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.