The real issue with Mumford & Sons is its pedestrian songwriting and predictable delivery.

It’s an album that discourages sitting still. Too bad the icky lyrics ruin the mood.

Chris Brown's fifth studio album, Fortune, is a pure-pop candy cane, meant to be enjoyed, consumed and forgotten.

Mostly the arrangements feel amorphous and vague, and matters aren't helped by the way Orton's voice is positioned in the mix. Her tone veers between conversational and angelic, just another texture in a scattered and shapeless series of musical pieces.

The production on most of Comedown Machine is off-putting in its chilliness.

The 28-minute length of this album adds to the impression that this feels more like a demo, a collection of fragments woven by Russell into a cautionary mood piece, rather than a major comeback.

These songs are meant to swing, but McCartney lets them plod.

At his best, Wayne was positively psychedelic in his wordplay, capable of creating entire alternative worlds out of a few surrealist metaphors. But he sounds slower, more methodical, less unhinged on Tha Carter IV.

With the Strokes, Casablancas exploits the tension between his behind-the-beat, just-woke-up vocals and the band’s hurtling rhythms. On Phrazes, the slower-moving tempos match the unhurried pace of his distinctive croon, and the melodies and arrangements aren’t strong enough to make up for the loss in urgency.

["Creature Comfort" is] one of the album's strongest moments, matched by "Electric Blue," in which Regine Chassagne's delicate voice floats over a wistful yet hypnotic electro groove. Much of the rest struggles to stay buoyant.

The vocals are slathered in Auto-Tune (didn't Jay Z proclaim Auto Tune dead once already?). The rhymes are simplistic ("You're the gas in my car, you're my petrol/You and I go way back, retro") or silly ("This is the original, this has no identical"–-really?). And the music's reliance on rhythmic and lyrical repetition (as opposed to progression and surprise) becomes wearying.

It's hardly ground-breaking, but when Tyler brays, Perry blooze-ifies on guitar, the cow-bells ring and the back-up singers wail, Aerosmith approximates a cartoony version of its glory days. But the album's second half nosedives.

It's the end of something, alright, and Johansen and Sylvain – as great as they once were as the backbone of the Dolls -- should get the message and move on.

Duffy's pinched voice warbles into Lulu land pretty frequently, and that squeakiness isn't helped much by the music: five ballads swathed in strings and heartache, five uptempo tracks with a bit more bounce but not much attitude.

Most of it might fascinate for a listen or two, but presenting this as new work at top-end retail prices is the type of barrel-scraping exploitation that would've made the ever-wary Cobain retch.

'Famous Girl' throws the album off balance, and makes every note feel exploitive and self-serving. In trying to restore his reputation, Brown ends up damaging it even more.

“Rebirth” doesn’t swing, it staggers, and Wayne’s bullfrog rasp is distorted by Auto-tune, apparently to mask the fact that he can’t sing.

With music as rigidly formulaic as this, no wonder the teens in her songs want to party until they blank out.

A cash-in thin on new songs that confirms Winehouse was still a long way from finishing up the five-years-in-the-making follow-up to "Back to Black."

Ferry’s best songs bubble with double-edged nuances and pastiche-style textures, drawing on influences from many eras. The Jazz Age diminishes that complexity, turning many of these brilliant tunes into period caricatures.

It would've been fascinating to see how far a full-blown collaboration might've taken her, but Aguilera spreads out the songwriting and production credits in search of more hits, most of which come off as flimsy gimmicks.

The soundtrack strives for a quirky, melancholy resonance befitting its tragic subject, but too often it comes off as gimmicky and ponderous.