Nothing about The Soft Pack makes you wanna know who these guys are or what they have to say about the world outside their practice space.

Ode to Ochrasy is a little more energized, but Mando Diao still aren’t breaking fresh ground.

Last 2 Walk is a club-banging record, but it’s hard to recommend something so by-the-book.

It lacks the playfulness of the early Faust records, where the band's experiments with jazz, folk, and raunchy rock and roll were coated with acceptable degrees of avant-garde theatricality.

For a visionary guy like Hendrix, this glorified compilation isn't as imaginary as it could be.

There’s something melodious and calm about Will.i.am’s third solo hip-hop/R&B album--but there’s also something boring about its euphonic electro-funk dolor.

Lissy Trullie sounds simultaneously hungry and tepid, as if Trullie wants to make a big splash, but her album lacks the conviction or vision to make it happen.

The contrived sheen marring much of the album dissolves, and things get industrial real quick. That dark and uncharted - for Cut Copy - territory might be the way to go heading forward.

Closer to Closed is a testament to the decline of Braid's teen angst, but those who grew up with the band may not recognize this aging friend.

Although only adequate run-throughs of the studio-album tracks, Stage Whispers' live performances do underscore a continuity between songs from both 5:55 and IRM that otherwise wasn't apparent. Stage Whispers' new offerings, on the other hand, are consistently interesting.

The effect is as scattershot as the guest list.

Great Lake Swimmers' sugar-sweet ditties easily drift in one ear and, unfortunately, out the other.

There are so many clashing vocal parts and guitar effects that you have to strain to hear the actual songs. Which is a shame, because said songs (all of which Ringo co-wrote) are pretty good.

There just isn't much personality on display here: Icky Blossoms strive for in-your-face decadence, but most of the time, they sound like every other anonymous dance-pop act on the planet.

It's a bummer that Visions ended up as a fever dream of a record: unnecessarily oblique, listlessly long (48 minutes!), and painfully shapeless.

These straight pop tunes are great by themselves, but after slogging through the symphonic sludge, you’re likely to find The Resistance a jumbled, forgettable tracklist.

It's all meant to sound fresh, but it doesn't always sound good.

Unless you’re a diehard fan, wait for their new album in the spring.

It would help if the songs were better, but with all the up-and-down scales and chirp-chirp-chirpiness, the American Express commercial gradually gives way to a Riverdance special on pay-per-view.

There is a place in this world (Pottery Barn maybe, or a future Eddie Murphy romantic comedy) for the R(ap)&B cocktail party that is Finding Forever.

For a while, Magic Hour - the band's fourth full-length - lives up to the promise of its hilarious, zebra-centric-2001: A Space Odyssey cover art. But the wheels fall off with "Year of Living Dangerously," a campy, aimless doodle not even rescued by its random violin solo.

Nary a tippy toe strays from the well-trodden path; it's as if Lemmy and the boys spent every couple of years locked in a studio with their own discography and no outside noises that might besmirch the purity of their brand. There are occasional hints of self-awareness.

The songs start running together till they’re not distinct tracks so much as guitars and bass and drums and yelpy indie vocals that happen to have been recorded at the same time.

The echo-saturated clang works as background music if you’re washing dishes in a haunted house or performing at-home knee surgery, but hunker down with the sound by itself and it evaporates like stale smoke.

The results are hit-or-miss.

A curiosity from a true talent.

The King of Limbs, a breezy exploration of the depths of subliminal glitch-folk, is this band's admission that the labyrinth of post–OK Computer zigs and zags they've led their audience through may never again lead to an arena-rock goldmine.

Hamilton attempts to resuscitate it with his warm voice, but the record plods on with one mid-tempo nodder after another.

For the jaded among us, this is regressive and full of genre-contrivance.

The General Strike sticks to the same supposedly state-smashing standards that drove the previous six or so albums from these Pittsburgh-bred punks into redundancy.

Although the Cribs are very good at what they do, the songwriting on the album just feels tired and unfocused.

Part of the problem is Rihanna's essential blandness in a post-Gaga/post-Idol pop market, but mostly it comes down to the siren-song nature of her amazingly recognizable voice.

Their most subdued effort yet.

And so it goes with Mogwai's A Wrenched Virile Lore: a broad range of electro producers, ambient knob-twiddlers, and singer-songwriters re-assemble the Scottish post-rock champs' most recent studio album, the excellent Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, mostly with shitty bonus-feature-styled results.

This is the same ol' Korn you've loved or hated (or felt indifferently toward) since you first saw that slo-mo bullet in the "Freak on a Leash" video, except with de-tuned guitars swapped for garish, beefy synths.

Seaside Rock amounts to a log of underhashed production ideas from the test kitchen.

For a densely layered, expertly produced dance-rock album, this second full-length from British three-piece Friendly Fires is perplexingly bland.

In the end, the record seems an ascetic exercise, complete with drumstick count-ins.

In exploring his split psyche, T.I. forgets what made the excursion interesting to begin with: there’s good and evil in everyone, but you gotta mix the two to get a reaction.

More often, however, CooRosie appear uninterested in the listener's experience--and that can make Grey Oceans a bit of a slog. The cost of their commitment is you.

Very few of their melodies go anywhere memorable, and when they do, they never go anywhere else. ("Courage" plays like one long mid-tempo drone.)

Lack of body heat and dynamics aside, the ideas on Warm Heart of Africa are pretty strong, perhaps awaiting ironically fairer treatments in the hands of future remixers.

Long on tweedly solos, rambling structures, and songs about being trapped in space and time, Prior to the Fire--love the title, dudes, despite my disappointment--is sure to satisfy hardcore stoner-metal devotees with no fear of the occasional eight-minute track length. Everybody else should seek out "Hello Master."

The lyrics are nonsense about grotesque surgeries and a futuristic interface of man and machine; they’re sung with a weariness that suggests that even the singer is fatigued with this kind of thing.

Gordon isn’t much of a tune man; his melodies rarely take a memorable shape here, and his adenoidal singing turns what he does have into open-mic mush. The lyrics, too, are on a pretty low burn.

Call it what you want, just be prepared to call it something other than music.

Throughout, you can feel the tension between RJ's desire to make something real, in spite of his limitations as a performer, and his discomfort with his true strengths in sample-based pastiche. In the end, it's a colossal waste of talent and time.

So far--on two full-lengths and a pair of EPs--the results have been underwhelming. That trend continues on this homonymous disc.

Suuns' debut LP is pieced together from a few decent ideas and a lot of bad ones.

Galactic Melt is entertaining in a novelty sort of way, but the vintage (or vintage-sounding) equipment produces such over-the-top sonics that it sinks the record, unless you're super starved for some already-been-done nostalgia.

There’s plenty in the way of ambition on Widow City, but little substance to back it up.

They don’t always succeed on Walk It Off, in part because producer Dave Fridmann’s oversaturated-in-both-senses-of-the-word indie-psych sound does them no favors in their attempt to establish an identifiable TNT brand.

With a slapdash track list that intersperses previously unreleased cuts with lightly retooled versions of tunes from Left Eye's import-only solo debut, Eye Legacy still feels like an after-the-fact throw-away, one that makes you wonder just what its creators were attempting to say about their dearly departed friend.

With tracks like "LUV XXX," "Beautiful," and "Lover Alot," everyone's favorite dude-looks-like-a-grandma just can't let go of that screechy horndog rock.

The music simply crawls by in a maddeningly static mid-tempo blur, going about its melancholy business on the way to nowhere.

Agebjorn seems utterly uninterested in taking Shapiro to a new place--not even a different dance floor--and though you can't blame him for drawing out a good time, it feels as if we'd been here forever.

For a gangster, Banks sure plays it safe.

As a post-Occupy album, it's less ripped-from-the-headlines and more cribbed-from-older-and-better-ideas.

Even Folds’s knack for a well-placed f-bomb has devolved into a lazy device masquerading as irreverence. His attitude may remain young at heart, but his irony’s over the hill.

Argos's unrepentant superstar imitations aside, Brilliant! Tragic! holds some well-written standouts.

Somehow, though, they forgot the crucial dollop of excitement or charisma, so we're left with an earful of directionless heartbreak and failure.

This record is a sequel to 2007’s "The Stage Names," and it shares its predecessor’s concerns: artifice, authenticity, and above all, the sniveling insincerity of hazy-eyed media zombies.

The blithe, lyrical approach is misplaced in the context of Morello’s domineering, effects-laden guitar sound.

Brandon Flowers has gone on record saying he brought the songs on Flamingo to his fellow bandmates for the next Killers album and was given the brush-off.

The pointlessness is grating. XI Versions' final three songs do show signs of life--Animal Collective, Walls, and Pantha himself manage to work up a buzz--but they can't compensate for time killers by Lawrence, Carsten, and Efdemin that make inoffensiveness offensive.

WYWH is a darker, thinner, more digitized affair whose only compelling moments come courtesy of a new-found sex appeal of the disco variety.

Sounds hollow and uninspired.

Beady Eye's eagerly awaited debut represents Liam Gallagher's uninspiring foray into the spotlight without Noel, his battle-weary brother and Oasis's chief songwriter.

Bazan has, it's reported, fallen out with God and off the wagon, and those tumbles get painful airtime on his solid first solo LP, Curse Your Branches.

The Luyas do supply some exquisite instrumental ingredients--a French horn sent through pedals, an obscure zither-like contraption called the Moodswinger, and various electronic effects--but they have a tough time making anything memorable out of them. Timidity eventually renders their work tedious.

Lifeless and boring.

B.S. includes far more filler than it needed to.

Throughout, a messy æsthetic attempts to cover up pop sympathies--or simply proves that dissonance and sweetness needn't be kept in their separate corners.

It might be one of the year's worst albums, an underwritten, overarranged mess of factory-floor guitar fuzz, go-nowhere vocal melodies, limp electronic beats, and lyrical clunkers.

Though Daybreak generally fulfils that longing for the simpler days of 2001's Stay What You Are, it's ultimately hard to understand why it's taken almost three years to make such a simplistic record.

This may work as a singles record, but it lacks the depth to hold much interest.

The songs, a handful of covers and about a dozen originals, aren't terrible, but the ukulele gets really old, really quick.

The collection itself is haphazard; what's worse is that the individual tracks build and remain suspended in mid air by very thin and awkward threads, rarely growing into full-fledged arrangements.

Davis-Jeffers sounds bored throughout The Flexible Entertainer, and her languid, half-rapped vocals are entirely affectless.

Insipid lyrics, absolutely zero feel, and derivative riffs that make Godsmack seem ingenious add up to everything that gives metal a bad name.

With a clearer eye to the cultures whose stereotypes they’re furthering, the Bells could have made a provocative connection between the European forms they’re comfortable with and any number of traditional Middle Eastern and Indian instruments and forms they’re interested in but not serious about.

For the most part, singer-songwriter Craig Pfunder doesn't justify the presence of vocals and lyrics.

All Things Bright and Beautiful, 12 sterilized laptop clunkers that are indeed bright but far from beautiful. There's no maturity in sight.

If Esben and the Witch don't quell their sonic histrionics, they may not get a second curtain call.