It's a little disappointing that in the two years since her debut EP, Warner couldn't come up with anything more distinguished than Feed Me Diamonds.

Mug Museum lacks any sort of emotional dialogue with the listener.

The beats are so simple that they’re a nonfactor, and there aren’t very many funny lines--which was Wayne’s most redeeming quality in the past.

The Sounds' latest release is another attempt to gain entry into the world of success that eluded them when their contemporaries took off into permanent stardom.

Bridges' voice and guitar playing are also serviceable, but the lack of variety causes the album to fall short of becoming recommendable.

Bitter Rivals could be explained as playing to Sleigh Bells’ strengths, but mostly it gets stuck in the weaker aspects of their previous albums, busying up the mercifully brief tracks with unnecessary filler, and definitively showing the dangers of nostalgia taken too far, with nu metal serving as a warning for pop punk, and freestyle, and whatever else might next resurface.

It’s difficult to latch onto anything in the sound patterns that Takahashi and Weiss are throwing out there.

For all [Nicolas Fromageau's] attempts at darkness, Fromageau can’t shake the pretty effusiveness that bolstered M83′s first few albums to the spotlight.

One Lovely Day listens like an attempt to meet expectations, never attempting to push his abilities or the prevailing tastes of an already devoted fan base.

Mediocre on every count, the resulting set of tracks won’t change anyone’s mind about any of the artists involved (that’s presuming it won’t make you like the Everlys less), but as a fleeting curiosity, it’s precisely what it says it is--with little imagination to spare.

Unfortunately, Kiss the Ring often sounds like it was made just to vault the celebrity-status and net worth of the man on its cover.

Even as singers Jon Russell and Josiah Johnson's voices flow together swimmingly over Charity Thielen's violin, the album never truly succeeds at living up to its name.

For this sort-of-but-not-quite comeback album, move right along.

Express Yourself is not a wholly bad collection of songs; half of them showcase Diplo's characteristic ear for taking disparate pieces and creating a coherent whole... [Yet] the EP derails during its second half.

Unlike Rubble Guts & BB Eye, Yes, It’s True never surprises itself with its own excitement.

Walk the Moon [is] a lukewarm, uninspiring collection of generic pop songs.

Aside from "Battle Born", none of the other high points succeed against the influences The Killers have long been aping, much less against those times when the band has hit that sentimental ache that exists in all of us.

While the first seconds of each track on KR-51 are promising and stimulating, the lack of follow-through and direction ultimately kill the songs before they end.

The album lacks the urgency of successful rap and rock, instead wallowing in a blah middle ground in its best moments.

And even these songs ["Nothing's Gonna Stop Us", "Everybody Have a Good Time"] fail to capture the raw energy of Permission To Land or the orchestral pomposity of One Way Ticket, instead falling limp between the two.

I'd like to hear Broken Bells at its strongest, not nestled into mediocrity.

Hoyas doesn't lack depth, but it's over-simplified. It's a hesitant musical effort, and quite forgettable when compared to Carey's debut, All We Grow.

The problem with Somethin' Bout Kreay is that the record is inevitably one of novelty, and it wears thin fast.

Husky's Forever So represents the latest in a sea of bands that, despite being able to perform and harmonize, should just go the route of talented session players and backing bands; artists with plenty to play, but not much to say.

Slave To The Game shows a band curious about more experimental sounds, however grating (note the steely, annoying electronics in "Umar Dumps Dormammu"), but perhaps too blockheaded to move further, remaining slaves to the tried-and-true Emmure din.

It's bubbling with the trite sounds of heavy metal c. 2002.

The art speaks to the album's sound: readily appealing, but ultimately, two-dimensional.

At the end of the day, I Can't Get No (Stevie Jackson) proves that Jackson is a perfectly capable guitarist for the band he plays in, who has the ability to whip a song now and again for a long player. Writing a whole album's worth of material? Not so much.

What this album is lacking is excitement and conflict, originality and surprise.

Early Times, a collection of figuratively pre-pubescent tape-fuzz that attempts to matter to us in some way, fails at being anything other than a mish-mash of crudely recorded, harsh sounding Silver Jews castaways.

The majority of the tracks on her second full-length, Anxiety, teem with chilled vocals, crunchy guitar, and keyboard blurps that move hips to sway before showing their hollowness as soon as one steps off the dance floor.

To play with the big boys, or to call themselves champions, these brothers will need to figure out what they want to talk about. Until then, they have nobody convinced.

It ultimately underwhelms, indulging too much in the melodramatic.

With its squeaky clean sonic finish and diluted edge, it’s a record that screams musical midlife crisis. If you were worried that a new Black Flag record would sully the band’s sterling legend, your concerns are sadly validated.

Paterson's deep respect for Perry's improvised vocals ultimately handicapping the eccentricities of each man's production prowess.

The Offspring's newest release, Days Go By, is both disjointed and mildly out of its element, containing one-third of this act's best output since pre-Splinter by a minuscule margin at best. It's just good old fashioned "meh."

The Duke is too scattershot, and Jackson doesn't quite know what genre to focus on.

The Ghost in Daylight is ignorable background music and the lowest point of the Gravenhurst discography thus far.

With a lack of depth, a messy focus, and a bloated sense of evolution, ¡Dos! isn't only a forgettable sequel to a bland predecessor, but a slip down the ladder Green Day has attempted to extend for over a decade.

Dark and light are persistent themes on Pale Fire; yet the color that bleeds through the most is an uninteresting shade of grey.

Call it getting lost in a sea of other great bands, but Real Estate has yet to truly claim their own piece of the surf-pop movement.

Mostly, the album suffers from just too much of the patronizing, saccharine Disney vibe and not enough echt Wilson.

[Hamilton’s voice] carries the wispy, breathy feel of an Iron & Wine, but where Sam Beam’s rustic vocals float like a leaf down a sunny river, Hamilton’s putters out like a deflated balloon, and he comes off as hesitant and unassuming.

Ultimately, Snow Globe doesn’t know what it wants to be, an album of covers or a showcase for the band’s return, and it sucks some of the joy out of the holiday favorites while it painstakingly tries to figure it out.

Differentiating yourself isn't the same as creating quality music, and Patrick Stump has only managed to do the first and not the second.

His latest work, Hell in a Handbasket, however, takes the success of Teddy Bear and pushes it a few awful steps backward.

Mostly, though, Tomorrowland doesn't grate as much as it excludes.

There are some songs to love, but you can only take so many variations of the same theme.

It's a retread of almost everything she's said before in the past 30 years, and though ultimately catchy, it lacks any subtlety or nuance to make you feel this is doing anything but reaching.

Curve finds the band rehashing other artists' creative moments in the sun but never making anything their own.

There are two stellar songs on Gardens & Villa, songs that show a ton of promise, but also make the rest of the uninspired filler on the album pale in comparison.

The result is a fine collection of Coldplay B-sides.

On Serpents Unleashed, Ohio quintet Skeletonwitch’s own blend of European melodic death metal, thrash, and black metal falls prey to flat production, which further stacks the deck against the band’s already ill-defined sound.

Christopher's hyper-saturated synths sound less like a reverent throwback and more like Twin Shadow in an irradiated snow globe.

With more focus and restraint, there's no reason to think Moore, Gordon, and Ono couldn't have really run with their collaboration and made something great. Instead, YOKOKIMTHURSTON feels like an overly conceptual exercise. Maybe that's by design, but a little melody would have gone miles here.

It's impossible for any Pollard release, solo or otherwise, to go too long without delivering something memorable, but he comes close to blowing it here.

A whole album of subtly punk drummer-laced singles, compiled for his posterity, and lacking a hefty amount of rhyme skills or dramatic effect.

The wheels on the record don’t just tremble and squeak--they completely detach. Eight solo albums in, M. Ward’s indie folk wagon finds itself stuck in the mud.

Skrillex and Diplo successfully serve up twitchy beats ready to incite anything with a pulse, but the sentiment at the album’s core leans toward insufferable.

Maybe it’s because we’ve grown accustomed to Cudi’s style and the influence it’s had over other artists, but at this point, it just sounds a little bit stale.

The problem lies in their vision, and the fact that it’s either too narrow or too cynical to take seriously.

The world Grobler crafts on Matter isn’t colored with the iridescent shades of blue from his early career; it is now a palate so bright and garish that it hurts the eyes.

So much of Ardipithecus is impenetrable, even distancing. The album is a headscratcher, one that shows plenty of promise but also a personality abstruse to the point of mystification.

For someone who records under his own name and not that of a collective, Croll remains a mystery, a patchwork of influences content to blend in, not to stand out.

What The Cautionary Tales needs is a prudent pruning. This album struggles to appear deeper than a common puddle.

When their punches land, you want to bless these guys for sticking to their guns and not growing up. But the misses are real and painful, and they make Taking One For the Team a far more embarrassing listen than it needed to be.

We Are Only What We Feel, if you go in expecting very little, can provide some background noise pleasure. But it only lights up for three seconds at a time. And then it’s trash.

As it stands, this album feels like a few good ideas mired in a mess of half-formed sketches, rough recordings, and simple cliches.

Rather than braving the road less traveled, Yudin doubles down on his replication of trite indie rock tropes.

With Reputation, Swift seemingly has the idea that bigger, wider, and louder is necessarily better, but the dopamine rush that modern pop music can so reliably produce never arrives.

Though only 11 tracks long, No Fixed Address feels rushed and half-hearted.

A muddled mess of a record from a band that completely abandoned any sense of identity.

Farrell’s ambition is an admirable quality he wears on his sleeve, and at times, he showcases an impressive stylistic versatility. However, throughout this album, he takes indiscriminate left turns, and it ultimately makes Kind Heaven a needlessly gratuitous and pretentious mess.

There’s no interruption, no welcome silence between discs one and discs two. No, just 20 songs, a brutal slog of stacks and condoms and stacks and condoms and occasionally a disembodied ass without any other parts of a woman sighted.

Twelve Carat Toothache feel thrown together and incomplete. Post Malone did himself a favor by limiting the run time of the LP, but if he’s championing quality over quantity, the quality has to be more incisive, specific, vulnerable, and holistic.

The album falls flat in just about every aspect. It’s not offensively bad, it’s inoffensively boring.

The songs, sonically and structurally, don’t sound contemporary at all. At best, they sound like disco by way of these two artists, both of whom have been making similar songs for five, maybe ten years.

Jungle is a polished debut, but there’s no sense that J and T (or whoever is actually singing here) feel any sort of commitment to their lyrics, their arrangements, or anything beyond producing neatly packaged songs that slide them into festival slots.

Unfortunately, Hold My Home is not another baby step in the right direction, but rather a collection of slack-jawed tunes surrounding one or two borderline gems.

Equally appropriately, with increased attention comes increased expectations and increased scrutiny, neither of which are met by this sophomore release.

Full of internal references to diamonds, fires, love, music, and seizing the moment whenever possible, Deja Vu’s lyrics play like pop music Mad Libs. When they’re not bland, some verge on violently tone-deaf.

It’s best to approach The Knife’s Shaken-Up Versions with caution, even though the blade has dulled this time around.

The riffs are certainly bigger and ballsier than those on the past few records, but Stockdale seems to have lost his personal line to the gods of the ’70s and is left settling for the lesser players.

Victory isn't going to blow your mind by any means, but it's the first time in a long time a Wu-Tang brother has stumbled.

Morrison has a talented voice, but you might as well stick to Glee to hear it.

This CD is worse than a nu-metal reprise, in that it doesn't give true ragers an outlet, but instead facilitates the same false machismo that tribal tats and fake bench-press numbers suggest.

It's always admirable when an artist or a band attempts to create a piece of music that differs from what came before. Unfortunately for Architecture in Helsinki, their new work fails as a cohesive whole, salvaged only by two or three songs here and there.

When you boil it down, Purple Naked Ladies' biggest fault is that it's generic.

The reissue of BlackenedWhite comes as a missed opportunity. Odd Future followers will likely have grabbed the expanded (and notably better) version when it was available free online a few months back; newcomers to the collective's output have better entry points elsewhere in their continuously-growing catalog.

[A] superficial lack of organization and purpose.

The album is at its best when guests take the microphone and falls short nearly everywhere else.

All Information Retrieved provides is leaking creative inertia.

It's unclear what the band has been doing during its lengthy hiatus (their last full-length was released in 2002), but keeping up with current music trends was evidently not on the to-do list.

["Dirty Laundry" is] so raw and visceral that we finely see her as intended: vulnerable, flawed, and totally real. She tries replicating that authenticity, but there’s only the uber-cliché “I don’t care; we’re over” anthem “Gone” and the album’s superficially enjoyable title track, which Rowland approaches with some intriguing level of nuance.

Rather than provide a solution, or even insight into the Internet reality, Gambino simply adds to the frustrations. The big reveal at the album’s conclusion is that he was (likely) trolling all the trolls, but what about the fans?

It's the uninspired and homogenous manner in which Joker goes about ironing out nearly everything that made his tunes memorable to begin with that makes The Vision one of the most disappointing debuts of the year.

A deluge of whining that's lyrically incomprehensible and becomes sonically dull after one song.

An album desperate for texture, flavor, and risks, Giant Orange is the aural equivalent of middle-of-the-road musical tragedy.