While lyrics have never been Mellencamp’s strongest suit, they’ve never been as clumsy and crotchety as this.

The overall lack of any real risk results in standard guitar anthem boilerplate.

A bit too predictable and lightweight.

This is a goofy record of bubblegum punk, with Queen lapping at its edges and enough good tracks to justify the smattering of empty screamfests.

There is flatness where once there was majesty; there is garbage where once there was gold.

For all its tasteful craft, aesthetic unity and knowing winks to its makers’ history, it’s simply not very interesting

So the form of vaguely electroclash pop delivered with frighteningly robotic efficiency has been mastered, but the content itself is the problem.

There’s little to differentiate Mr. Beast from Happy Songs, and less to recommend it in the face of Mogwai’s potent catalog.

It doesn’t feel right to be beating Will Oldham down for doing something that is so distinctly his own, even though he is doing it again and again to a greater or lesser extent.

It’s the sound of two very talented musicians getting their proverbial creative ya-ya’s out, temporarily sullying their good name to lay ground for something potentially even more exciting.

Hurricane Bar is totally contrived: too much “That Thing You Do” and not enough shot-from-below-the-hip bacchanalia to keep the fire stoked.

On the whole, Animal Years seems dashed off. Of course, dashed off by a clever songwriter with a helluva voice makes Animal Years a decent album.

The musical missteps wouldn’t be so bad if Broder’s voice didn’t often betray him.

The growing sense that Molina released this record last year--and will probably release it again next year--is frustrating.

Were the album as sleek and steely as “Makes Me Wonder,” we would be crowning and mitering Maroon 5 as master purveyors of white-boy funk.

['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.

Out of Breach isn’t without its charms, but with an opening statement as assertive, exiting, and promising as Afro Finger and Gel, it certainly feels a little disappointing.

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.

Not a dud, certainly not a work of cosmic art. It’s meekly above-average.

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.

Starting at the midpoint, "Twosley," Maritime starts to drag.

Hello Love is certainly the most hinged of their three releases, in that it sounds the cleanest—the most streamlined both instrumentally and lyrically. Too bad what it’s saying is, more often than not, familiar to the point of being trite.

Really, though, Cabic needs more “Red Lantern Girls,” a gauzy folk workout that hides and seeks until a brutish electric guitar prods the rhythm and heads for higher ground. It is everything the rest of the album is not: aggressive, terse, and surprising.

Whatever Sam’s Town’s scant merits, the album reminds artists to be more careful about their role models—and to avoid Bono’s phone calls.

The sheer amount of misfires makes Songs for Christmas impossible to recommend to anyone but the devoted Sufjanite.

The only perfect choice here was to make an album full of ballads. It could have been a violent reworking of age-old texts. Unfortunately, there’s not enough violence here to fully rend and flay, just enough to bruise.

Unsurprisingly, everything on Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is sublimated beneath Case’s vocals: music, momentum, the need for tunes.

The top half of the album is stuffed to the gills with dry Pat Benatar rips and unexciting ballads.