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

This is a pretty uninspired piece of work.

Athlete’s sound is a wondrous discovery for young teens just getting into “chart indie” or jocks who feel open minded for listening to something a little more complicated than Oasis. For anyone else really, Vehicles & Animals only offers up a smorgasboard of odd, inventive pop music that’s only odd and inventive enough to try and sound less like everything else.

Review 1: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1468" TARGET="_blank">The Black Album&#146;s failings fall upon Jay-Z&#146;s shoulders as much as his producers.</A> [Score=64] Review 2: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1469" TARGET="_blank">The majority of the beats here are mediocre.</A> [Score=38]

A great study in songcraft, but not a consistently exciting listen.

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.

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.

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

The disappointments just keep on coming.

Kill Them With Kindness might be a rewarding listen, for example, for a Stars fan, but then again it might be better to stick with the more familiar originals.

The last decade has bled the band dry of energy and verve meaning that where once these songs would have been pop classics, now they’re tastefully tuneful AOR.

Whether the songs are merely half-developed or the sugar-sheen production simply washes them of any potential grit, it seems apparent that the dreaded second album curse hath struck again.

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

I don’t like it. I don’t hate it. And that’s the truth exactly.

Color me unimpressed.

God love her, but Faith and her handlers just can’t seem to tell the difference between good and bad songs.

Tamborello’s incorporated the extended song structures of minimal into his newer constructs without the genre’s scope for subtle detailing and nuanced alteration.

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

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

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.

Precious, effete and insubstantial.

Uneven by and large, and below what we all know R.’s capable of, this one mostly shoots blanks.

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 record is worth having, but offers little more than a slow orbiting tour of familiar Boredoms territory.

Everything on Winds Take No Shape is done with such mechanic precision that there&#146;s little room for any sparks to ignite this mythic fire.

Pick a Bigger Weapon would’ve made a truly killer party album, but two factors hold it back--no one cares about Riley’s politics, and he’s not nearly as clever as he thinks.

The result may be, in a manner of speaking, the most consistent Atmosphere album to date. That is, You Can’t Imagine is consistently okay.

Cale faces a problem that neither recent Tom Waits nor Leonard Cohen have overcome: he can't sing anymore.