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]