It’s a loud and cacophonous affair—where previous efforts doled out their noise in judicious restraint, Breaks responds to their need to unhinge their fractured pop.

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

Even the "there's a great album hiding in here!" cliché doesn't really apply, since if you conducted ten trials of picking fourteen songs at random, you'd end up with ten albums of near equal mediocrity.

This is nearly half of a really good follow up to their debut, but that first sequence of tracks is so lackluster, so full of swagger and bile meaning nothing, that fans may not get to the good stuff.

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.

Hard Candy’s best moments... are fewer and further between than on previous albums.

In the end, we can’t ignore that The Hives’ best moments are those borrowed (or just plain pilfered) from punk acts that preceded them.

Unlike many R&B artists, Destiny's Child are actively bad at singing ballads, which mostly turn out mawkish, aimless and dull.

If this is your first experience of the band, you might still find it fresh, but personally I’m beginning to feel radicalism fatigue.

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

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.

Sure, this is a very *accomplished* album by a band who can play their instruments: organs, pianos and strings sit gracefully beside each other, and there are some deft vocal harmonies, but The Thrills simply don’t have the songwriting skill or the sheer personality to make this anything more than a passable debut.

In country music, it’s all about the chops--and Millan doesn’t have ‘em. Yet.

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.

There are moments of brilliance, no doubt, scattered handsomely throughout this album, but the overall effect is one of frustration, and not simply the frustration associated with great musicians struggling to come up with interesting ideas, but the frustration we all experience with music as a whole.

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.

They sound old. They sound past it. They sound, and this is one word that nobody would have ever thought could be used to describe the Beasties, irrelevant.

A rudderless piece of work.

Skills most often attributed to premiere MC’s like deft wordplay, vivid storytelling, emotional resonance, salient talking points? These are few and far between on T.I. vs. T.I.P., even if the man remains an impressive technician who sounds at home on any beat you can give him.

Idlewild fails in the same places as Speakerboxxx/The Love Below: both feature some stunningly flat crooning and poor pop revisions straight from the mind, body, and soul of Andre Benjamin.

For as honest and beguiling as Foster's almost feminine falsetto might be, the themes being touched upon and, more importantly, the way in which Forster dabs at them so simply... causes this otherwise fine artistic expression to be slandered significantly.

Patience is far too long to hold my attention, and nowhere near as consistent as either Older or Listen without Prejudice Vol.1, but there are moments here which surpass the strongest songs on either of those previous classics.

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

Rarely does an album ingratiate itself so immediately and so quickly wear out its welcome.

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

While their sounds are pleasant enough, where Lemon Jelly fall short most often is in their unimaginative arrangements.

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.

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.

Clearlake are clearly talented and still capable of making a groundswelling record. Amber, however, is not only not it, but it’s reason to wonder if they’ve lost their own sense of identity in an effort to sell records to pint-swilling British punters.

The problem with Nightlife is that, with the exception of “Hotel Suicide,” nothing really stands out.

Made in Brooklyn is mostly filler and little meat.

It wouldn’t be so bad if The Stills didn’t kill the majority of the newly minted loose-limbed percussion and flighty major key romps ("The Mountain")--with drivel choruses and intermediate tricks (flooding the speakers with a porridge of every conceivable instrument).

Ultimately, The Day After is another middling album from a tremendously talented rapper who will never get the respect he deserves because he's all too eager to make compromised crossover records.

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

It’s solid, but it has no power over me.

It has one pace, and that pace is “mature”.

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.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the kind of music Hot Hot Heat makes. Nevertheless, bands have done it better.

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

The songs are breezy to the point of vapidity.

The saddest part of all this useless audio-masturbation is that it completely masks the genuinely beautiful pop songs of which Anderson is so capable.

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

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

The musicianship on this album retains a professional, waxed sheen, and that’s part of the problem: Hammond sticks to the basics, employing pedestrian rock setups whether he’s punking along with gusto or putzing around on the beach.

The songwriting isn’t bad, by any means... But Heumann’s big-picture lyrics—faith, truth, etc.—are as ceaselessly heavy-handed as his guitar work, giving the whole of Rites an overwrought feel, one that can border on comical depending on your mood.

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

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

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.

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

His seemingly harmless overarching theme of matters extraterrestrial stitched through each of the album’s tracks somehow compromises their effectiveness.

Freeway is great on guest appearances, but it seems that he can’t string together an entire song by himself.

This is by no means a bad album, but to my ears, it’s worse; it’s mediocre.

Planet of Ice's cerebrally structured songs pull in too many directions to pack a proper punch.

Too many of the ideas seem incomplete, like sketches waiting to be fleshed out.

In a time when The Darkness is successfully parodying cock-rock, members of Velvet Revolver are still earnestly carrying the torch. Whether you think that’s noble or laughable will probably determine your opinion of this album.

Banhart's efforts to expand himself have left him woefully unable to play to his strengths in the rare occasions he bothers with them.

There’s a really good EP waiting to be edited out of this.

It’s hard to fault an album for being too much of a good thing, but there it is. Songs like “Goliath”, “Glass Walls” and “Linus” just blend together. By the end you no longer look forward to another swooping, disheartened melody, you want variety of any kind.

Live From Rome is fairly lyrically sound. In this case, “lyrically sound” should be taken with exactly two grains of salt. One grain would represent the ranting political nature of the content.... Grain #2 simply exclaims, “Dude! Rhyme!”

I’d argue, though, that being an expert on the group’s verbose and ragged past wouldn’t help all that much. This is a different sounding band with pretty much the exact same lyrical concerns.

An unpleasant change is clear in the first instant; Summers’ voice is pushed to the front of the mix, and the over-the-top choruses and limpid lyricism that comes through is enough to make you blush.

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

Pullhair Rubeye isn’t awful, but it could’ve been great.

In some ways is a step backwards towards their rockist, meat-and-potatoes roots, and in other ways is a quantum leap into the unknown.

To be fair Free The Bees isn’t a bad record as such, it’s just that this backwards looking, past-is-best philosophy so often smacks of a distasteful and conservative obsession with authenticity and tradition, as if sounding like the past is more important than sounding like yourselves.

Sadly, Suit, is exactly what it purports to be: the business-side of a duo of albums. And, in the world of pop, there’s nothing worse than sounding like business as usual.

They’re obviously enjoying success and using it to explore a wider musical range, but they haven’t translated that admirable tendency into a coherent vision.

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.

Ultimately, The Meanest of Times stumbles when the folksy frayed stitching is torn away, exposing nothing but atrophied punk muscle.

The one thing you can't accuse Under the Blacklight of is being boring, but it abides by an either/or sort of mentality that presumes that a complete lack of substance is the only alternative to the kind of music Rilo Kiley and their pals made in 2002.

The vast majority of this release just doesn’t stick together coherently and suffers because of it.

The meandering songs coalesce into an uninspired mass, burying the few good moments within it.

It would be difficult to convince yourself that The Sun is anything but meandering and listless.

As beautiful as many of these songs are in terms of immediacy, their lackluster instrumentation never allows them any lasting appeal.

An entirely mediocre album that hints at a greatness that may lie beneath.

The Machine EP is a bizarre experiment for the YYYs: is this studio-glazed rocker the one that will show their true colors - or is this just a little endeavor to see what they can pull off? Either way, I’m pretty pissed.

Slideling eschews all of McCulloch's recognizable quirks and endearing pretensions, replacing them with slick generic “mature” songs and arrangements that make Coldplay sound adventurous.

You can see the Angel/Heaven/Cocaine lyrics coming a mile off and the predictable bass that punctuates them soon becomes just as banal.

You best spend your time listening to older Xzibit joints and wait around for the next one to buy new.

Part of the problem is that the melodies are spicy, but the riffs are pedestrian, almost nu-metal.

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.

The problems on the album don’t stem from creativity or intellect, but from execution.

So Amazin’ isn’t quite pop and it isn’t quite rebellion--it’s straight-up high school.

Greedy Baby doesn’t make sense sans visuals, and even with them it makes… little sense.

Honeycomb proves too rigid and self-serious to make good on Black’s strengths.

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

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.

Instead of consolidating their respective strengths, Broken Boy Soldiers is White and Benson compromising them in favor of finding an agreeable but ultimately dull and colorless middle ground.

Another Day On Earth is more blank than frank, a journey through a hollow land, more discreet than it needs to be. Imagine a recording in which every human error has been scrubbed, like coffee grounds off a formica counter.

To the Races isn’t that bad. Bachmann’s just so much better.

Admittedly, though it’s clunky and overwrought, the real problem isn’t that the story is tedious or that Olga’s voice is awful--it’s actually weirdly thrilling--it’s that the album simply doesn’t feel as well executed as the premise promises.

Threes is their most average album yet, sounding similar to their two previous full-lengths but lacking the confrontational loudness of Wiretap Scars or the precision of Porcelain.

The album’s stagnant celebrity worship stifles their ironic, so-dumb-its-addictive intentions.

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.

We find Jewel going through the motions rather than providing us with a noteworthy movement and in the end these songs here are less artistic pronouncements and more the conclusion of a specific product line.

Vulcanized basslines, ice-burn synth washes, and helium-fused guitar lines again serve as his trademarks, and Nguyen has yet to shed his reliance on preset dub-lines to offset his lumpen beats. He may seem a bit more comfortable with English, but his lyrics have waned with his accent.

The sparkling electronic/acoustic subtlety of 2001’s The Invisible Man has been replaced here by excursions into poor trip hop, and this low-key solo effort lacks a good polish and a harsh editor.

Timeless falls awkwardly between Buena Vista Social Club and Santana’s latter-day Rolodex albums, deftly combining multi-culti good intentions with the bathos of a great artist aiming squarely at commercial revival.