Sharp, intelligent, and (most importantly) highly enjoyable, Enemies Like This is probably the height of the group’s creative abilities.

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).

It's hard to imagine another album in 2006 doing a worse job of justifying its existence than Blood Money.

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

Mostly, the band sticks to their strengths, making music for a party that ended sometime in the 90s, with the occasional reggae inflection to differentiate it from previous albums.

Mika makes music that sounds like vegetables with all the flavour boiled out of them. Blandness born out of a fear of doing anything new, interesting, or provocative. Blandness born from a fear of alienating a single person with a single piece of conviction in your music.

Even if this album perhaps only has one hope for a hit single, the album is much stronger and reflects that unlike many of her contemporaries, Carlton is moving forwards and towards something.

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.

Shock Value has a disturbing amount of chemistry-set mishaps.

Foregrounding the self-doubt that was a quiet but insistent subtext on the eponymous album, producer John Shanks provides unobtrusive arrangements and lets Phair strum more electric guitar; this is a singer-songwriter record, like Exile On Guyville. It’s also warmer than its predecessor.

The music is the same. As immediate and worthy as some of these songs are, the chugging guitars and oar-bank handclaps and background HEY!s don't sound like the work of a band that really likes this music and wishes it'd been around to make it at the time and probably deserved to be, the way the Donnas' old jailbait anthems could; they sound like bad one-liners.

Their musical gifts haven’t left them... and their overwrought yet empathetic lyrics signify that their bandwagon jumping is misguided rather than crass.

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

taTu, somehow, miraculously, still matter.

More than anything in his career, Escapology is literally riddled with confession and confusion.

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.

Were Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned released in 1999 when everyone else was releasing their mediocre post-big beat follow-up album, though it would still be unlistenable, it would also be excusable.

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

Languid, lifeless, and generic.

While traditional rock fans may have a difficult time swallowing Cake’s meticulously produced, pop-obsessed, genre-bending concoction, fans of Moby, Beck and The Flaming Lips might make for easy converts.

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

While the drop in adrenaline has left room for some good ideas, they’re not fleshed out well enough, and with the lack of a single flat-out rocker, there’s nothing to get excited or exhilarated over.

There’s hardly an honest word on In My Mind; any sane listener’s bullshit meter should red-line after about fifteen minutes of it’s textured repulsiveness.

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

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

The Others are one of the worst bands I have heard in a long, long time.

For the most part, songs lumber along with little forward motion.

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

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

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.

This album is 80% total shite.

Rotten Apple... doesn’t try to address Banks’ shortcomings, it just buries them under tectonic plates of NYC sturm und drang and more of Banks guffawing end rhymes.

Sadly, there’s no escaping the fact that Squire’s solo debut is a one-paced, uni-directional affair.

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

From the onset, this disc excels on a new level.

Do you have any idea how dull it is listening to someone being calm and content?

On his few appearances on “The Re-Up,” Em sounds completely lost, grasping for a new subject for his roving mind, or even for a reason to keep rapping.

Electric Six make junk music for junk times, and they’d be nigh-unbearable if they weren’t so much fun.

Simply put, either you’ll love this album or not “get” it. It’s too good an album for you to not like if you understand it.

Don't bother.

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

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.

Outta Sight/Outta Mind is not an album that you can discuss in measured tones whilst tending to your beard. It is an album that will only cause mass hysteria and blood clots and burst forth Kundalini from the base of your spine like some auto-massage chair plugged into the wrong transformer while you holler “wheeeeaaauurgh!!” and finally slump down into a wet pile of exhaustion.

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

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

“Wires” does grow in stature with familiarity through radio exposure, and “Trading Air” could easily have the same kind of airplay success, but I can’t understand the mindset of anyone who’d want to play them over and over again when so many other, more exciting and intriguing things exist.

Mos Def sounds positively lifeless and distant.

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.

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

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.

This is a very good record. I personally dare the “ASHLEE SUX” folks reading this to give it a reasonably objective spin.