Blood Red Shoes sound at their best when they manage to reign in their musical touch points and put them to work in their service.

With a bevy of somewhat indistinguishable tunes, a production aesthetic that keeps everything front, center, and earsplitting is a problem.

The lack of a unifying theme on this particular album leaves their past influences far downstream and without a paddle.

The musical accompaniment, courtesy of his more-famous friends in The Minus 5, is solid, workmanlike. Unfortunately, the vocals are placed front and center, and Harding’s inflection puts added emphasis on embarrassing lyrics.

There’s an attempt here to go back to the relative atmosphere of at least Going Blank Again, but the resulting music ends up sounding like the more reverb-heavy, turn-of-the-millennium British art-rock bands.

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

On Tomorrow’s Hits, we place our hands against the walls, we feel the familiar texture of recording studio foam, we lift ourselves up gently only to drop back down to the ground, actions of a bored child.

Absolutely the least offensive record you will probably not hear this year.

Despite its positives, the album falls far short of the impressive musical peaks of Kelly’s discography.

With nary an aural step forward from their hitherto records, Painted Ruins ends much in the same way it begins, not with a bang, but with a drone.

On The Blueprint 3, Jay-Z, for arguably the first time in his career, sounds tired and old; too tired and too old to create a new blueprint, but not to create a third copy; too tired and too old to create new styles and ideas, but not to regurgitate them; too tired and too old to tell a new story, but not to tell an old story of a time when swagga belonged to the gods, one in particular.

This is yet another album destined to become background music in a trendy clothing boutique. Sadly, I have a feeling it'll have more than one Concretes record there to keep it company.

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

It's rarely messy enough to be visceral, and rarely clean enough to be cerebral. Even the 30-minute running time is underwhelming. In fact, the album ends with a long electronic sigh, as if acknowledging that it hasn't accomplished anything.

It’s not a terrible album. It’s not a spectacular train wreck. It is, in fact, so remarkably unremarkable that neither a glowing nor incinerating score feel deserved.

None of the other songs are as instantly arresting, aside from “Plenty of Girls in the Sea,” which proves to be just as fruitless and repetitive as the aforementioned single.

Where xx was an album that got its hooks in you, Coexist becomes a somnolent atmosphere-in-itself, in which hooks are conspicuous by their absence. It all works best when the tempo rises (relatively speaking), as on "Tides" and "Swept Away;" still, the pulse races placidly.

Ultimately, High Places have succeeded in doing something that, on paper, seems an impossibility: they've managed to make an album that is undeniably focused around rhythms sound like an absolute slog.

Unfortunately, There’s Me and There’s You is a precipitate more than a catalyst, a document far less persuasive than a documentary about its own creation would be.

His songs are built around solid hooks and show enough dynamism to keep the listener from hitting the ‘next’ button, but when the album is through playing, there’s no pressing need to hit ‘play’ again.

That's what Cape Dory will be for many listeners--a toxic sugar rush full of empty calories.

Couples proves that Kate is no Jarvis, and, more importantly, The Long Blondes are no Pulp.

The album’s certainly well-produced, occasionally catchy, and at times even soothing in its simplicity, but it can also be dull and uninspired, like something I might put on when I want inoffensive background music for a relaxing social gathering.

Instead of in-your-face intricacy and complex rhythms, Travistan displays a much more restrained complexity that doesn't jump up and down for attention; and replacing the innovative vocal lines are cloying melodies that never seem to end.

Elephant Shell has it all if you’re looking for youthful mistakes from a well-meaning (but again, young) band that really, really, REALLY shouldn’t let the hype go to their heads.

A painful disappointment.

Content (pronounced like the noun, not the adjective) is, in many ways, a return to form for the group.

The pleasures that Pleasure describes are mundane to the point of tedium, trite beyond cliché. And the music itself is, despite the strength of Feist’s voice, mostly intolerable.

Soundgarden's best material conjures a dense atmosphere of gloom that renders Cornell's angsty lyrics portentous and significant. But few of the songs on King Animal evoke much of anything in the way of feeling.

While no one could accuse Sylvian of playing it safe, the exercises that make up Manafon are neither experimental nor aesthetically pleasing enough for me to recommend this album.

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

Let's Go Eat the Factory works as an offering to those obsessive enough to be satisfied just to see Sprout and Pollard up on the same stage and little else.

The Recession, then, is a portrait of the artist as an over-his-head young man.

Indeed, Annie’s given us a few winning singles but also a lot of glitz that can probably be ignored after one listen or two.

No doubt there's an EP's-worth of gems buried here that are worth returning to, but for the most part, New Love resembles its thematic obsession: it's a strained affair.

The lyrics here are trite and the melodies saccharine.

This is the new big British band? This is barely inspired enough to make it off campus.

While Nookie Wood suggests lusty concupiscence, naughtiness, and vim, these conjurations are foundered by big production and mastering straight out of 90s alt-pop radio

As the Chicagoan trio defines it on their debut album King Night, witch-house is a curious blend of aesthetics.

Unfortunately, the inspiration and vivid imagery don’t sustain, leaving you stuck in the middle of a boring anecdote.

The songwriting is pretty much entirely solid, and there are brief flashes of idiosyncrasy, but this album boils down to being a product of the excitement of influence and just being young playing and writing music, without ever remotely threatening to stand up as something worthy of all the critical saliva that’s already dripped onto bedroom carpets worldwide.

It changes the sounds of the band from the bombastic elastic to the crouched minor. It changes the hopes of the band from boundless to restrictive. It limps, self-conscious and careful.

“The Line,” “Winter Queen,” and “Wingsuit” share in the rest of the album’s sterile, self-parodying style of production, but set themselves apart with their uncommon catchiness relative to the rest of Phish’s studio discography.

There are enough genre-hopping and synergistic, trans-genre partnerships present on the tracklist that Long. Live. A$AP, its commercial bets hedged, feels not unlike a myriad of other major-label rap disappointments from nearly any other era of rap.

A real carnival of a mess, completely inconsistent, sometimes really horrifying, and, more often than not, entertaining.

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.

There's something inherently adolescent about an EP that veers sharply from genre to genre, each song an island, completely separate from those that precede and those that follow.

The album’s an impressive document of Barrett’s talent, but I don’t hear the hooks that similar acts like Belle & Sebastian built their name on. Without them, The Pica Beats remain an also-ran.

If we're ripe for an introduction of post-grunge sounds into the retro mélange - and given that the moment in question is now 15 years ago, no doubt we are - then we have here one among the early contenders.

Only about a third enjoyable.

The album tries really hard to be the soundtrack to both your trip to the disco and your trip down the rabbit hole, but doesn't offer any particularly compelling reasons for why you should make it either.

Its intentions are good, but it’s stuck in trying to make itself into something that it is not: frightening or bold or looming.

Freedomland is frustrating because it documents possibly compelling works by a band whose performances captured here were probably compelling, too. It just doesn’t reach the standards of prior work, so I’ll just keep waiting for their next studio album.

A Girl Cried Red replaces Nokia’s NYC authenticity for her inauthentic take on a genre that struggles to maintain itself.

Dimensional People wants to be a major rap album, complete with cameos stacked way high, all epic and prodigal. But it’s just not all there.

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 their best efforts, Free Reign marks just another step in Clinic's journey to unfortunately become even more forgettable.

With two exceptions (Desiigner and, uh, Damon Albarn), the [guest artists] completely fail to elevate the tracks in any way, an unfortunate consequence of needing to feature Charli XCX on your album because she’s good and popular as hell rather than because you and Charli XCX have made any particularly interesting music together.

The blandest rock n' roll record possible.

A change in demeanor accompanies this change in style, however, and it's a turn for the worse: Phoenix now gesture at being a Serious Group with Something to Say.

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.

Lily’s nonchalant declarations of self-esteem leave me cold. And as soon as she traded generically upbeat ska/reggae samples for a bunch of ho-hum electropop beats, she became indistinguishable from her imitators.

Frustrated fanboy headscratching aside, the point is simple: All Day is a misstep of the worst kind, wherein Gillis' craft devolves from transformative to parasitic.

This is easily the biggest disappointment of 2006.

This game of literal musical chairs completely cripples The Most Serene Republic’s musical aims to the point that the album’s 40-minute runtime feels 20 minutes too long.

Audio, Video, Disco is simply too unfocused, too half-baked, and too busy hiding its inadequacies with superficially interesting window-dressing to fit in either of those settings--or any other.

If The Raconteurs were any other group (that is, if The Raconteurs didn't have Jack White), the press/Blogosphere would slam it.

And the mixing problems extend far beyond Corgan’s voice. The Band of a Hundred Murderous Guitars has turned into a modern-radio-rock band.

In some ways, it is as an exercise in stripping away everything that makes The Flaming Lips such a truly special group, leaving only that which serves as decorative tinsel to their music, hanging limp and lifelessly in the air.

Musically, there are too many things going on and too few things going on. Every track sounds more or less the same, and every track sounds like a poor heyday tribute.

What Will We Be is a better, more realized album, but it’s still a dud, filled with mediocre, half-composed songs and tediously unfocused songwriting.

While the tension and confusion have passed, we are unfortunately left with a pretty disappointing piece of work.

Imperial Teen sound here like they're trying to squeeze some new flavor out of a chewed-up piece of gum.

The shallow cynicism and apathy that animates so many of its songs are under-interrogated by its writers, instead finding form as a pessimist’s non-committal, inconclusive pouting.

What was once shambling and humble and fun has turned into another anonymous, swaggering, guitar-driven indie rock act.

Wildlife is nothing more than an album that sounds fine in the background--even at a volume you couldn’t help but pay attention to--yet ultimately fails to make any kind of memorable impression.

It’s “Lost Boys and Girls Club,” “Cult of Love,” and “Trouble Is My Name” (“Trouble is my name/ Is it your name too?”), endless clichés in songwriting, narrative, subject, and sound.

LaValle’s been trading in spitshined tonal conventions and vacuum-sealed beauty for quite some time now, and this might well be his best effort at putting it to record. But there are already three Album Leaf LPs that do this exact same thing, and the prospect of him doing that thing slightly better simply fails to excite.

There’s potential for a good album from the group, but they have yet to find a unique voice and passion with which to write.

The sound of Stigmata is grayed and stale--reaching, perhaps, for 18th-century Baroque, but instead winding up stuck in a rusty soundcard from 1998.

Every aspect of the album sounds like the full-length equivalent of a Spotify Chill Out playlist: flat, disposable, inoffensive (though “technically-sound”) 2010s muzak.

Sure, Nine Black Alps may be a more "genuine" concoction of Nirvana's formula, but how can this be considered revelatory or of interest when it comes across as so faceless?

Menos el Oso takes the act of melodizing the banal to dizzyingly silly new heights.

Maybe we're supposed to love this album because it's the musical equivalent of a KFC Double-Down, filled with fancy co-stars and production, deep-fried, and devoid of any intellectual or nutritional value.

Its songs are mostly amalgams of tired pop music tropes/techniques and trite realizations

In the end, Ribot’s considerable talents are sadly lost among 12 disjointed tracks that range from out-of-place cacophony to irritating cliché.

Our Love To Admire isn’t even a contractual obligation to push off without care. But boy does it sound like one; a band phoning it in, out of steam, and running on a few lingering fumes and smoldering coals.

There’s no sense of cohesion or flow between any of these songs, partially due to a clear lack of thought devoted to these conceits, but mostly because every M. Ward- and Conor Oberst-penned song sounds the same lately.

Sometimes, like on the outstanding "Wrecking Ball," the emotion calcifies into catchy, mature hooks, propelled forth by Cyrus' oft-underestimated vocal heft. Then again, the breakup also produced "FU," a dismally adolescent electro-soul duet with French Montana.

Colors dispels a greater notion of contemporary selfhood with its sheer tastelessness. It holds status as the most truly perplexing move from the artist to date. Unfortunately, the result of that move is borderline unlistenable.

This project was D.O.A. from the moment Ghost announced it a year back, and hip-hop fans should consider themselves lucky that there’s at least a few salvageable moments in Wizard of Poetry.

When it’s watered down by this much sneakerhead aestheticism, it becomes hard to even hear the culture-shaking subversion that lurked in the sounds of Machinedrum’s influences.

Everything about Everything is Love feels superficial, from the artists’ constant pronouncement of their love for each other to their engagement with topics like fashion, art, watches (this gets its own category), social issues, how great their friends are, sports, and, indeed, their own lives. The most boring aspect of the album is its centerpiece: the couple’s obsession with their wealth.

Where The Excitement of Maybe shines--like a harvest moon--is in production, composition, and musicianship, but these alone aren't enough to sustain the distinctive voice Cervenka has spoken in so boldly, particularly when they're employed in the service of pastiche.

Only toward the end of the record does BJTM finally let up, delivering a couple relaxed and half-realized shoegaze jams (“Super Fucked” and “Our Time”) that come close to being good. Sadly, it is all for naught.

Unfortunately, two good songs do little to temper the overall disappointment with this new direction, and having thoroughly enjoyed Take Me to the Sea, it really pains me to denigrate its successor.

The thick and poorly affected patois, the overproduction, and the sheer terribleness of the songs on Trapped Animal seem, at best, a huge dent in The Slits’ otherwise immaculate armor.

Your willingness to stick with McPhun from here on out depends entirely how much you enjoy listening to music that sounds like a meticulous recreation of 80s dance pop.