With Getting Away With Murder, Papa Roach offer fans of this sound an appropriately hard punch in the face. But there's a hollow sound as the bones collapse, because all that's supporting it is expensive art direction and a big scaffold of clichés.

If you look beyond everything that's downright embarrassing about this album -- the reliance on interpolations rather than original songwriting, the amateur-at-best rapping, the generic beats -- you'll notice a few minor improvements.

Given her promotion to the Paula Abdul seat on American Idol, there's a distinct irony in having the first sounds on Jennifer Lopez's Love? all twisted through a vocoder: she may be judging the pop purity of legions of hopeful singers, but even she can't resist the siren call of the computer.

Too many of the cuts appear pieced together in the studio, never once capturing the energy of a band playing live.

Seems slickly over-produced and a little forced.

Rubin skillfully retains a veneer of authenticity throughout Shangri La, adhering to the Dylan in Greenwich Village vibe of the 2012 debut and never letting the electric expansion feel like exploitation, but all this care is applied to songs that are deliberately slight.

Messy, noisy, directionless, and painfully shy on both tunes and purpose... and winds up sounding a bit like a parody.

Apart from the lovely ambient instrumentals that open and close it, the album is all valley and no peaks.

A joyless experience.

He's certainly less distinctive as a rapper than he is as a singer--both lyrically and vocally--original only for the level of his combativeness and the number of times he references his luxury coupe and wrist wear.

A less than engrossing record from Piano Magic was bound to happen at some point, but few could have predicted something as dull, drab, and ultimately powerless as Songs From the Chronic Fatigue Ward -- er, Writers Without Homes.

For those listeners who pine for a world when Seven Mary Three received heavy rotation, this will satisfy, but anybody expecting the spark of Jane's Addiction or even a dose of Navarro's campy on-camera charm will be sorely disappointed.

Mildly entertaining but tremendously taxing.

It's not that the Offspring sound behind the times on their eighth album, Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace--it's that they sound disconnected from it.

It's clear that despite laudable ambitions, comeback albums should be focused and lean, not as flabby as this one.

All this adds up to one of Neil Young's genuinely strange albums, a record that's compelling in its series of increasingly bad decisions.

Though Moonlust is pleasant, it so actively tries to re-create the feel of its inspirations that it is more a distracted reverie than anything else.

In the case of Nobody's Daughter, the tattered, ragged survivor in the gossip rags is no different than the one on record, both capturing Courtney in an inevitable, not so romantic decline, inadvertently turning every cliché into truth as she slowly slips into her final role as alt-rock's Norma Desmond.

On the proper What About Now, the group is striving to sound big and important yet winds up sounding small.

Perhaps if this production were scaled back a notch or two, Fearless Love wouldn’t feel quite so oppressive, but its oversized sound fits Etheridge’s sense of self: she’s boxed herself into a corner where she only makes music that sounds important…whether it actually is important winds up being beside the point.

Though they might lack the minimal lyrical subtlety of the bands of that era, musically Steel Panther will scratch the itch of anyone craving a little hair metal excess.

Hoodstar only makes it all the more apparent that the St. Louis MC's overnight popularity was like lightning in a bottle.

Give or take a couple hot tracks, this release is not likely to play a significant role in his legacy.

Despite all their newly developed relative nuances, Nickelback remain unchanged: they're still unspeakably awful.

Her voice is damaged, and there's not a moment where it sounds strong or inviting. That alone would be disturbing, but since the songs are formless and the production bland -- another reason why the hip-hop announces itself, even though it's nowhere near as pronounced as it has been since Butterfly -- her tired voice becomes the only thing to concentrate on, and it's a sad, ugly thing, making an album that would merely have been her worst into something tragic.

The dividing line between these two types of songs is a subjective one, to be sure, but even devoted fans would probably agree that the bulk of The Bundles--the first recorded output from a longstanding though intermittent collaboration between these two leading lights of anti-folk--lands sadly but squarely in the latter category.

At the very least, it would do Avary a world of good to have someone to urge him to ease up on the throttle of his vocals.

They skated by the first time through, due to a couple of fluke catchy songs, but they have no hooks or full-fledged songs this time around, and suffer dramatically because of it.