Rehashed Bob Mould still beats most of what’s out there, though, so the album has its strengths.

Honkytonk University is one missed opportunity after another.

Nothing’s Lost is a more stately affair, flaunting van Petegum’s growth as a producer without losing his child-like talent for awkward emulation.

His intention here was to create something unpolished and free of studio edits, acting as contrast to Shadows. His result, unfortunately, reeks of squandered potential.

Review 1: He may well be repeating himself... but Spiritualized are still a force.</A> <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1300" TARGET="_blank">Review 2: With Amazing Grace, Pierce has achieved a perfect balance between his traditional blues-rock leanings and his appetite for studio excess. [Score is an average of both reviews: 79 and 90]

The album achieves a great deal of its success from the relaxed collaboration, but it does suffer from it, as well. Reid and Hebden interact so casually that they don't find the friction to really propel great improvisational music.

There’s nothing groundbreaking here, and this record could very well sound sickeningly syrupy come December, but Hal have found a way of reflecting the sun from a time when it wasn’t quite so poisonous.

So what if the Darkness are nothing but a bunch of playacting nancy boys. They have an outstanding penchant for hooks [and] write witty and possibly sometimes moving lyrics.

The whole album is put together so oddly, almost haphazardly, that this works better as a collection of moments than as a whole.

This is called showing the kids how it's done--and doing it.

Prefuse 73 is in a rut. And a bad one at that.

It’s hard to imagine The French Kicks making a great album, given their limited changes so far. That doesn’t change the fact that Two Thousand is a very good one.

Easily Strait’s worst album in over a decade.

"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.

With Friendly Fire, we get a number of concepts and stabs at self-aware dynamics, but we mostly just see the over-privileged slacker.

Standing out might be the biggest obstacle facing the bulk of Right About Now's 12 tracks. It's significantly shorter than Kweli's best album, Train of Thought, but has far fewer shifts in sound or mood to keep it interesting.

It&#146;s not a real consistent journey, because of the eclectic styles, but the masterful sequencing makes it flow smoothly from track to track.

Carrabba’s keening grandiloquence may have lost some of its most explicitly cathartic qualities, but The Shade of Poison Trees remains his best work in years.

Fanfare aside, even though the naked version is an improvement, Let It Be remains the Beatles&#146; worst album.

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

While the music remains modest, there are a few moments of gratifying lyrical incision and indecision befitting this being Jones’ first album bereft of covers.

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.

Suitcase 2 does exactly what it sets out to do, documenting the incredible breadth of Bob Pollard’s songwriting.

It&#146;s all quite beautiful and inoffensive, and that in itself may be an admirable goal. But what it lacks is the experimental--or at least, improvisatory--bent of Tortoise, as well as lacking a lot of what made the last Brokeback record so great.

Avril is not some brilliant songwriter, and her voice is good, but not amazing, and her &#145;tude is a little ridiculous at times. Despite this, she is the most refreshing and exciting girl in pop rock today.

Too many tracks on It&#146;s All Around You don&#146;t quite measure up to the compositional quality or imagination of previous works.

Camper's new work is not only as strong as ever, but also more relevant than ever before.

RUOK? sees Dangers with his abilities at their fullest, but with aspirations in a less interesting direction.

Turn the Light Out scales everything back—the drums, the guitars, the vocals—leaving us with a clean-cut, grown-up Ponys, trying to get comfortable in their own skin when they were just fine in someone else’s.

Not quite the apocalyptic inverse Screamadelica that XTRMNTR was, it&#146;s still a damn site more radical, experimental and dangerous than anything produced by any other mainstream rock band this year.

The problem, of course, is that Shatner knows he&#146;s Shatner now. And so does everyone else. It&#146;s the joke that stops being funny after you hear the premise.

Few songs on the album are as perfect as [the opening] two, but many of them are nonetheless excellent.

The only song worth a second listen is 'Smithereens.'

The Spree remain a vital, relevant artist only for Volkswagen advertising execs and anyone who takes the last five minutes of “Scrubs” episodes too seriously.

A vibrant album that at times sounds like it&#146;s a young band&#146;s first shot at the cherry.

Unfortunately, even when they attempt to paint a serious social commentary, they can&#146;t seem to suppress their sophomoric potty humor.

National Anthem, is monochrome and even somewhat sterile, characteristics often overcome by Whiteman’s increasingly excellent craftsmanship.

Jacket Full of Danger is an unfocused album that lets his own kitschy gags grab him by the ankles.

Much of the album bears more than a passing resemblance to the second half of [Daft Punk's] Discovery.

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.

It offers in personality and atmosphere what it lacks in originality.

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

['Fantasies' and 'Missed' are] mere tasty morsels amidst a mass of mid-tempo gelatin resulting from nearly arbitrary song structure ('Own Your Own Home'), bland chord progressions ("Ghost"), or one-take studio dickery ('Phonytown') that renders the closer, 'Cheaper Than Therapy,' a five-and-a-half minute afterthought.

Soft Money is full of the sort of guitar riffs that mutter their notes and beats that knock about to break themselves free from dumpsters.

It's a smooth, cohesive ride that never lapses into boredom.

It has some nice tracks, some experiments and more than a few keepers, and, yes, it’s almost exclusively a fan-only proposition.

By no means have We Are Scientists made a great record, but it shows enough promise to make us believe that it might just be possible in the future.

It’s the tracks that sit closest to the old Trail of Dead that make up a majority of Worlds Apart’s uninspiring moments and also ruin any cohesion that could have otherwise been attained through the heart of the album.

With the multifarious tributaries flowing effortlessly into the whole, I Thought I Was Over That has a diverse coherence that is hard to define and establishes itself as a distinct entity in its own right.

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.

So what if there are bits of Soft Bulletin and Dusk at Cubist Castle all over the record? At least they managed to choose the bits that fit together well.

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.

What’s most striking about the album is the realization that despite his reputation as a musical chameleon, all of Cex’s albums are pretty similar.

Sweat&#146;s the obvious keeper for those looking for the follow-up to Nellyville.

It’s not a classic, nor is it an embarrassment. It’s a disc which says: we’re the Fall, we’re still going and, frankly, you should bloody well be pleased about that. A statement with which I’m inclined to agree.

The Walkmen’s version is difficult to recommend to anyone unfamiliar with Nilsson and Lennon’s album.

Trip-hop has been brought into the 21st century, at last.

By turns thrilling, gratifying, and hideous.

Noah’s Ark proves, again, that the Casady sisters are perhaps at the forefront of the overlabored ‘freak-folk’ scene.

This is the best pop album of the year and what Ashlee Simpson wishes to be.

It’s certainly another step forwards and upwards for one of our only real musically emotional geniuses.

With such a subdued and steady tone, I Dreamed We Fell Apart sometimes suffers from an overdose of languidness.

The Fallen Leaf Pages starts strong and tails off, but even that would be more forgivable if Putnam’s writing was as distinctive as it used to be.

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.

What it ultimately comes down to is style versus substance. Once Midnight Movies matches the latter with the former, the results should be nothing short of stunning.

An irritating listen.

Into the Blue Again is more stylistically cohesive than his previous works, but the songs are ossified and interchangeable; while the one-man band aesthetic of Album Leaf implies meticulous approach to craft, there's an assembly line feel that makes you feel like he cranks out a tune in ten minutes and spends the rest of the week tweaking EQ.

Fans of novelty pop and slapdash spunk will undoubtedly enjoy their debut record, Coming on Strong; for those who prefer their records a little less morning-breath, you’ll smell this one’s approach and smother the light with a pillow.

Sean Paul is a gifted songbird, and on The Trinity his vocal gifts and Jamaica’s continued creative vitality are a surefire formula for thrilling music.

Maxïmo Park haven't just avoided the sophomore slump, they've made a follow-up that suggests that those who threw their lot in with the band instead of, say, the Futureheads made the right choice. Almost as exciting as the music on Our Earthly Pleasures is the potential.

Eyes Open is composed of broad, obvious songs with broad, obvious hooks, aimed straight for the hearts of as many people as the band can manage. All of this would be bad, horrible even, if it didn't work. But it does.

Riot! is immediately appealing because it focuses on sounds that have been neglected by the genre’s frontrunners. This is an uncomplicated album comprising of strikingly uncomplicated music, entirely lacking in 15 word song titles, Jay-Z guest appearances, and theatrical meta-concepts about performing in a rock band.

They rock hard and fast and damn the stylistic similarities, because they have as much energy and explosive tendencies that even the Stooges themselves showed back in their heyday.

It takes a couple of good close listens to appreciate Herren’s languid songwriting; a casual listener will likely enjoy listening to only a track or two before turning off.

Has only a slightly spottier ratio of hits to misses than their best albums.

It&#146;s not essential listening by any means, but an interesting look into his working methods of previous years, nonetheless.

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 album’s appeal is so superficial that those who don’t cotton to guys trying to look pretty while the bombs drop should avoid this entirely.

There&#146;s a distinct lack of personality, meaning that LL Cool J&#146;s eleventh long player is merely good, and his reputation (and bank balance) will be neither tarnished nor expanded.

Never, Never, Land exposes Lavelle and File as, surprisingly, excellent songwriters with an ear for a good chorus and a knack to fitting performers and material together.

Props for being candidly happier, but as is often the case with bands with ten-plus-years of solid material, Earlimart’s newest release serves us better as an unwitting PR campaign for the rest of their oeuvre.

As long as Wonder is producing and laying down basic arrangements himself, he’ll never be awful, which is a shame: like any lifelong charmer, he can stand to be more vulgar, or show some teeth, damn it.

The pandering that characterizes the first half of the album leaves no hint of the hidden gems that follow.

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

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

Only half of these tracks provide truly valuable alternatives to Guero songs.

Insufferably vacuous.

The mood for both is, in a word, joyous.

A band as talented and enjoyable as Clinic should be allowed to distill and advance their sound without getting tarred with the brush of stagnancy.

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

Completely forgettable.

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

Unfortunately, after this three-track novelty act, Fulfilled/Complete comes down to earth in a decided crater-dive.

With The Cover Up, IATWTC does a better job of ripping off New Order, while often drawing from trance.

Goswell deserves praise for putting together a solid album that could appeal to both fans of her previous work and others.

One of 2005’s most thudding disappointments.

Unfortunately, the record fails at times to live up to its largesse.

Except for Ghostface, he's probably rhyming as well as anyone around right now.