problem that neither recent Tom Waits nor Leonard Cohen have overcome: he can't sing anymore.

Of course, anyone expecting a new Smiths album from this was always going to be disappointed. However, anyone expecting a good album from it is going to be disappointed as well.

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.

It's not bad; it just feels like a stopgap to hold fans over until Enon has recorded enough material for a new release.

There are dozens of bands that do this kind of stuff better, including Wheat themselves.

Honkytonk University is one missed opportunity after another.

On Schizophrenic Chasez attempts to reanimate early-80s electro, disco and new wave back into pop.

Theirs is an unwelcome indie lyricism that lives in a vacuum, devoid of guttural expression and left to vacant, bumper-worthy slogans.

The good news is things pick up, eventually. The bad news is the album ends just as it starts getting interesting.

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

So much here rests on formulaic indie tropes.

Sounds like a retreat.

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

They’re a perfect opening band: professional and sufficiently appealing on a sonic level without risking upstaging the headliner with any distinct personality or emotional resonance.

If an army of songwriters and million-dollar producers can make Paris Hilton listenable, even for only 38 minutes, then no one else with a major-label budget behind them has any excuse.

When Dunckel moves away from pop immediacy, the results are often puzzling.

They can&#146;t rap. Period.

Descended Like Vultures snuggles down between Wolf Parade’s Apologies To The Queen Mary and Modest Mouse’s 2004 release, Good News For People Who Like Bad News as a competent, half-slapped together, half-methodic slice of evolved indie-rock.

The crisper production gives the music an extra bite.... Paradoxically, though, the increased fidelity also reveals the band&#146;s deficiency with musical dynamics, making a half-hour seem surprisingly long.

Too many songs are caught between the band’s fading post-punk tension and their more professional desires.

Give Friedberger credit for diversity, craftsmanship, and the unprecedented ability to release a double album that actually feels composed of two separate entities. The rest of it? Too much, too fast.

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.

The biggest problem with the album is that most of the tracks feel like there should be a rap over them.

Beginning with third track, "Lupus", a certain lifelessness starts to creep into The Equatorial Stars.

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

A record lacking in a substantial amount of soul, grit and sensuality.

Broken Ear is limited and bogged down with its exacting and overriding sense of rhythm and lack of true sonic experimentation.

Little on Magic outright falters, which is why it's hard at first to explain how unappealing it is.

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.

Pales in comparison to its predecessor.

[It's] not just emo, but the purest, most virulent strain of the stuff.