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.

It’s a trad, tried, and tested sound that they truck around town, exemplified by guest appearances by Conor Deasy of The Thrills and, a little more inexplicably, Maroon 5’s bass player. It’s the middle ground bewteen these two groups which The Tyde occupy.

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.

Todd Smith might be the last straw for many fed up with his current direction.

Hope of the States haven’t completely given themselves up to mediocrity yet, but they’re well on their way.

Bloated with ideas and parsimonious with tunes.

It's not a complete disaster--the songs are still there, shining proud and (far too) loud--but each listen brings a constant, aggravating reminder of the sloppy production.

Press Play is like an episode of My Super Sweet 16: though lavishly decorated and probably an honor to be invited to, there's a megalomaniacal presence that ensures the whole party is about glorification of ego rather than actual fun.

I wish I could critique them for something other than their obvious debt to Spoon. Sadly, that’s the most distinguished characteristic behind the studied, boardroom-designed pop of Robbers on High Street.

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.

Nash keeps herself resolutely in the background of her songs, revealing precious little of her own personality or emotion, and it’s this reservation that makes her fail as a popstar, at least right now.

The biggest flaw with Other People’s Lives is that the songs play to Davies’ weaknesses rather than his strengths, coupled with overproduction that veils any remaining virtue under a gauzy blanket of unnecessary studio witchcraft.

The strange thing about The Inspiration is how it's posited as an alternative to the much-bullied "conscious rap," and yet, it's among the least fun albums released this year.

He sounds ragged, out of tune in places. He simply doesn't sing as well as he used to.

[Their] debut, a scrappy collection of twee garage-pop, isn’t bad. It is half-bad, though. Which isn’t to say that every song isn’t good—they’re just fine, the emphasis on ambivalence.

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

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

In the act of making himself more accessible, Common’s verbal skills have slid into disrepair.

It seems to prove a cardinal rule about art and ambition; if you paint in too many colors, you end up with mud brown. The Mars Volta could fill up whole galleries with canvases this color, and with Amputechture, have constructed another monochromatic monument to wild, uninhibited excess.

A shame an NPR market supercilious of the mercenary likes of Sheryl Crow has forced her to record songs that Crow herself would consider models of autumnal acuity.

A big confused mess.

No one listens to Gwen Stefani to hear her rap. Or sing a sentimental power ballad. In fact, if there’s a Gwen song that can’t be described by putting two (or more) genres together, I’d suggest skipping it altogether.

It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here. But until then, Blue Eyed in the Red Room is one to skip.

The Looks is like the Witness Protection Program of electronic disco, where they put the folks for whom the normal anonymity of dance DJ's is simply not enough.

Genuine hooks are oddly scarce.

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.

Ghost lacks the dynamic swing of much of their past material, content to move towards unnecessary cohesion, one that takes all the wide-pupil joy out of their songs.

The Lemonheads is full of, for better or worse, comfort music. It radiates a blunted nostalgic glow that seeps through the frequent musical languor.

Don’t Believe The Truth is simply Oasis being Oasis with maximum efficiency. Which is to say that if you’re a committed acolyte of the church of Oasis, you’ll love it.

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.

This album is an incredible disappointment- right when Wire was beginning to build up momentum; there’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.

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

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

Rather than show true sympathy by exploring the nuance of even the superficially simplest lives, Bazan makes drearily deterministic morons out of his supposed objects of pathos.

I’m making a mix CD for someone and it’s an incredibly difficult one because she’s into crap like Ben Harper and Lemon Jelly, and I can’t even impress her with a Travis promo CD because they’re ‘too boring’ even for her!

Not only is the product musically conservative, chocked full of soul ballads and tame funk workouts, there's nary a trace of the devilish sense of risk that has permeated even his worst material.

Paul and Dan, knowing that the Dating Game skits sandwiching the album were just a poor shadow of the 3 Feet High And Rising game show, had to up the Wacky Factor within the songs themselves. “More guests! More cray-zee guests!"

When (and I mean, when) he raps, he's barely conscious.

A particularly dour, unsatisfying way to end such an intriguing career.

She sounds like she’s adopting characters and singing their songs, rather than her own. And, for a record with the name Autobiography, it seems like no bigger criticism could be leveled.

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’s got them all lined up.

While Petty is to be commended for putting himself on the line in some manner for his beliefs, the spirit of music would fare better if people of his stature took a harder stance than he does here.

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

The parallels with The Prodigy’s similarly dreadful Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned abound, but the difference here is where The Prodigy’s album was just offensively bad at every corner, here Norman Cook seems to be striving to make the most mediocre album humanly possible.

The continual sense of aesthetic, structural and emotional conservatism constantly makes the listener feel short-changed, Singing Tom persistently pleading his own honesty and kindness and suitability and weakness.

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

Accomplished and full of bluster but ontologically completely hollow; this is The Vines.

For completeists only.

With a snoozilicious country-rock sound that makes even the Eagles seem crisp by comparison, Kozelek appears to have temporarily mothballed his greater sonic ambitions and opted instead for a niche as a latter-day Mazzy Star for boys.

Lacking individuality, distinction and imagination, this album is over-produced, overlong and over-indulgent.

A dull compromise of artistic intent and marketability.

If The Blueprint proved that coming back is easy, The Blueprint 2 proves it’s difficult to stay on top.

All but a couple of tracks here are dipped in the melodramatically thick strings of the opener- and the sum result is that it’s almost too much to take the whole LP in one sitting.

In attempting to show all of the things she has been doing since we heard her last, Aguilera lessens the impact of the better songs on the record. Instead, in between ten to twelve mediocre/good songs, we have eight to ten songs that would be better served as B-sides.

For once, Madonna has stumbled not because she reached too far, but because she didn't reach far enough.

Insufferably vacuous.

This record is Weezer-lite, emo-lite, corporate radio, MOR rock junk.

Its utter lack of anything approaching strong feeling relegates it to the realm of indie-flavored muzak.

It’s not that this album had to be catchy. But when an uninventive melody is rehashed ten times to the point that you wonder whether literal keys and strings are missing from the band’s instruments, what you get is a diffusion line of a product that wasn’t even selling well in the first place.

Adding a set of young female characters to this drab mix only accentuates that a concept is needed to bolster the actual music.

This is the band’s most listless, amelodic effort to date.

It’s all just too "over-" - overcooked, overheated, whatever you want to call it.

A couple of times on Uncle Dysfunktional the Mondays break out of their past and attempt to come to grips with more contemporary forms, but it’s less than convincing.

There are no great songs to speak of on Dumb Luck, and in fact there are just a few that I would hesitatingly call “good,” or more important, “memorable.”

There isn’t an ounce of life in Curtis.

An irritating listen.

Facelessly competent, they make self-important, self-consciously literate guitar rock past its sell-by date via a simple recipe: mix together some late-period Death Cab for Cutie, some OK Computer-era Radiohead, and add in a few Doves and some Decemberists.

Just go buy an album that isn’t this one.

No matter how many literary allusions or whimsically witty turns of phrase he packs into a verse, The Believer lacks the balance and blood of his previous work.

Morningwood does a great job at imitating, and they have spirit. But their spirit does not translate well to good listening, nor does it provoke the underwear-dancing and air guitar it hopes to achieve.

His music has lost a large degree of the vitality that it once held.

If you’re a fan of the genre, don’t bother with Dangerous Dreams unless you’ve absolutely exhausted your current dance records.

Sounding (at best, mind you) like an uninspired Afghan Whigs tribute band, it recycles motifs, melody lines, production tricks, and lyrics from the back catalog. Part of the problem lies in the production--it's far too muddled, loud, and flat--but even the most gifted producer would have trouble making a good album out of the Dulli-by-numbers on display here.

Easily Strait’s worst album in over a decade.

There’s no moderation on Cookies, no inner temperate telling the lads, "Enough’s enough," whether it’s following yet another crack about getting paralytic on drugs, another glammy, mascara-running-from-the-sweat-and-effort guitar solo, or that nth attempt to be cheeky.

"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.

Make Believe seems so simple compared to [Weezer's] other albums.

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

It’s not that Wolfmother are all that bad. It’s just that everything there is to say about them is best said by immediate reference to another band and Wolfmother always come up short in the comparison.

The Horrors aren’t horrifying and Strange House is nowhere near strange enough.

Serving as nothing more than a temporary diversion or side note to his fully realised work, this is worth a cursory listen for the insight alone.

His career for the last decade is basically that of a chicken with its head lopped off, running around the coop unawares whilst coughing up a never-ending stream of blood. If you couldn’t guess, Eat Me, Drink Me is where the fowl finally falls over and collapses in a pile of its fellow poultry’s fecal matter.

Doves’ strength lies in their careful sculpting of the sonic and the emotional, and here they’ve restrained their palette and scope so much that the result is grey.

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.

The Cost is bleached of any sort of lifeblood, stumbling out of the gate and moping towards the finish line.

Completely forgettable.

Like many comedy albums, it delivers initial laughs, with few surprises for continual listening.

This album is flat boring musically and sonically.

All in all, Birth of a Prince seems more like a stepping stone to better things than a fully fledged work in its own right.

Thickfreakness is an unrelentingly dour record - perhaps this music was best left in the past.

Friends: believe me when I say that the combination between the two disparate elements–unbearably goofy synth-pop and sub-par commentary on various parties’ political shortcomings–is indeed a deadly one.

The problem with D12 isn’t that all of them are crap, its just that they’re not given enough room to breath and prove themselves to be better than average.

This album is 80% total shite.

Panic Movement is far too samey and too much emphasis is put on the lyrics, which are not the Hiss' strong suit.

Hocus Pocus is comprised mostly of fleeting moments of brilliance where it all just coalesces for a moment, and then returns to its MOR state of undeveloped garbage.

The evidence now seems indisputable that Wilson is completely, totally, finally spent as a creative force—as it is, we’re treading dangerously close to “How many failed collaborators does it take to produce a half-decent Brian Wilson album?” territory (answer: you can’t count that high).

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

If these songs have a certain melancholic charm, it has been obscured beneath an impenetrably bland sheen.