Unfortunately, the mere manufacture of unique sounds isn’t enough to rescue them on La Forêt.

It's unconvincing and bland.

Cansei de Ser Sexy is just so acutely gaudy and trashy that, despite an abundance of spunk and sneer, it comes off as disaffected and impossibly irritating.

The lack of complexity, tension, and propulsion in most of these songs is a big disappointment because the soundscapes are not grand and glorious enough to overcome the simplistic musical lines and repetitive nature of the lyrics.

For all its aural pleasantries, it seems bored, lethargic, strapped, bounded and paralyzed by mysteriously viscous elements.

The group's sound is, at times, difficult to simply listen to, so it comes as no surprise that expanding upon it in such a drastic way would produce several miscues.

A bland alt-pop stew that meanders aimlessly.

Once the songs on Lion the Girl are over, they are as difficult to remember as those wisps of dream that dissolve upon waking.

The Bedlam in Goliath is an exhausting listen and it seems like the guys have tried to pack in as many prog-rock clichés as possible.

If you wanna hear some Killing Joke, do yourself a favor and go get a copy of the band's original debut self-titled record or What's THIS For...! (which were complete trend-setters), because this latest release comes off as nothing but a lifeless self-parody of those albums.

The music itself isn’t quite as bad as the singing, but it still lacks the sincerity needed to keep Sun, Sun, Sun from sounding like a collection of Eagles’ outtakes.

These songs are painfully uneventful.

Wasif aspires for the guts of Neil Young and the tortured soul of Ian Curtis but captures neither, instead sounding like an inappropriately self-pitying, passive-aggressive whiner.

It sounds like 4th generation Stooges impersonators.

This is a grating, difficult, unsatisfying album.

The Raven is downright awful, perhaps Reed’s worst album since Metal Machine Music.

Wading through the next 70-plus minutes of wandering noise and blank hissing for the gems was painful, to put it mildly, because when I got to them, they were played off-key and incredibly quickly, as if the band wanted to get it over with and get back to banging on the guitars and making nonsensical noise.