An album that, despite its hallucinogenic tendencies, is painfully boring.

Sadly, there aren't many moments on An Argument With Myself that register strongly.

Hymns, unfortunately, does not mark the logical next step for the band, nor does it exactly tread new ground. Rather, it denotes a descent into self-indulgence that’s paradoxically reckless and complacent.

Where the dog-eared, snapshot ambient wooze of Twoism and Geogaddi once harbored a feverish throb, Tomorrow’s Harvest now prickles with hollow spaces: a fragmentary, pixelated symbolism has been lost in the construction of an outline of a broader system.

Chalk this one up as a failed experiment, albeit one that ups enthusiasm for explorations to come.

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.

I'm all about brevity when it's effective, but S-M 2's patchiness makes its 38-minute length feel much longer. The record isn't unlistenable or even awful, but it's filled with lackluster songwriting, ripe with pastiche, and drenched in a wall of effects that do nothing to mask these flaws.

Pink is muddy as a bowl of bad split pea soup, and twice as hammy.

It feels as if Smith is drawing from long-gone, innocent, pre-fame events in his life, but as they recede, his stance becomes more wistful and increasingly confused. The music, unfortunately, follows suit.

On most of Keep Your Dreams, Canyons are trying too hard to be everything all the time. It's obvious they have all the tools they'll need, but it'll be a little longer before they build something really worthwhile.

Rather than referring to primal transgressions, however, Cowgill refers to the performative transgressions of earlier musicians. There is nothing wrong with this approach, and yet there is something about King Dude's particular gloss on neofolk that I find naggingly inauthentic.

The songs drag, the lyrics lag depth, and many of the songs break down into nothingness due to a lack of concentration and effort.

Unfortunately, for all the polish and gut that Grammy-winning producer Vance Powell brings to help turn diarrhea to gold, the songs lack idiosyncrasy, and Diarrhea Planet’s winking anachronistic irony is lost.

Unfortunately, I Dreamed We Fell Apart straddles the unhappy line between experimental music and very un-experimental lap-pop.

By the time he hits the solo, which sounds like a cracked organ from a crazy kiddie fair, you might find yourself thinking that some riddles are just not interesting enough to solve.

Building a Beginning takes to heart every criticism of his 2013 release, inverting it into something that, though restrained and even surprisingly heartfelt at times, does very little to save itself from being forgotten.

The LP plays at depth and synthesis while making do with simply reproducing indie electro-pop tropes.

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.

Dumb Luck is an album that desperately tries to be spontaneous and carefree but eventually ends up sounding stunted and alienating.

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.

Ingenious in its conception as a soundtrack, weak and tedious as a standalone musical venture, an interminable experience despite its brevity.

Codes and Keys is littered with PDA for Gibbard's new celebrity wife Zooey Deschanel, but this especially garish monument to his muse would have been better placed on one of her She & Him album-wafers.

When Joyner’s at his best, he can break hearts in the most hopeful way possible; in these moments, he is as reinvigorating as a much-needed cry. But most of the songs on this album lack this quality, instead coming off as contrived and, as a result, harder to relate to.

Helena Costas and Danger Mouse combine the former’s folk pop proclivities with the latter’s penchant for hip-hop and psychedelia, and the results are mostly awkward and cumbersome.

The initial mystique of The Weeknd is gone, and we’re now confronted with the work of a young man who possesses an impressive voice, an incredible ear for production, and a complete lack of purpose in his confrontational, intensely graphic lyrical obsessions.

If anything, it's nothing: a dark, expensive, teenager programmed, radio-friendly, MTV-destined nothing.

Those pop songs, [not the ones on Herein Wild,] confess everything and never apologize. Herein Wild just disappears.

It features the same schizophrenic, influenced-by-everything quality of Dre's The Love Below, but where people were able to overlook the many boring-to-terrible tracks while skipping to "Hey Ya" or "Roses," The New Danger fails to feature as strong a centerpiece.

The LP isn’t internally coherent, isn’t particularly successful on its own terms, which is probably more of a sin than any imputed association with this or that philosophy could ever be.

There are some solid points buried deep down in the wreckage of Cole’s seven-bar pileup, but you’ll have to sift through a great, big, ambivalent pile of solecisms in order to get to them. As it turns out, that holds true for the vast majority of Born Sinner.

"It's Kickin' In" sounds like Linnell doing karaoke over a failed garage rock single, and most of the rest sounds like, well, Fountains of Wayne.

Here Comes the Cowboy sounds awfully similar to 1973’s Hosono House. But there’s a lack. Maybe it’s the dynamism displayed on Hosono’s debut that makes it so intrinsically enthralling, but on Here Comes the Cowboy, the whole thing feels more like American gaijin vs. Japanese cowboy copypasta.

Where Newcombe’s music once sounded fresh and lively, his political message both controversial and effectual, on My Bloody Underground his music is neither fascinating nor engaging.

There is too much focus (or carelessness, perhaps) on his herky-jerky flows that match drum for drum, and the simple rhymes and tired messages are pathetic.

All of the delicate, precious tom buildups that segue into invariably lofty choruses, all laced with the same pining slide guitars, overlay the record with a strummy, mid-tempo delirium that sets in once the considerable swagger of the first three tracks wears off.

Sadly, This is for the White in Your Eyes sees a band with great potential whose ambitions too frequently get the best of them.

Daft Punk have released an album so bland and repetitive that it may actually call into question all their past glory. It doesn't seem fathomable, but alas, the proof is seemingly inscribed in each note.

A real slog to get through.

The group is at their strongest going off on long, meditative tangents of minimalist techno, but too often GusGus obscures their instrumental prowess with lyrical absurdity.

This is a bloated, overlong rock record that shouldn’t have even considered breaking the 40-minute mark.

This robot-induced hypnosis leads less to genuine enlightenment than it does to pointless New Age dehydration.

It's All Around You middles about with infuriatingly placid tracks that suggest a fading band merely treading water.

The Pipettes are only fresh in the sense that they've appropriated Spector-influenced girl-pop for a new era.

Listening to World Waits, you get the feeling that it would be a more enjoyable record if Enigk didn't execute every single note with such immense, ridiculous fervor.

The Oranges Band are good at what they do, but The World & Everything in It seems destined to function as background music rather than as a focus for rapt listening.

[A] near-carbon copy of their debut record.

Maybe Now or Heaven isn’t an awful record, but it’s certainly one that strips away everything I felt was compelling about the band to begin with.

Simply put, the music on Swing Lo can't support its great ideas. To quote Dylan, "a song is anything that can walk by itself." Maybe time will prove me completely and utterly wrong, but as far as I can tell, nothing on Swing Lo walks by itself.

Ostentatious as it is, there’s no denying that Magna Carta… Holy Grail is filled to the brim with satisfying, big-budget production.... It’s just a shame that Jay-Z doesn’t rap ‘em for all they’re worth.

Musically, the album mines its entire aesthetic from a bargain bin of classicist hip-hop clichés.

The Dark Leaves is too uneven to transcend its shortcomings, and that poses more of a conundrum than if it had been simply awful. There are great songs here, but it’s frustrating to see them so outmatched by the lesser efforts.

As much as The Garden departs from past Zero 7 albums generically, it ultimately falls into the same trap: it readily signifies pop accessibility, but fails to communicate more than a vague aura.

Its total lack of affectation is the album's biggest problem. It feels like it's sequenced to fit some expectation of what types of songs an album should have.

The most frustrating thing about Currents is that, for probably the first time, it seems like Parker is writing songs that would be pretty decent and probably interesting if he freed them from this musty aesthetic and gave them room to express themselves.

Oddly, he's got a ton of talent, a great band, an excellent producer, and lots of committed fans, but he still comes across as needy and overbearing.

Hello Everything is his most disappointing release yet.

Unfortunately, Let Us Never Speak Of It Again barely registers any of the emotion or punch of the debut and, worst of all, goes ahead and adds positively dreadful lyrics to nearly all the songs.

Divided By Night has few worthy moments and a whole bunch earmarked for the couple of "Fast & Furious" films. The guys still have the goods, but this album will not be well-remembered.

You can’t fault the band’s energy or enthusiasm, but You and I doesn’t bring enough of its own ideas to the table to make it essential listening.

Because the album risks so much in its all-in politics, the songs on their own are more difficult to judge. For that reason, the album is enjoyable almost solely in small doses.

Scattergood’s voice is the star, but it can be utterly distracting, a vessel for an expressive, prolific writer who may be too afraid of the revision process.

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.

Fuck Buttons have created an aural ibuprofen, an auditory Novocaine.

In a time where it is possible for acts who made their careers in that early-90s cauldron of independent creativity to reform and remake themselves, it seems a cop-out to make such a risk-free album, especially since Hatfield had full creative control. Fan-funding could liberate, rather than stifle, even allowing experimentation; there's no boss to please, only fans to engage. But that doesn't happen at any point on There's Always Another Girl. Just more of the same.

It’s not that 31 Knots aren’t succeeding in flexing their musical chops--they just don’t know where to take them.

These tracks are lifeless, and the multitude of sounds turns to mud, eventually eating itself.

Taken in small bites, there are great moments here, but you're unlikely to clean your plate and ask for seconds for all 14 courses. I for one will be hanging out for dessert, but I don't imagine I'll be invited for dinner again.

Musically speaking, Bones is a promising young talent with the benefit of access to many other skilled players. Lyrically, however, he’s far from refinement.

The guitar work is all painted in one color and changes are predictable, while the vocals are less adventurous and human than before.

What's frustrating is that beneath the surface of LP4 there appears to be the basis for a great record. But its execution is too rote, too much the result of being so entrenched in the band's Ratatat-ness that the material is suffocated.

Parish is good at what he does, but I suspect he'll have a hard time finding an audience with patience to watch him do it.

After several spins, it appears that 'edginess' is precisely what's missing here; in fact, the listener is left pining for it, as almost every track floats along at its own pleasant, blissful pace--easy to swallow but difficult to digest.

If Snares is complexity incarnate, Lanois is distilled modesty. These are strengths that are realized individually but create discord in tandem. Their pairing is like eating apple pie topped with cheddar cheese: some are sure to find enjoyment in the combination, but for the rest of us, these pairings are best avoided.

Kweli still has an ear for beats, and despite some particular low points here, his lyrics were always overshadowed by his flow, which is as sharp as ever.

Lackluster sound quality, predictable track construction, and the utter absence of emotional push and/or pull yield a record that comes off more like a product placement than a work of art.

They are pros, the best at what they do, but this is running on empty.

Linkin Park’s The Hunting Party is a difficult, painful, rarely rewarding album.

Sleep Forever, if anything, is an assurance of their staying power; they could probably get away with releasing this same record throughout the remainder of their career.

For all of their wonderful contributions to modern pop music, McCulloch and Sergeant aspired for too much this time around.

For the most part, there is little here to take offense to.

Underneath Lil Xan’s disengaged delivery, TOTAL XANARCHY ends up slogging through his sketches of abandonment, addiction, and, conversely, fame and success, with total listlessness.

On the whole, these tracks feel partially-realized, like demos that didn’t get wholly fleshed out.

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.

This is the sound of a thin stench of burning bone coming from a kebab shop’s dumpster.

Is the Is Are, like its title, conjures up a nothingness that is suffocating, especially coupled with the way that the band sells this music as if it were some kind of spiritual exercise.

There's a professional, assured feeling [to] it, but its nagging lack of innovation or [a] truly memorable melody leaves me a little cold.

Not great, a few catchy moments, certainly not god-awful, but just bland enough that after three listens, all life is drained from it.

It's rare when rock of this ilk misses the mark, but somehow Pearls and Brass have accomplished just that with ease.

But as difficult as it may be to overlook the flaws on this record, May somewhat redeems himself with, heaven forbid, mere quaintness.

T.I. vs T.I.P. is mercifully light on the requisite skits illustrating its dichotomy, but you almost wish there were more of them to explain the album’s weird alchemy of simultaneously overwrought and undercooked production and flaccid, self-absorbed lyricism.

100 Lovers baffles with the breadth of its misfires; from sequencing to packaging design to instrumentation, this is a band taking bold steps in the wrong direction.

Essentially, the band only seems to have bit off a little more than could be chewed, and Outside Love feels like a slight misstep.

Repo runs out of ideas so quickly it starts to appropriate its own ideas.

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

I would stress that this conglomerate of half-baked songs should in no way reflect on the rest of Cursive's canon -- there is a reason most of these songs have gone largely unnoticed and unappreciated.

A flimsy and disposable album.

Flumina does exactly what it's meant to. Which is not very much.