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

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.

The record is neither a failure, nor can I imagine is it a pisstake. No, this is Tom Jenkinson letting out his inner rock star, letting his guard down from the laptops a little bit more, and having sloppy fun.

Throughout, as ever, it’s Stewart’s voice that grounds the music in something recognizably human, his inexhaustibly elastic voice capable of so much but never able to be anything less than beautiful.

Even when the songs work (rarely), the band doesn’t; even when the lyrics work (read: never), the music doesn’t; even when guitars aren’t processed to sound like a cat in a dishwasher, the riffs suck.

Nothing on this album surprises me because anyone who has listened to this band regularly has become so steeped in pointless oddity that they have moved past surprise into the realm of mild annoyance.

What keeps Siberia from being more of a snoozer is the fact that there’s more Will Sargeant guitar to be found here than on any other recent Echo outings, and Heaven Up Here producer Hugh Jones returns to give the band what’s arguably their fullest production values since 1984’s Ocean Rain.

Made In Brooklyn’s not as bold or striking or collected as No Said Date, but the sophomore effort’s a fine follow-up, nonetheless, and almost certainly doomed to the same neglect.

While their debut showed a lot of promise, Beach Fossils still haven't really set themselves apart from every other band practicing the same pleasant murmurs of personality.

The lack of variety here is as unsurprising as the rehashed chord progressions between songs.

It's well-produced with some nice drums, but it simply has no reason to exist.

La Sera aren't quite up for that challenge, but their debut finds them rising above the careful posturing of their peers and creating something inarguably lovely, which, for now, will do.

White people shouldn’t try to be funky.

The schizophrenia on display here is not of the dramatic sort that intrigues or interests; it’s a very real disorder that befuddles and annoys the listener.

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

Familial's far from brilliant, but you-snotty brat of the Radiohead generation, lapping up the languor of both Wavves' bong-odored holidays and the admittedly strange sight of Matt Berninger's kid on his shoulders-would do well to turn the dial of your irony meter from "post-post" to "zero" for a half an hour or so.

Urn is a chore.

“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.

Plans is a shameless and famished record, the sound of pop slurping itself empty.

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.

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

Let it be said here first: Kasabian is indisputably one of the most important albums of 1997. Unfortunately, it’s 2005, and we’re left wondering just what the hell they're trying to pull.

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.

A seriously solid and enjoyable album.

Black Mountain is as mundane, bleak, and hollow as the cover art would suggest.

I err on the side of good rap, something Unexpected Guest is full of.

Return is largely bereft of the chintzy, minimal Zaytoven beats dominating previous Gucci releases, and in their stead exists the dense ominousness Luger peddles so brilliantly.

[Espinoza] takes the predictably disappointing low road through fanboyville with cruise-controlled caricatures of one of indie rock’s most deified stars.

So it’s possible that the songs on Wait For Me will end up in the same coffeehouses and car commercials and other small, sterile environments as those on Play, but Hall’s drawing inwards as hard as he can, to the great benefit of his compositions, and Wait For Me is unabashedly majestic.

To Coldplay's credit, amidst the over-production they still manage to reach their quota of flag-waving festival rock songs, some of which could be considered career highlights.

These Arms Are Snakes have clearly created a distinct sound and are doing something only the Blood Brothers can come close to right now in terms being interesting, inventive and still rocking hard.

Where Dios felt structured, (relatively) focused, and clever, dios (malos) just is let to drift in a mess of under-developed songs, odes to drug abuse, and unfocused guitar strumming.

The Beets’ simplicity was one of their strengths, but N.A.P. is the sound of Wauters realizing that in music, as in life, complexity brings richness, and often greater rewards.

It’s hard to fault the album for a little flab when the band’s trying new things and mostly doing them well; hopefully they’ll realize that underproduction simply isn’t their style next time around.

The Brave and the Bold is an awkward, lumbering affair, of passing interest to fans of the artists’ work and no one else.

Felix’s uses the second-person address and the confusion it--as well as conventional instrumentation played in freer forms within more confined song structures--creates to produce an engaging, if harder to parse, take on something similar.

All said, the album’s capably produced by Tony Doogan, Secret Machines aspirations and all, and it’s a debut wrapped in sophomore expansion, a third of a universe away from anything deservedly cosmic and anything appropriately full.

With Get Lost, McGuire has nudged toward both goals, and while in many ways, for long time fans, this is exactly what you'd expect a 2011 Mark McGuire album to sound like.

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?

It’s not [her] strongest performance so far, and that comes basically down to song choice and production.

The Blueprint's vaunted resuscitation of sample-based boom-bap rap production is replaced here by big corny synth wipes, a sometimes-fascinating corollary to Jay’s corporate sense of purpose.

Pretty dull.

The album fails mainly in its inability to set itself apart; for a Warp release it’s dull, Beans isn’t enough of a rapper to carry the show by himself, and the beats feel like they would have been interesting if they didn’t just remain stagnant through pretty much every track.

Razorlight is nearly everything wrong with rock and roll today.

Many of the songs lose their indelible glow being snail baited and cleared up like this.

Aesthetically the album is an equally awful collection of pabulum, completely derelict in its offerings of arrangements and tones, sanded smooth of its personality and as derivative in its every moment as the bands it’s most derivative of.

Skin of Evil is hardened, seamless, and totally unrelenting, everything full-bodied and visceral about Frog Eyes squeezed until it sublimates. This is scary, ethereal shit. It’s also a gorgeously captivating half hour of bedroom pop pushed screaming out of bed.

Instead of being doomed to tread a certain set of glossy, shoegaze-littered paths, and in that doom come off desperate to change, they search within their well-worn sound for a collection of songs with no aspirations to be anything more than the best at what they are. Now that's some progress.

Even the fun disco of 'I’m That Chick' is too little, too late for E=MC²--an album that proves just how easy it is for a well-funded virtuoso and the world’s best hitmakers to create a steaming pile of shit.

Goodbye's shoegaze fascination, organic glow, and subtle shifts belie its apparent initial simplicity.

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.

Circus is a saddening step back to her glossy yet unengaging "In the Zone" era, which is a shame.

My Everything is so concerned with making a palatable pop singer, it has watered down its subject to the point of tastelessness. It is pop music Bud Light.

Somehow Portamento is snuggled amidst St. Vincent and Braids and Tim Hecker and Colin Stetson on my year-end list.

After Drag It Up, their dismal last offering, The Believer is another sign pointing to what may be the wreck of the Old 97s.

Yttling and Epworth have succeeded in making the Scream enjoyable and vital again, hardly a sure thing after the embarrassment of "Riot City Blues."

Don’t Believe the Truth... probably isn’t Oasis’ nadir (that distinction arguably being due to 2002’s atrocious Heathen Chemistry), but one could be fooled for thinking so.

As such, it is both a strong refutation of every album Weezer has made since "Green" (as it, in its time, seemed to balk at "Pinkerton") and a numbing confirmation of the only available place this band has left: comic shearing, loose plagiarism, three separate solo projects (all of which are balls).

Enough Thunder certainly offers up enough for any Blake fan to both love and hate--and at the end of the day still be entirely unsure of exactly what to hope for.

Apollo is too much, too confusing, and too forgettable.

While the best of it is good enough to promise a fruitful and substantive future, the worst of it suggests that in a few years time, Mr. Mathers may be little beyond a slightly intimidating class clown.

It's an accomplished, knowing work that only seems to have its head in the corner.

If Soul Position intended to craft a wholly direct, musically and lyrically and conceptually simplistic piece of positive rap, like a modern day Arrested Development album, then I think they did that well enough, and I guess I don’t fully appreciate because I’m too caught up in my own gangly mental schematic of what it is that makes good hip-hop good.

What they have done on its proper follow-up is neither lazy nor hollow, merely undefined, making no clear promises on future plans.

"My December" ends up, curiously enough, a pretty freaking fun summer album.

Each time the album so overtly flips over, the same brief blushes of goosebumps, the same visceral highs, the same infectious, clapping percussion: I straight up have a crush on this album.

At their best they write strong, clean, melodic rip-offs of classic British indie rock and at their worst they write weak, clean, melodic rip-offs of classic British indie rock.

Some Loud Thunder is a mixed bag of spectacular material and hodge-podge studio doodles.

Unsurprisingly, the formula still works just fine, and in more than a couple spots, it’s revitalized and intensified to great effect.

We Are Young Money is like a microcosm of Wayne’s career: often frustrating, frequently brilliant, and thoroughly, lovably weird.

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.

I think All Delighted People is more fun to talk about than listen to even though I have trouble discerning what it is I'm trying to say.

New axe-slinger or not, I'm With You is a given for this band--at least four songs too long and Rick Rubin's nonchalance leaves everything sounding precisely and consistently the same.

The monolithic nature of the album feels necessary, but like any sustained chord, every other song tends to have less interesting undertones.

An incredibly pretty album with depth and scope.

Gemini is an effort so manic and unfocused that it barely coheres enough around it's stilted little center to be called an album.

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

Pocket Symphony is pleasant but not striking.

The songs on Paper Tigers are waifish, white-bread, cliché-based ditties that deserve to have every nonexistent nuance carelessly overlooked, the listener satisfied in knowing that those unexplored depths remain uncharted simply because they contain abysses of nothing.

Time to Die doesn’t seem to strive for anything, so it settles into being a pleasant little pop record, boring and bereft of character.

The problem this time out isn’t a lack of interesting material, it’s that these aren’t lyrics, these aren’t songs, these are for the most part spoken word stories backed by some of the most horrific and baroque music ever recorded.

Where Live From Rome really falls off, though, is the production.

MPLSound appeals to nostalgia both implicitly (a reminder of the reasons for our adoration) and explicitly (the album sounds good because it sounds like Sign O’ The Times).

When the Deer Wore Blue feels like a safe record. As they play this record too close to the chest songs blend together, needless repetition pervades, and most of the record's latter half is undistinguished.

One could dwell on the poetics of Vermont’s lyrics if they were more understandable; despite a high-flying voice, she enunciates with a marble-mouth worthy of Michael Stipe. Even Bejar isn’t invulnerable here, tacking on guitar solos to cover holes in the songwriting walls.

I am...amused. But it's sort of like the horrific fascination of seeing a train wreck.

Jet Lag is a confident, mature, fully-realized record, and much denser than it lets on.

Granted, thanks to the kind of company Mr. Combs’ platinum chain reels in, almost half of these tracks have some modest amount of entertainment value to them, but all the Just Blazes and Rich Harrisons and Big Bois and Pharoahes and Kanyes and Nasirs in the world can’t cover the Proactiv-shiny mug up front, the shifty but proudly brand-name-not-person-name emblazoned on the border, the voice that bumbles through every song.

Tasteless Rolling Stones apers rip off an entire decade of rock music.

Dent May has a firm grasp on his ukulele, debuting his skill through an adept, kitschy, brief, and rarely but sometimes resplendent album, but he’s still forevermore a novelty.

Though the thesis of this remix album restricts remixers to only one album, the remixers limit themselves further, and seem afraid to do too much more than reaffirm certain dance touchstones already done away with by Weber himself. They've missed the sanctity for the structure.

Maddeningly diffuse at best, and an engorged sonic clusterfuck at worst.

Mostly, though, Flowers just feels like a breather album after the last two, a typical Joan of Arc album wholly trapped in the moment of creation.

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.

Problem is, In Space isn’t a Big Star album. Or particularly good, for that matter.

As a summer stopgap for their new full-length this fall, Friends. works fine. The title track is quality, plus their fanbase eats this shit up.

LotusFlow3r achieves nothing so much as reliving the glory and joy of emulation, which is saddened by the image of Prince nudging our shoulders, urging us to relive with him.