The Thrills still have more musical verve than many other second-album victims, but too much of this album seems as if The Thrills have wearied of their own sunny musical dispositions.

“Something Hyper” and “Xian Undertaker” are exceptional and worth hearing. However, the rest of the album provides very little payoff.

A staggeringly uneven salad of powerpop alt-country and even R&B that succeeds as often as it fails.

Despite Fortune’s several throwaway tracks and sometimes generic alt-country feel, it serves as a reminder that The Mendoza Line’s prolific songwriters are still capable of churning out catchy, accessible pop songs.

With repetitive, though bizarrely catchy refrains of failed puppy love and crushes gone awry, Kiss and Tell markets itself to an audience that still borrows money from mom in order to purchase the release.

The majority of the record is solid and enjoyable, but taken in its entirely, Riot is a bit tiring.

For every standout track on the record there is another song where Sparta takes a step back to assess the situation and falters a little bit.

Revival is a good album, and I don’t intend to imply that some of the slower tunes or more laid-back lyrics are simple throwaways, it’s just that this is definitely a change of direction for a band that has followed a relatively clear path for such a long time.

The sad thing about Waves are Universal is that there are many songs that just don't cut it.

Nothing here is horrible, but nothing here is great.

Although most of the songs are good individually, the record is fairly monochromatic, and it can get a bit tiresome listening to it from start to finish.

Alternating between sounding like a gremlin and sounding like a baby, the vocals don't so much haunt as distract.

It’s the sheen and almost reflexive attentiveness to commercial accessibility that’s placed on a good handful of the songs that can make them sometimes fail or falter or seem weaker than they truly are.

A simple exercise in bright, energetic--if somewhat vapid--pop music.

Bee Hives is a mostly instrumental album that heavily favors the fuzzy keyboard tones and heavy reverb of the band’s early work.

Too much of the edge is gone, too much emphasis is placed on guitar solos, and the guitars sound, at times, rather flat and listless.

Byrne fans will probably already own this, and probably should, if for no other reason than the final two tracks. Casual fans who haven’t seen the movie will probably be put off by 13 mostly homogeneous tracks of soundtrack fare. Without an emotional attachment to either Byrne or the movie, that’s simply too much for even a solid album like this to overcome.

As half of the fun of an album is trying to figure out what the artist is trying to do creatively, having the artist essentially tell you what they're going to do and then watching them do it, is somewhat less interesting.

Despite the band’s annoying lyrics, their beats can be catchy and they have a kick-ass bass player.

Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid has enough substantive quirks amongst the tiresome new-wave signposts to make this album a reasonable yet flawed artefact that is more than just the sum of its quaint parts.

In the end, this is better left to die-hard Yo La fans and jealous bassists everywhere.

Some of Log 22 feels like a step too far, with the band's ambitious arrangements falling foul to the limitations of their musical abilities.

Nocturama isn't the weakest album in Nick Cave's canon, but it's far from being a particularly good one either.

In effect, the group have carbon-copied the sound of The Great Eastern but neglected to paste-in an equal number of tunes.

While individual songs work on their own, the album seldom succeeds as a whole.

The sad truth is that few of the songs top their studio counterparts.

The problem is the songs. Oh, the songs - they're pretty, all right, but there's no substance.

Adamson is certainly adept at replicating the sights and sounds of the Bond and Blaxploitation films that inspired him in his youth. But is he celebrating his passion or merely mocking it in a hamfisted fashion? Sadly if feels like too much of the latter, even if it is by accident.