Goodbye contains both the best and the worst of Schnauss’ output until now.

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.

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.

Velocity is one massive dose of extremely fuzzed-out pop.

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.

<A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1752&PHPSESSID=962ece01ecbce6b79b9bf797952f15ee" TARGET="_blank">It's a much stronger record than you might expect from something that will probably wind up being, in retrospect, a transitional album.</A> [Review 1, score=80] <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1753" TARGET="_blank">It's just too much; too much noise, too much concept, too much deep NJ woods isolation, and too many witches' tales.</A> [Review 2, score=50]

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.

Prefuse 73 sounds freer, and yet more deliberately formal--most of the songs break down like classic hip-hop does, two-thirds of the way toward the end.

His beefs have become so infinitesimal that he&#146;s started to unconsciously parody our LiveJournal culture, a minor event or misunderstanding generating reams of dialogue, running commentary and painstaking minutiae. In short, he&#146;s no more compelling than one of those non-famous drama queens in your life you already find insufferable, just another loser who blows up non-events, and it&#146;s transformed the long-running Eminem Show into the most myopic, hand-wringing, self-reflexive stuck-in-the-mud soap opera of our time.

All at Once is still challenging, but it’s a challenge without much reward.

If The Blueprint proved that coming back is easy, The Blueprint 2 proves it&#146;s difficult to stay on top.

It’s easily the strongest album that she’s made in this millennium, but suffers from the fact that her vocals have deteriorated.

My December isn’t the kind of earth-shattering fuck-you accomplishment that would make this story too good to be true. However, it’s not nearly as bereft of good songs and great moments as some folks would have you believe either.

It’s a shame that Stone and Saadiq fall for the name-dropping approach to making records; inserted like ad-breaks, the guests are easily the worst thing on the album, giving a strong whiff of one of those horrible kitchen-sink-and-rolodex stinkers in the middle of a really very good, if conservative, soul record.

Perhaps it’s too easy to blame Fridmann for these new distractions, but I can’t imagine Ounsworth and the band leaping ahead this way without him. Here’s to hoping that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah move backward more lithely than they progress.

Maybe their edge was lost in the lukewarm production. Maybe it was lost in Barney’s lyrics, which are as utterly meaningless as they have been for years now. Maybe it was just lost altogether.

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

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

But overall as much as the listener should be prepared to hate this record and its pretensions towards anticipating pop trends, it isn&#146;t necessarily a failure.

A directionless mess that never makes an obvious commercial ploy, never reveals any new ideas and never implies any forethought or central intelligence, yet somehow demands attention throughout, revealing new layers and engaging moments with every listen.

Mediocre to its very last note, it reminds you that mediocrity is indeed far worse than simply awful.

An uneven record that came out a few years too late.

Athlete&#146;s sound is a wondrous discovery for young teens just getting into &#147;chart indie&#148; 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&#146;s only odd and inventive enough to try and sound less like everything else.

Version has its share of undeniable clunkers, but its successes are so immediate and so animated that no reasonable listener could possibly begrudge Ronson for forcing them to rely on their track-skip button.

The Sunday girl may be entering her autumn years, but she&#146;s still an absolute treasure.

While Sennett is often compared to Elliott Smith, at least vocally, there’s far more Badly Drawn Boy in his persona; his voice warbles meekly about waking up with the sun, eating butter, and smiling oceans, even while the egotism lingers.

It’s the most consistently entertaining and lasting of R. Kelly’s albums yet.

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.