It's pure BTS, but without enough sparkle or rough-hewn beauty to be memorable.

Even through patches of mediocrity, QOTSA still offer something healthy and respectable to the hard rock world, but too much of anything can be bad for you.

A greater focus on club anthems and straightforward songwriting broadens the band’s appeal but sacrifices originality in the process.

By so clearly rejecting the terms and expectations of rock and pop, The Drift asks fairly explicitly to be taken as a serious work of art. However, for all its highbrow aspirations, it seems to fall between two realms, lacking the innovative reach that would make it a credible presence among contemporary avant-garde compositions.

Despite the frigid bore of the album's latter half, the initial grandiosity of the songwriting and vocals make it possible that the Killers can avoid the bleak fate shared by other new wave gimmick acts.

Unfortunately, his lyrics don't measure up; he writes songs that repeat a phrase or two in lieu of any sort of finished thought.

Devil's Playground makes like it's 1983 all over again.

There are problems. For one thing, some of these songs have been done to death. More important, their voices don't blend all that harmoniously, and not all the arrangements do the tunes justice.

Begins the band's slide into sonic monotony and lyrical malaise.

Beyond the musical unevenness of an album whose finer qualities interleave those mounting miscalculations, a rising suspicion that misery is of more comfort to her than happiness makes the tenor of Williams' songs increasingly hard to bear.

A record which adheres closely to the formula but fails to generate any sort of spark from it.

A Ghost Is Born is a textbook example of an album created to fulfill expectations the band doesn't necessarily share.

Perhaps those who regard the Northwesterners' compositional skills with awe will find this a fascinating prism of strong creative angles, but as a follow-up to an extraordinarily gorgeous web of noise and delicacy, it leaves a lot to be desired.

It’s easily the weakest album in her career and sounds even worse when compared to the subtle path of Beautiful Creature.

A stunning flop, a failure on almost every conceivable level -- conceptual, artistic, commercial.

The type of banal, greeting-card rubbish that even Diane Warren would probably find trite.