Strictly speaking not much has changed since this Japanese trio’s debut EP Neji/Tori washed up on North American shores, but somehow that previous effort had so much charming belligerence and ferocity and Destination Tokyo sounds bored and meandering.

A much more mediocre, boring, phoned-in, lyrically tripe-y batch of tip-toeing Brit-pop snooze-o-rama-fests.

There’s a brilliant EP lurking somewhere in this record, but Mike Skinner is either too ambitious or too fatigued to rescue it.

There's a lot of rappity-rap cliches at work here: overwrought punchlines, vague disses, bitching about the industry. Kweli spends a good chunk of the album acting like a drunk, unemployed superhero, stumbling into supermarkets to aid old ladies whose purses are fully in their possession.

On Cassadaga Bright Eyes sounds like John Mayer.

I have enough faith in this band to presume they’ll eventually see Only By the Night for what it is, as a fourth album hiccup that fails to play to their strengths.

It’s a lot of slickness that adds up to little, though, as a culturally myopic Roots Manuva audibly struggles to feel out the changed face of hip-hop; he sounds unsure of what tone to take and what words to say.

All of this provides a great recipe for exactly one good listen. That one listen is best the volume down though, as Death Magnetic might very well be the most distorted, punishing mastering job since the advent of the CD. After that, the charms of the album become significantly reduced.

The best the band could do is take this folk stance and make it somehow relatable to the sort of listeners like those in Chicago, blessed as they are with one of the most storied and diverse stocks of bands in the country. What Of the Cathmawr Yards ends up instead is a cold catalogue of personal taste and increasingly diminishing scope.

Half of The Sun Awakens is vigorous and wonderful; half is abhorrent and stultifying.

Ruff Draft is subtle, full of muddy melodies, magical synths and crispy snares, all typical of Dilla beats that aren’t on major label releases.

Goldfrapp have shed the sex-Moroder-robot-Bolan-fuck-disco like a used condom and re-tooled themselves as a whimsical psychedelia and pastoral folk outfit for the disappointing Seventh Tree.

They finally hit a hipster-heavy scene with what should have been a maverick heat-seeker of a debut and end up too tiring to interest most of the hipsters who long ago became bored of swapping their “Alice Practice” 7” on Soulseek.

This is as fully realized an example of the Friedberger vision that exists, which is why it’s so frustrating that Winter Women never really gets off the ground, or that Holy Ghost wallows in its creator’s own pique.

The record can get a bit dull or just plain hokey.

Flavorless.

This is the New Year. And there’s plenty of Bedhead in the New Year. Just not enough, unfortunately, in The New Year.

Do It! is about as radical as Clinic seem capable of, which is to say that they finally seem smothered by the borders they’ve set for themselves.

If this is EitS attempting to summarize and compact their three previous albums into one easily consumable package, the results merely drag the listener along through series of “catastrophic” cues that tell them what they should be feeling.

Mother of Curses feels suffocating: it’s experimental but constrained and bleak but not humanistic or relatable.

This is a power-pop album released by the biggest Fall Out Boy-ish band working today, on a major label, but it’s also 50.4 minutes of Fall Out Boy music--an extended, incomprehensible and surprisingly marketable clamor, ambulance siren loud, of contradictory signifiers.

Sad that we have to talk about a member of Black Star making an album without a guiding ideal, dull production, and bad lyrics.

Anything ends with all expectations met, but little else. Martina Topley-Bird has the kind of voice that deserves beautiful and strange accompaniment, and as such, most songs beg for so much more.

+/- have abandoned their bipolarity, which I was willing to call “complexity” or “potential” until just now, for a straightforward record that yields none of the possible benefits of a straightforward record.

I could go song by song and come to the same conclusion with pretty much each one: the dedication to this carefree whimsy of youth ultimately stands as the most impressive thing about Passion Pit, and it wears thin quickly.

Why Vampire Weekend seem uninterested in being a no frills pop band is a mystery. They slather what would sometimes be solid songwriting with such production doodads, intertextual namedrops, wry smirks, and defensive irony that the songs themselves are crushed under the weight

All I hear is vague honesty in place of actual emotion or considered writing, and frail vocals smeared across the whitewashed wall doesn’t compensate for a severe dearth of substance.

I’m convinced that Beck Hansen has a few more good albums in him. One thing’s for sure, though: The Information isn’t one of them.