It doesn’t break any new ground, but it’s not a retread. It’s just good, for you and your soul.

As far as products go, B.o.B. is, at the very least, highly marketable, if not terribly satisfying. The Adventures of Bobby Ray, like bubblegum, loses its flavor after about 15 minutes.

While definitely not an ideological Plan 9 soundtrack, it’s not an unearthly eyeful either.

I'm all for musicians not taking themselves too seriously, but with such audacious, irreverent, and yet captivating material populating the bulk of the album, it is a supreme letdown to finish on such strangely muddled notes. Still, Dead Zone Boys is worth some serious attention.

An album that is, at best, a dilution of the real experience it's trying to capture.

If the songs weren’t quality, it would be easy to write these guys off, but the tunes on Living on the Other Side are enough to make me consider charging a few tanks of gas to the credit card and seeing the ocean. And that’s saying something.

Share The Joy sees our own Vivians enter into a similar contretemps: locking horns with death and with demons (literally, on "Trying To Pretend"), they achieve a narrative victory that nonetheless remains, for the auditor, a work in progress.

This album will please Supergrass-adoring simpletons merely looking for a new album by their favorite band, but to everyone else it should be considered a major disappointment.

Outside of the few moments of innovation, though, very little will strike one as all that inspired.

Although the construction of these songs are as stacked as on other F&O albums, this time around, the piling up of bridges, solos, and refrains only adds to House of Spirits’ tangible claustrophobia.

Strip away voices, acoustic guitars, and the lullaby-ish balladry, and you have substantial grooves, declarative beats, and mesmerizing blends of fuzzed, meandering synthesizers clanging and cooing.

If Bones is too densely packed to inspire, at least that’s a good quality for a foundation to have.

The shift in styles more readily exposes the band's strengths and weaknesses.

Amid the minor missteps and business-as-usual pleasantries, though, there is one winner of a track. Album opener “Wiggmann” finds Japanther supplementing their pop craftsmanship with an equal measure of ingenuity.

This set of witty pop songs fits perfectly in the musical panorama of the last 15 years: there are no underground rock references, no orchestral pop sensibilities, no vacuous attempts at updating a 'decades-old' sound to modern audiences.

The album is full of familiar tropes dressed up in gold and leather, and the songs are wrapped in a plastic that stops our touch--turns it cold, numb from feeling the electricity of the body, of the night.

The lyrics mostly follow white-kid reminiscences, and it's best just to slot them in with all the rest of early-90s-mining that goes on on Old Friends, because they're forgettable.

Despite occasional flourishes, Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy is an average set by a band who should be far beyond releasing anything less than stellar.

Exquisite Corpse's saving grace is that there is enough variety to its ensemble of guest performers to keep the listener somewhat interested.

There's a primeval sense of exuberant abandon here that, again, many bands working in similar territory try to capture, but that is rarely manifested so completely. And for hookiness, this is as habit-forming an album as you're likely to come across.

The only thing Arcade Fire’s Everything Now is about is Arcade Fire, which is its most pernicious and pathetic quality. Arcade Fire are no longer Orpheus and Eurydice, lovers doomed to tragedy; now they are Narcissus, the Greek hunter who lost the will to live after staring at his own reflection in a pond for too long. They ask their listeners to participate in this cynicism as they grasp so falsely at explanations for why “we” are like this.

The timing may be off, but Total transcends trends to be one of the year's best dance records, and a likely cult classic in the making.

Stay Trippy distills the sonic extremes of contemporary hip-hop into a potent hybrid of radio-friendly sheen and hard-knocking street fatalism.

It's pretty much all the same synth leads, bang-bang beats, and tired rhymes as every other Aftermath related project since The Eminem Show, which wasn't that great either.

With 13 songs to sit through, it all sounds like the same riffs, verses, choruses, and rhythms in slightly different contexts. It also sounds like a big disappointment from a band that roared out of the gate with several nice 7-inch cuts and a strong debut album.

This album has been done before and lacks the originality or quality of songwriting to merit repeated listens or set it apart from the scores of others playing this type of music.

Savage Imagination, the duo’s second full-length album, arrives little over a year after Toropical Circle and represents a remarkable upgrade to their shared sound, blasting their day-glo explorations through a mosaic approach to sound source layering and live multitasking

SZA remains a captivating, interesting singer, but the focused singularity that made S such a rewarding listen is largely absent here.

These United States sidesteps what could have easily been part of a superfluous boy-and-his-guitar genre by folding classic standards and varying its instrumentation and pop arrangements enough to create a warm and subtle structure, making for an altogether fresh and uniform interpretation of railroad folk introspection.

Outside tastes like having returned to my favorite bar to find they've redone the menu. Only this time, all the improvements are positive ones.

The reinventions that fare best are the ones that come from the minds and hands of producers who dare to alter the attitude of the original compositions.

Overall, however, Money is hit-or-miss. The less structured tracks often get lost in the shuffle, resulting in stretches of floundering in between the more highly developed tracks.

Ask The Night is a dose of a kind of southern comfort that my doctor might actually approve of.

The harsh truth makes itself clear: overdubs and studio pre-meditation trivialize Johnston’s music.

Despite her best efforts, the non-instrumental tracks still suffer from a kind of sameness that causes them to run together.

By any other band's standards, Winchester Cathedral would qualify as a strong to very strong effort. However, the feel of sameness prevents the record from surpassing the sum of its parts.

This is easily the biggest disappointment of 2006.

The recording captures the irrecoverable magic of a first meeting and encapsulates it.

Year in the Kingdom suggests whatever band he’s drumming for is ultimately inconsequential; this backwoods wanderer seems fully capable of detailing his wreckage on his own.

It's the clingiest and most needy record I've heard in a while.

The result is an experimental pop album that's easy to appreciate, but difficult to fully connect with.

Despite the pristine texture, though, many of the melodies find themselves veering into the frankly repulsive world of adult contemporary.

Earth Junk’s parts are greater than their sum.

The more you listen, the worse it gets.

Even if it's derivative, Red Bedroom is very catchy.

The Bedlam in Goliath is an exhausting and overwhelming effort that fails to leave any tangible impression.

I sense a more natural sense of songcraft here. Banks is still trying too hard, seemingly attempting to write songs he thinks people will like rather than songs that, whether simple or arpeggio-filled, he and his mates like.

Dirty Gold feels like a statement, an arrival.

Moments of its 44 minutes are as hard to stomach as anything Xiu Xiu are ever likely to record.

Just know that Architecture in Helsinki have enough energy to continue cranking out these adrenaline and saccharine cocktails until you do.

While Don't Climb on and Take the Holy Water is a nice change of pace and a pleasant excursion in the free-drone for an underrated guitar band, it lacks any real defining moments that would make it a more noteworthy and essential album.

The songs are better than solid. They're catchier than catchy. These songs are just good.

Eyes At Half Mast seems to be, on one level, an exploration of the horizons of the style of music that Talkdemonic themselves invented, but a lot of it retraces steps already taken, albeit with a noticeable upping of the proverbial ante as far as energy goes.

Octahedron isn’t a representation of the best The Mars Volta are capable of, but it is a glimpse into the power they possess when they better harness their capabilities.

Perhaps the most that can be said for Have Fun With God is that it is reverent of its exceptional source material.

Even if it is a bit less adventurous, many of the tunes are right up there with anything the band has done.

Fans of Iggy Pop would do well to give Preliminaires a spin, since it showcases a side of the artist not readily visible in his other work.

If you can get past the hype, you'll find that For Screening Purposes Only is a solid, sometimes spectacular debut from an exciting group of young'uns.

I Love You, It's Cool is an indication of the band's ability to actually live up to the hype and promises that have previously, sometimes carelessly, been thrown their way.

This is techno at its most individuated, the drama of small, melodic transitions between layers of simple, emotive phrases sought in weirdsigged box jams.

On Talahomi Way, the Llamas are in fine, optimistic form, taking a holiday outside of time, to a place where Brian Wilson converses with Shuggie Otis over mai tais, major seventh chords are once again heard in pop songwriting, and distortion is something that happens in a funhouse mirror.

Some Sweet Relief’s beauty starts to wear kind of thin on repeated listening.

Some will find the album’s often starry-eyed nature vaguely overdone, and it’s this more than anything else that will turn them off. However, for those who fall weak at the knees when the strains of R&B, soul, and hip-hop hit their ears, even in an idiosyncratically distorted form, the post-millennial quotations and evolutions of In My World will be love at first listen.

Co-opted as they may be, the best tracks tend to be the ones that aren’t attempting to mine old hooks for new hits.

They finally turned their funhouse mirrors inwards and crafted a Mature Album in a way that only they could, refracting their own past work through the same broken prism that they’ve spent years pulling pop and rap through.

It's obvious after a few listens that the weight of the talent collected here hurts White People as often as it helps.

The depth and craft in these songs keep The Sun interesting and make its inspired moments that much better.

Familial is a worthwhile attempt at the contemporary folk that has been bastardized by many, coddled by some, and ignored by most. In this regard, perhaps Selway has forged an experiment more daring than you might think.

Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is a weepy response to the Postal Service.

It's a joy to hear him in such audibly great spirits, even if his most cognizant album effort in decades isn't some kind of miraculous knockout

While Nothing Bad has great, well-written, dynamic pop songs, the album suffers from length.

Mediocre... I'm just so used to this indie dance sound that Le Tigre just sounds boring in the context of Fall 2004.

With Echo Ono, despite their disposition to meaty and minimalist hard rock, Pontiak have shown that there is music beyond what they know.

These are performative anthems, which use the sonic and affective history of their sounds to construct towering emotional peaks. It is essential inasmuch as it succeeds in touching on something inherent, drawing from a pre-conscious set of sounds to create music that is as striking as it is affecting.

There is nothing like Transatlaticism's "Sound of Settling" here to offset the never-ending stream of ballads and down-tempo songs.

The record can at times feel static and repetitious, revisiting the same structural devices numerous times and using a lot of the same timbres and ambient sounds on every track.

Kozelek spends a lot of time on Common as Light giving us his broadly “common sense” liberal pluralist live-and-let-live shtick, punctuated by grumpy bashings of “hipster” culture and its parades of regenerated tenement buildings and juice bars, music journalists, and Father John Misty, but it’s only on 10-minute opener and standout track “God Bless Ohio” that he really bares his soul.

Full of spirituality and hope, these new songs lack a thrust.

Bulldozer is essentially just an impersonation of a Snares record circa 2005, masterfully percussed but otherwise unsubstantial.

The songs all sound pretty much the same; this could be Avril Lavigne, Sheryl Crow; hell, it could be Christian Contemporary.

On this new album, it's not so much a problem that they remain stuck in the 90s politically, but more that their music seems so irrelevant sonically and willing to wallow in a mid-tempo techno-metal goth-night ghetto.

Like all things retro, Faunts find themselves stuck between nostalgia and total recall, unable to determine the criticality of their appropriation.

With the exception of a few standout tracks, on one hand we are not engaged with memorable melodies that would lean the album toward the poppier side of 80s synth and its contemporary revival; but on the other, there is not enough complexity here to engage the deconstructive pleasure characteristic of long-form dance music.

It’s a difficult album to love, or even like. But, for all its faults — and there are many — there is enough here to make one think that maybe, just maybe, Bloc Party are capable of making, with their third LP, the kind of challenging yet highly accessible pop album they think they’ve made here.

Relying heavily on posturing and tired song structures, lacking the incisive commentary and pointed humor that it strives for, Music's Not For Everyone is a record that fails on many fronts.

Props are due for not recycling the same album over and over again--something he could probably do for awhile before anyone would call him on it --but, unfortunately, the new approach results in Bianchi’s most banal album yet.

It’s the endearing uniqueness of this coupling that give Catfish Haven an edge over the plethora of contrived Americana wanna-bes currently littering the musical landscape.

His legacy is confirmed and almost nothing he does could harm that, but it also seems as though the young bucks of the music world are progressing the framework more so than he.

Comets on Fire, 90 Day Men and No Doctors all released albums within the last year that proved classic rock to be relevant in today's music community. The difference between these bands and Black Mountain is that it doesn't sound like the members of Black Mountain had to crush their souls to write their songs.

Some of these beats are really interesting and unique, almost flawlessly incorporating subtle elements of jazz, folk, psychedelia, and the boogie-woogie rhythm of J Dilla, whose two appearances on the album are characteristically powerful. Too often, though, DOOM and his guests offer inconsistent, barely-there performances.

There are no embarrassing stabs at pop crossovers, no bitter jabs at the record industry. Just tuneful and accomplished, if somewhat anachronistic and faceless, BIG MOODY ROCK.

While it’s clear that the album harbors a sign of affection, there’s just no room for the audience to revel in the appreciation that makes it so.

They've got all the right footnotes and they know their way around a hook, but A Thousand Heys doesn't carve out a distinctive enough place for itself amid this year's crop of guitar-wielding miscreants.

The style is, in fact, so far from themselves and close to Smith that I'm going to assume this is a one-off mourning effort. If it is, it's worthwhile for anyone moved by Smith's death; but if they make another, it'd be extremely blasphemous.

Trans Am's Liberation is one of those rare albums that combine great musicianship, irony, sonic diversity, and originality. And to top it all off, the album rocks.

In essence, it’s an improvisational nightmare that leaves you feeling extremely uncomfortable for an entire hour, while concurrently having you wish you could lie down to listen.

It is Moby’s right (as well as his wont) to repurpose the same songs, the same structures over and over again. It is my own right, however, to choose to listen to something else entirely.

Far from the naval-gazing, self-conscious banality one might expect from such a young artist, Moondagger is filled with moments of philosophical prowess and intelligence.