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

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.

“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.

The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living is an exercise in empty nothingness. But it’s not Bacchanalian coked-out excess nothingness, it's the joyless hollow-eyed actions of a man who is waiting for the next fix and doesn't care what bullshit has to come out of his lips in order to get paid.

There’s just not much to get; these 9 tracks awkwardly move from one improvident moment to the next, collectively assembling a record that might elevate the mood of an extreme skiing video but does little to lift conciseness.

If music is best judged by its immediate effect on the listener, this record succeeds and cannot be forgotten. In this case, that's not a good thing.

Past a handful of listens this becomes quickly uninspired.

There’s no such dirty, beautiful reality on his new album, just grand empty gestures backed by production polish and symphonic schmaltz.

Keane have talked up Under the Iron Sea as being bleaker, more raw than their debut album. It is about the things they have seen over the last two years, the problems, the horrors, the sin. But Keane have not been uncovering the carcases of napalmed babies for the last two years. They’ve been playing music.

Wholly forgettable.

They make two kinds of albums. File Riot City Blues under "Shite."

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.

Great ideas abound--it’s just that they stumble on their face.

The biggest problem might be Rice’s vocal technique. On O, he had a tendency to endearingly strain for notes he couldn’t reach. Now, it sounds like he’s purposefully written songs to allow him to overextend his thin voice.

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.

Mos Def sounds positively lifeless and distant.

A dull, droning bit of mainstream rock.

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

Mostly consists of generic rock, the sparkling production wiping clean any trace of roughness or originality in the group’s sound.

Man Mountain is a poor album. It feels forced (the worst kind of feel for this kind of music), it feels cheesy, and sadly it doesn’t conjure many more feelings beside ‘I think I know what they might have been going for with this…’ Unfortunately they never get there, and it’s a chore to hear them try.

Muse write... the same way Metallica write, i.e. just compiling bits of ‘music’ then sticking them together, except they’re more impressed with their fragments (though they’re simpler and duller and even more remarkably similar to each other than Metallica’s), so they make them go on longer and repeat them more times.

Languid, lifeless, and generic.

By track three, something awful is apparent.

A boringly functional record full of tediously average songwriting.

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.

One of 2005’s most thudding disappointments.

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.

A record that's so deathly serious that each of it's ten songs could be associated with its very own biblical plague.