The ethno-tinted dreampop of School of Seven Bells left me stymied and listless and, most crucially for a critic, at a loss for words.

Given that the record is so nominally personal and probing, it’s telling that there is not one moment of transcendence, or relief, or acceptance, or melody, or substance.

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

Another World desperately labors to keep fans satiated and ends up overburdened, somewhere nicely between all its scattered intentions.

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.

Feed The Animals isn’t much of anything at all. It’s just another clip show of all your favorite records.

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.

Where the compilation loses itself is in its exhaustive nature. An update to the sound of older songs (albeit not much older) seems appropriate enough given how important production was to the scream and sheen of their self-titled album.

There’s nothing outstandingly terrible about Seaside Rock, but that’s what ultimately makes it kind of boring.

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.

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

From admittedly unsympathetic ears, it’s a fruitless mess caked with vanity and smothered by its own insular delusions of prosperity.

Yes, I love Clipse and the Re-Up Gang, but tough love invariably accompanies true love, so there you have it. The relationship is just on the rocks for now; here’s hoping November is like the honeymoon all over again.

Like a professor spewing a semi-clever lecture on civil rights and contemporary left politics where he’s pretty good at rhyming his facts but acts like rhyming is all the sinew that his presentation needs to connect the bones of his argument.

Songs in A&E retains all of the weight of its self-imposed seriousness, its capital A artistic gravitas, but unfortunately leaves the uplift of invention to the memory of Spiritualized albums it so readily evokes.

There’s other fun songs on The Sun, but nothing that sustains itself as consistently as “Charlotte” and “Numbers.”

Sitek’s technique is, successfully, fascinating and unexpected. But so many purposes and conceits, both avoided and embraced, collide over the course of the album’s eleven tracks that technique simply overwhelms melody and Johansson’s voice both, but mostly whatever it is about the song that Waits nailed to the wall in the first place.

It’s a predictable formula, a majority of the tracks building to a triumphant climax set to an egg timer, peppered with forced witticisms, seemingly culled from Postsecret, that have reached a new apex of laziness.

In total--and there is absolutely no other way to absorb this album; if it lets up it will lose itself--the sentiment is hostile, championing a mismatched, bitchy pile of allusions to alienation, dissatisfaction, and indifference that begs for attention and respect but is too passive to amount to anything but a wan wash.

There are songs on Nouns that seemingly defy you to listen, and not because they’re loud or crass or due-heavy on true-dat market-maneuvers and what I guess we can now safely call “aural assault”; and not because of the bad vocals, bunkered mix job, or the hundred and one other things that would make your parents, my professors or Celine Dion hate this album.

Inoffensive, largely listenable, and accessible, the album is still stunted, and so never reaches the peaks of "The Civil War," still their best and most fully formed effort.

Ultimately, this is nothing more than workaday feel good bar music, technically well executed with the peaks and troughs in all the right places.

Rising Down is pretty much same old same old.

If only you didn’t spoil these tender moments that seem to make my heart want to burst out my chest by goofing around all the time.

The result is a series of boring romances and half-assed torch songs that drag their feet in a way that’s exhausting to listen to.

Worldwide‘s participatory highs are intense, if fleeting, and that cover would look amazing on a t-shirt.

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.

The title Attack & Release implies the best aspects of the Black Keys’ music, all sweat and hurt and sweat and ecstasy, but the album neither gives nor takes, neither emotional nor sweaty but still clammy-handed.

What keeps Consolers of the Lonely from being an outright shit affair is, predictably, the assembled chops of its musicians, a group never so much fussy as amicable, wide-eyed about the righteous licks and insensitive tempo shifts they solder together so tightly.

They are a talented, enthusiastic and timely band; I feared that it’s ageist of me to suggest that their debut album isn’t great because they’re too young.

The Odd Couple from its superior predecessor (just: the writing is a bit weaker, the arrangements sleepier, the production effects a bit thicker) and so its most glaring flaw is that it simply lacks St. Elsewhere‘s invigorated tone, following the same blueprint with cheaper components, producing off-putting retreads whose only appeal lies in their similarity to more effective tracks on Gnarls’s former effort

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.

I’ll be as straightforward in my assessment of his Trouble in Dreams as I can: this is his tenth solo album of the same old shit.

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.

Let The Blind never pitches badly or throws up a truly terrible track to mack on and leaves me with the potentially duff argument that this record is really good at what it does, but what it does so exactingly reaches for breadthlessness that its under-ambition ends up under-cutting what made the songs pleasant and amenable in the first place.

Golden Delicious confronts, rejects, and reinterprets his own past, which simply leaves me longing for a return to it.

There is nothing here but a band very awkwardly trying to have a good time, and that’s the kind of party you always leave early.

Fun and fresh enough on the first couple listens, it remains to be seen whether Vampire Weekend can find long-term favour with the listeners and critics so taken with them at present.

It is logically a bloated, uncomfortable, saturated throwback to no genre, time period, or movement in particular.

White people shouldn’t try to be funky.

Really, the sad emptiness of these raps needs little explication from me.

La Cucaracha is still a bit of a disappointment, short on memorable tunes and a bit muddier and more piecemeal than it should be.

While it’s very good at what the Band of Horses does best--providing a soundtrack to whistful moments or memories--unlike Everything all the Time there’s nothing here to grab onto, its songs merge together, and it’s so innocuous in the band’s trademark comfort that it can pass almost undetected.

Although there are a few individual moments where those qualities round-off and transcend any qualms anybody might have about Lekman's style, that style on its own, minus a map or even the faint corners of a box, can only elicit the slow smile of admiration, not genuine, passionate interest.

Magic manages to creep into a flat din, and tact is lost to nostalgia.

The latest Dashboard Confessional album is extremely front-loaded, it should have been an EP, etc.

Sure, Banhart executes the truncated verse spectacularly, but he doesn't give his listeners enough time to love him.

In Our Bedroom After the War is half of an above average album, which is unfortunate if only because the band's still clearly capable of gorgeous pop convulsions when they lay off the theatrics and let their rhythm section rev things up.

The album is frontloaded with its best numbers, and they seem to descend in quality as the album progresses.

Kala is the sound of a hugely creative, angry, head-strong young artist reaching well beyond her means, both musically and politically, and coming up short, though, to be fair, it still manages to contain a few of the best songs of the year.

Yes, the beats are big and the sound is mainstream and commercial; however, the band sound restrained and uncomfortable.

As a Caribou album, this is mediocre. Not bad, but it's not much of a Caribou album anyway.

Every track on this record grows into some such perfectly orchestrated climax, surging as a function of the production alone and with nary a hook or clever turn of phrase or structural complication in sight.

What actually lies inside Prince’s twenty-somethingth album is more than disappointing; it’s thinly if grandly produced, tapped with a veneer so dumbly decades behind any sense of interesting or intriguing taste that one can’t help but sit back and swallow the benign whole, thinking all along, Who the fuck even makes music like this anymore?

Zeitgeist isn't a good record, but it is good work.

Even the best songs of Our Love To Admire can’t reach the boggling complexity and honesty of most anything from "Turn On The Bright Lights" (2002).

The point being that this album isn’t “terrible,” just sort of dull and boring.

You wanna hear a mediocre hip hop album with a few decent songs? That’s the T.I. I’ve come to know and love.

Tiger plays like a huge pastiche of past releases.

DeLaughter needs to be more personal; already having a dozen people yelling at you distances the ideas they express, but emptying those ideas of any meaning isn’t the answer.

Though The Sun has plenty of accomplished performances by a capable and experienced band, it’s not very exciting stuff.

There are hits on Good Girl Gone Bad, big clubfisted ones, but they're wedged in with facsimiles and reductions.

It’s not like everybody’s playing a different song. Everybody’s playing the same song. It’s just that, for great boring swathes, that song sounds stubborn. It sounds like it doesn’t want to be played.

[Producer] Gil Norton... [has] an enviable track record, but he’s not doing Maxïmo Park any favours with this soft soak finish.

An album of pasty songs, severe missteps and bizarre overreaches, but an album nevertheless shimmering occasionally with the inherent sometime-genius of its creator, Volta is one of those pretty-bad records that may stick around, may sound better in a few years.

By now, Sage Francis is emo; however populist you cut it, he’s treading familiar paths, rhyming in familiar cadence, arguing with the asshole authority of an artist much too comfortable with his niche.

Unfortunately, too much of Snakes and Arrows is dominated by mid-tempo, lumbering behemoths.

Make no mistake, this is a slight record, but nonetheless one with more than a few enjoyable moments.

Favourite Worst Nightmare seems warped and contrived, bearing all the signs and watermarks of a band trying not to feel uncomfortable.

Sadly, the only true victories on Dumb Luck are Tamborello's own title track and Oberst's "Breakfast in Bed."

Year Zero massively benefits from lowered expectations. Reznor channels his anger, focuses it and takes a much-needed breather from his tried-and-true formula of nihilism and the question of self-destruction, but at its core the album has very little to teach us or anything original to say.

Grinderman isn’t angry and it isn’t raw, just a careful concoction of licentiousness and braying disdain ultimately monotonous and unexciting after the first four cuts.

On Cassadaga Bright Eyes sounds like John Mayer.

Myths of the Near Future is probably the most assured British debut since Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled.

It’s entertaining, sure, but also empty and a bit soulless.

It’s inoffensive, painfully so, with the smell of something run through focus groups from the get go, written and produced by committee to sell the greatest number of copies.

Ted Leo again falls a few hands short of the definitive statement we insist on expecting.

Without making the new sound genuinely old or the old sound refreshingly new, Mason waffles in the flux between.

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.

The songs themselves aren’t so much unlistenable as just a little sad, highlighting the fact that Iggy Pop is less-than-scary nowadays, and his voice is shot to hell.

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.

Okereke now sings instead of barking, and, well, oops on him.

This Youth Group record is a diluted version of already watered-down music; not only is it not as good as their first album, I’m not sure it’s as good as Keane’s first album.

Crow’s ego and identity have been largely removed from Living Well’s equation, and in its place are a number of undeviating, short, one-word-title indie rock songs that don’t require an explanation or setup.

Hip Hop Is Dead’s fruitless and one-dimensional rhetoric is sure to depress the Nas fan more than any of his didactics.

Its problems are both wide-reaching and acute, an album full of tiny misfired rhymes and shiny-dildo drum hits that add up to what I’ll go ahead and label Jigga’s second worst record, after 2002’s abysmal The Blueprint 2.0.

This loosely associated collection of songs isn't even the logical extension of some of the more unwise artistic wanderings of Worlds Apart (2005).

Doctor’s Advocate is essentially a long album of just okay rhymes, just okay rapping, and (without the benefit of best-of-year sublimity like Cool & Dre’s “Hate It or Love It” production) a lot of just okay beats.

Every song seems like it all went through a grime factory conveyor belt, and at the expense of being cohesive, Public Warning grows a bit repetitive.

These songs contain all the accoutrements of anguish and despair: he sings the words, he screams the words. So why does it all sound so fake?

Sure, they love the album and want more people to know about it: admirable. But c’mon, why not just get rip-roarin’ drunk, bring in a bunch of friends, and make a legendary album of their own.

+/- 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.

Flavorless.

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.

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

Inevitably, most of the studio design on each song is greedy and belabored. Everything is in its right place, but everything is too obvious or too proportionally gaudy to warrant more than a signatory “lo-fi” moniker.

Ludacris has created the most uneven album of his career, so frontloaded it might as well be an EP.

Beyoncé’s an artist who’s not sure how to sell her full personality and craft in lieu of selling what she thinks we want.