It's not that Elbow's half-Travis, half-early-Radiohead Britpop shoegaze routine is patently shitty; it's just hopelessly forgettable. [Mar 2006, p.134]

Heady Fwends has racked up about one song's worth of decent material-only none of it is in the same song.

12 tracks that are so feeble and lifeless, it's actually painful to put effort into reviewing them. [Jun 2005, p.160]

The contemporary-grunge and vintage New York-punk nods packaged here are unthreatening; singer Lillian Berlin's vocals are forgettable; and his lyrics remain more stupid than socially aware. [Dec 2005, p.214]

Our quality of life would instantly improve if this disc didn't exist. [Feb 2005, p.94]

Plays out like a tepid, second-rate version of Iowa, which pretty much makes it a third-rate anything else. [Jul 2004, p.142]

The larger flaw of This Is All Yours is the excessive studio ornamentation attached to songs like "Choice Kingdom" and "Hunger Of The Pine" that fails to cover up unbalanced, disjointed writing. [Oct 2014, p.96]

One-man synth-pop act Ernest Greene's singing lacks firm consonants and dribbles out unintelligibly most of the time over the most compelling of his stripped-down electronic compositions. [Aug 2011, p.122]

The second album from the glorified solo project Babyshambles is a half-baked abortion. [Dec 2007, p.184]

Half this record sounds like a field recording from a daycare play room. [Mar 2002, p.84]

Will make you thankful your stereo has an easily accessible off button. [May 2005, p.136]

Patton's latest fantasy-headache is a one-song, 55-minute conceptual misfire that careens from acid-casualty chamber music to high-velocity cartoon metal. [Feb 2004, p.82]

Disastrous. [Oct 2004, p.144]

Built off of two piano chords or a single guitar riff, Felix'a music is as ho-hum as their vocals, and without diversity in the songs' chord structure, the album blurs together until what's left is a coffee-table coaster. [Dec 2009, p.113]

The guitars are processed into high-tech oblivion, and every song is eight minutes long when it should be five. [Aug 2003, p.100]

In the Grace of Your Love is lethargic and shapeless. [Oct 2011, p.109]

Nearly everything that made Fitz And The Tantrums interesting has been thrown out the window for More Than A Dream. Fitzpatrick has run out of anything interesting to say, instead relying on awful cliches. [Jun 2013, p.96]

As singer-songwriters go, Barlow's not worthy to make a Starbucks run for Conor Oberst, Jim White, Joseph Arthur or Chris Carrabba. [Mar 2005, p.122]

Sounds like a teenage Faith No More at their first practice. [Sep 2003, p.116]

Painfully pretentious, plodding, self-indulgent drivel. [Jun 2003, p.97]

Pathetic. [Jul 2005, p.182]

Nauseatingly upbeat. [Oct 2003, p.138]

In one word: lackluster. In two words: dead boring. [Aug 2001, p.90]

Tricky without edges and paranoia is freakin' dull. [Sep 2003, p.118]

The vocals are almost hilariously monotone, the lyrics loaded with crass, elementary rhymes, and the instrumentation is simply dreadful. [Jul 2014, p.98]

The lyrics on Folker make the tripe in Westerberg's early solo material... read like T.S. Eliot. [Oct 2004, p.144]

Orchestral additions are cool, but here they dominate both in terms of volume and notes-per-minute, transforming potentially aristocratic black metal like "The Cult Of Venus Aversa" and "War" into poorly layered sonic slop. [Dec 2100, p.111]

Umpteen attempts at serious lyrics topple this album right off the runway. [Apr 2014, p.91]