Minor quibbles are easy to overlook on a record that is, the majority of the time, flawlessly executed.

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.

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.

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.

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

I have the distinct feeling I’ve heard most of the songs on this album before. Nothing here is particularly original, and nothing moves me in the way that Gough’s earlier work so did.

Earnestness is so damningly difficult to nail down, but Fink and his cohorts come as close as anything this year, displaying an aptness for cloying love songs minus the puppy dog eyes.

The record's understandable missteps are minor in comparison to its joyful evocations, and though Lindstrøm seems to be attempting to approach new territory, he does it in considerate measures and comes away with something that still makes perfect sense.

Even reduced to a proper ten songs, Revolution is still a bit front-loaded, if only because the band will never be as adept at slow atmosphere as they are upbeat rock.

The majority of Future This is a punishingly noisy, hookless mess that contains precious few of the qualities that endeared folks to the Big Pink to begin with.

When it is instrumental, it’s “Get It,” which seems a timid remake of Since We Last Spoke’s title track, or it’s “Murs Beat,” which, tellingly, has no Murs. Some of the rest sounds like a softer, more overproduced, and generally shittier version of the Cars. The rest of the rest sounds like something duller than that.

Thankfully, these are just two misfires, album-cripplingly sandwiched around a triple whammy of floor fillers.

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.

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

This is a record filled with breezy jazz tunes ripe for a dance hall. It’s also music that will give you a headache from thinking, if you take the time to truly appreciate the multi-faceted work of art that it is.

If it’s funny and not unlistenable, we may have a kitsch classic on our hands, right? No. The third way to describe this album is: reprehensible.

Beat-wise, IV doesn't attempt to outdo the top-dollar Carter III production, whose murderer's row of producers and beats is likely to remain unparalleled for some time. But Wayne uses the less showy selection this go-round to deliver a definitively rawer album that only smartens the impact of some of his career's best vocals.

On Rolling Papers, Wiz Khalifa's personality shines through: unobscured, stoned, brilliant.

The saving grace of Uncanney Valley is its resolute tenderness, an emotion the band never coaxed out of their twenty-something gloom.

It’s largely half-baked in its execution.

Baffling production questions aside, In The Dark is still another solid entry into what's becoming a pretty spotless discography for a band with seemingly little aspirations to do anything but be a predictable answer to what a band called "the Whigs" would sound like.

Young Adults Against Suicide comes off as the less talented, R-rated Beastie Boys doing PSAs.

More than any other melodic recording this year, Earth Grid feels truly timeless.

It's nice that Primal Scream attacks these tunes with gusto, but the passionate performance doesn't hide the fact that this album is utterly inessential, little more than a sampler for what amounts to a really swell wedding band.

There was a time when he did these things for our id, for our deeply rooted disgust at our own celebrity culture and so at ourselves. But here he’s not standing in for anyone, working himself into a feverish sweat solely for his own satisfaction.

The tragedy here is not that this is a mid-nineties retread, though, as much as Corgan’s songwriting is Machina level unmemorable.

Coleman's exploring, surely, but he never abandons a sure-footed consistency, and the record works wonderfully as a whole.

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

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 all so cold and empty and irritating.

It works as an introduction of sorts to this young band, who have a surplus of great ideas (and, hey, it's a free download). But it's little more than a starting point, a segway, an ice-breaker, to the much meatier discussion that Ashes provokes.

Since Ferrari Boyz doesn't mark the reemergence of Gucci, it's best viewed as a warm-up for Flocka's previously-mentioned sophomore effort.

Bloated on the rotting corpses of hackneyed scratching, hackneyed drums, hackneyed sampling technique and hackneyed key work (all that in hackneyed combinations), Feedback makes it difficult to differentiate the acceptable from the tired.

Would be much better if it came with an option to turn the vocals off.

So long as you approach Unkle Dysfunctional as little more than an excuse for Shaun Ryder to head back out on the road, I guess it works fine.

Odditorium has at least a handful of solid tracks.

Whether or not Human After All - which of course, has not a single purely human voice in its midst - is supposed to be some great stroke of pop irony or self-reflexive wink is irrelevant. Boring, empty music that thinks it’s making a point is condescending and pedantic.

In all, the languidness of Rules has its own odd charm—since WBA never aspire to be much beyond a wistful dance pop quartet, they don’t fall down the stairs too embarrassingly.

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

Raditude is thoroughly extraneous. It is Weezer’s worst album.

If for no other reason than that VanGaalen is perfectly content to be an intuitive outsider to this “outsider” genre of music that he unplies, his Black Mold tastes fresh and new and, ultimately, life-giving to the likes of us.

The problem most people are going to make is taking the record too seriously, but even recognizing it as being overly tongue-in-cheek won't save it from being, at very best, painfully frustrating.

Reintegration Time‘s alright, but it’s no substitute for seeing these guys perform.

Sound[s] less like the work of an actual band than a sterile concoction created by scientists in white lab coats.

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

The hook aspires to nothing, and so its nothingness is an anthem for do-nothing/think-nothing slacker types we like to imagine were listening to the Beastie Boys and Nirvana in 1994, but were probably listening to the aforementioned Dave Matthews.

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 not so much that he's over his head as much as just past his prime, and though his love of creating music that aims to communicate a very simple and honest message is respectable, he's ultimately unconvincing and awkward with tepid melodies, gimmicky guest spots and subpar lead vocals.

Those already on the Charlatans bandwagon will likely enjoy enough of Simpatico to warrant its purchase, but there's no questioning that's its one of their weaker efforts.

A long collection of awful ideas and recycled ideas in the absence of an Idea.

With Our Heads is a lonely, long stretch of un-anchored time passing, the audible, honest-to-god equivalent of switching one's mind into Airplane Mode and eyeing the smooth, barely altered upper cloudscape for the duration of a flight.

The net effect here is that Super Animal Brothers III is the stem of a great dance record with some irony smeared on it, shit-on-canvass style. Sure, it ends up making a statement, but…why?

Make Believe finds Cuomo donkey-punching the formaldehyde-soaked corpse of his former glory.

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

Although Pressure Chief isn't a bad album, several of its songs come off like b-side compliation fodder rather than a batch of fresh material.

She’s still plenty capable of bringing the funk when she plays to her strengths. Unfortunately, she only does so for half of City Beach, relegating her solo debut to little more than a curiosity for the Luscious Jackson hardcore.

Of all the glaring sonic crimes, it’s Moby’s nonexistent voice that most solidifies Hotel’s future infamy.

With one bright, surprising exception, the songs here either make a terrible impression or they make none at all.

Weirdly, while each of the songs is too short, the album itself is too long.

It’d be nice to hear something a little more rousing (album closer “Musee D’Nougat” drags on a sleeping synth-string progression for 14 unnecessary minutes), but like its vastly underrated predecessor, Earth is worth getting to know.

There are very limited redeeming qualities to this collection of poorly played, badly written tripe.

The problem is that for all the slick operations and glorious machinations of the marketing and production, this band has run out of steam; soulless without being undead.

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.

Much more attention-getting has been Lil B's ambient mixtape Rain in England, an effort which doesn't seek so much to invert hip-hop as to merely slander it.