It has more than enough moments to make it a solid album, had Joel Petersen stayed with instrumental electroclash. It’s just that the lyrics are god-awful strands of post-teen angst monotonously spoken with the rhythm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.