On their self-titled fourth album, one colon-blowing mid-tempo after another shows the strain.

The stiff, weirdly disengaged, single-note guitar solos and Kidman’s monochromatic death screams don’t make you want to keep dragging yourself through the record.

So while there's no lack of diversity over Shaman's 70-plus minutes, that's also its undoing: it doesn't hang together. [#12, p.152]

Stylistic attention-deficit disorder dilutes the focus and also dates it. [#17, p.137]

Again, the results are a mutant virus of gorgeous and bland, grainy and slick. [Mar 2007, p.135]

What's the point of a cheesy goth-pop record that isn't any fun? [May 2006, p.105]

Producer Desmond Child trips up the Meatman by valuing metal flash over the altruism of want-you-need-you humanity.

In their desperate eagerness to please, HHH offer a few modest pleasures. [#12, p.143]

The Coxon-less Blur seem half a band, adrift in a loopy, moody head cold. [May 2003, p.115]

Too often... the results sound messy and carry a hint of prog-rock pomposity. [Mar 2004, p.115]

There's something forgettable and half-finished about a lot of it. [#11, p.124]

Its penitent but hopeful mood still suggests a Catholic equivalent of corporate Christian rock

They’ve buried those strengths deep to make way for a humorless new approach that borrows the turgid bleariness of Oasis (“Living’s much too easy and dying will be some kind of bore”) but misses the Gallaghers’ pomp and glory.

If she's trying to skewer empty luxuries, her delivery is too disengaged to register as ironic or feisty. [Apr 2009, p.63]

'Up' sounded like the work of a band getting its bearings. On 'Reveal,' they're still finding their way. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.110]

We're left with the immutable Corgan sans ambition: his narrow whine, melodies not quite predictable but dull anyway and a misty worldview with collegiate airs. [Jul 2005, p.116]

Every chorus is a rousing tribute to overstatement. [#17, p.137]

The utterly flavorless repertoire she sings here... steers her toward Lite FM. [Jan/Feb 2005, p.106]

Sound[s] like bad Southern swamp songs covered by the world's most miserable bar band. [Sep 2005, p.131]

This album, the second from Angels and Airwaves, is thick with U2-aping major-chord bluster and well-meaning meaninglessness.

The nu-metal and new wave sendups are too conventional to work as either comedy or music--and the nonstop woman-bashing becomes repugnant fast. [Nov 2005, p.131]

A startlingly generic effort. [Sep 2003, p.120]

As limp as a broken guitar string. [Oct 2004, p.114]

So easygoing they're like going nowhere, his voyages to the beaches, beers and frathouse memories are easier journeys than the saccharine mountaineering that occupies the rest of the disc. [May 2004, p.119]

They just sound cranky here, and their beats are mostly perfunctory. [Nov 2004, p.137]

Glumly generic. [Aug 2003, p.124]

Blame Seger for aiming no higher than to be the soundtrack for the next Larry the Cable Guy feature. [Oct 2006, p.142]

Only one song exhibits any nuance or creativity--a cover of Supertramp's 1977 lark "Give a Little Bit." [May 2006, p.106]

A suite of weak songs and half-finished ideas. [Mar 2004, p.120]

It's groove-deprived and difficult, and not in a particularly inventive way. [May 2008, p.78]

Kravitz has evolved merely from one set of retro-’70s surfaces to another, with uncharacteristically uninspired hooks.

Isaacs’s indistinct, flannel-waving wail doesn’t add anything to these titanic anthems of soul and struggle, which don’t say much beyond: Dave Navarro, still breathing, still taking meetings.

Skimps on warmth and even grit except on a few blood-curdling screams--when, blessedly, you don't have to hear their words. [Nov 2003, p.119]

The saggy country-rock complaints about corporatization and alienation [Farrar] offers... sound like submissions to an Air America poetry contest. [Apr 2007, p.121]

Give Whirlwind Heat this: The first time out, they've managed to sound exactly like the worst bands downtown New York coughed up in 1982. [May 2003, p.125]

The default setting is funk-pop bombast augmented by horribly dated electronica. [Nov 2004, p.128]

If America was a self-respecting nation, there'd be a street named after him in every city. Alas, if they're based on this record, we'll find ourselves striding Vague Call to Goodness Street.

The problem is not the lumbering, mid-tempo beats or the terrible lyrics (“Synthesizer, crystallizer, realizer”), although neither help. It’s the sense that you’ve heard every synthesized squelch and ambient breakdown before.

Every track emerges as ugly and joyless as the one before. [Oct 2004, p.127]

The lightness and clarity that once set Hales apart is here squashed by overwrought arrangements of lesser melodies that replace pop classicism with conventional rock bluster.

The songs are soggier, the sentiments more banal. [Dec 2005, p.154]

As overblown as he is oversensitive, reaching toward the rafters whether his jumbled platitudes about wounded relationships warrant it or not, Cook is more like Michael Bolton in a T-shirt.

This mismatched combo brings out the best in each other only on the refreshingly lightweight 'Call Me.' [Nov 2008, p.76]

Though The Great American Songbook is bad, it's not shamefully bad--if only because it's too tasteful to risk sinking that low. [#11, p.143]

The Five... go for the high-flown pap of '70s singer-songwriters Dan Fogelberg and Dan Hill, playing off Ondrasik's fey falsetto and fondness for lush, string-sweetened arrangements. [Mar 2004, p.117]

Their full-length debut--anchored by sunny ’60s-style pop festooned with strings and heavy-handed synths--also includes a Portugese track, a classical-music interlude and (enough already!) a tap-dance routine.

A low-rent version of the Streets without Mike Skinner's wit, they're just a couple of palookas mouthing off in the pub. [Nov 2005, p.131]

More Bon Jovi than Blur, bloated with stadium-friendly power ballads. [Jun/Jul 2002, p.106]

Jettisons their saving grace--a big, glitter-streaked wink--for limp stabs at profundity. [Apr 2005, p.117]

The jam-band influence that now pervades the group's sound is as pernicious an additive as that strychnine somebody slipped into Robert Johnson's whiskey. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.110]

Shaggy has one of the most grating voices in pop. [Oct 2005, p.143]

A poorly-recorded collection of lazily-written songs recorded by an artist whose muse deserted him long ago. [Oct 2004, p.131]