You leave Nine Kinds of Light completely unaltered, neither enlightened nor offended, simply having experienced a series of first-person statements: Adebimpe in his doorless (and not terribly interesting) tower of self.

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.

It's to British Sea Power's credit that Valhalla Dancehall seems far less concerned with mainstream sermonizing than their last full length, opting to indulge in the off-kilter charm that drew us to them in the first place

As quiet strings and stupid whizzing noises pull the curtain on LP4, all I imagine is Ratatat going, "Alright, party's over, guys" and all I can think is "wait, is that what was happening for the past 43 minutes?"

Sundown is still considerably boring when compared to the likes of the Kings' first three albums. It's also too long, the back end sacked with faceless mid-tempo songs devoid of hooks that can't compare to the mini-epics up front.

Popp sounds as if he's having a ten-year-old argument with himself, and though he's certainly earned the right to make the point that this argument still holds currency, O is less than convincing.

With never any hurry or need to their lyrics or their vocals, with only dreamy soulfulness that sounds too content and comfortable wallowing in grief to want for much else-I just don't see what's very necessary about this album.

Humbled by a silenced rhythm section and bafflingly reverberated guitars, the majority of Interpol is little more than background static. Maybe it's time for an intervention.

As a whole, it's not consistently buoyant enough to be a good pop record, and the politics that weigh down its middle section aren't sharp enough to make it into anything more than a middle section weighed down by some obvious politics.

The problem here being that the clean production values are themselves another veil masking Williams' fundamental badness--and so this album becomes, like its predecessors, an exercise in misdirection and deceit.

What's the same is bigger and broader, bringing its faults into stark relief. This is, I stress, Best Coast's Proper Album, and so rather than Where The Boys Are's loosely defined "songs" we get Songs: feeble, noise-soaked throw-back translations of everything from doo-wop, girl-group, pop-punk, to pseudo-grunge.

It shouldn't come as a shock that Bionic is not a very good record. What should is that the conversation about how bad it is has become one of the most vitriolic and fascinating conversations pop music has recently provoked.

It’s a middling album that managed to get the best of collective consciousness.

Still, as much as the warped good intentions of the album can get exhausting and embarrassing, Nas and Damian's creative side remains pure enough to carry one through the lunkheaded didacticism.

Nothing Hurts ends up being its own worst enemy: it obscures its biggest strengths, choosing not to showcase them but to drown them out in a familiar and uninteresting haze.

The Dead Weather have released another quickly recorded batch of entirely unmemorable, unpleasantly limp rock music showcasing Jack White’s increasingly irrelevant take on garage, blues, post-punk, and guitar refuse.

It regresses to the essence of an increasingly stale sound with a series of second-rate tracks and bored performances. This is co-option at its base; you were a few years too early, Nick.

Forgiveness Rock Record doesn't provide anything interesting to talk about in and of itself. Its actual thematic talking points, as far as I can tell, tend toward political pedantry.

This is the third album in a row where Snaith seems to have devoted most of his effort into submerging his own unique voice deep within the musical persona he's adopted, I just don't really get what I'm supposed to do with it. Like, should we get him some water wings to keep his head above the water?

Here’s hoping Sweet Sister is the sound of a talented group shaking out some superficial songwriting ideas before getting down to it.

Volume Two is a record, of occasional charm, that comes off all-too-aware of how cranky a response to it other than “charming” will seem.

My frustration is simple: not only does the record’s production drag down what could have (probably) been good songs, the band deliberately downplays its two best players, and everything suffers as a consequence.

This album simply sounds like their first with inferior production and less-memorable songs.

Utilitarian sensibilities typically create better, catchier results, but Little Boots’s producers can’t help flaunting their knob-twiddling abilities, justifying their paychecks while counterintuitively making Hesketh’s music sound all the more amateurish.

An overcooked vanity piece from a band inflated by praise, Odd Blood heads in every direction at once.

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

“Robocop” works on Storytellers too, proving that there are fleeting moments of emotional honesty beneath this steaming heap of artifice, a reason, for some puzzling reason and perhaps beyond all better judgment, to still find oneself interested in what this guy will do next.

If anything, this is an effective teaser for a new Broadcast album, since many of the tracks here could easily be part of great Broadcast songs, but in this form, they aren’t, and it’s clear that we both know that.