Up and down we go, and each time the adrenaline rush lessens.

At.Long.Last.A$AP is an unfocused, overlong slog of an album.

MGMT is by some margin the New Yorker’s most intuitive, sincere and naturalistic record. The bad news is that it’s not at all musically interesting.

In The Lonely Hour is an album made by an artist who spent years waiting to be famous, but when he got there, found that he didn’t actually have that much to say.

It’s a record that masks its lack of content under swathes of super-hip production tics.

James never really follows it through.

Ultimately, the overall feeling of Mature Themes is of a band and songwriter that don't really care. So why should we?

EX is not awful, but it’s certainly not good either.

Play this album from start to finish and it’s hard not to feel that at the core of its cheaply gratifying genealogy is nothing but misery.

Despite her undoubted vocal talents, she doesn't possess the authority to sell the bluster of her lyrics.

Generally though, The Fifth‘s “dance” tracks--‘Bassline Junkie’, ‘Something Really Bad’, et al--just seem too limp to succeed as radio hits, and they’re certainly not good or interesting songs in any other capacity.

Everything that is missing from [Lady Gaga's Artpop] is here, but everything that is good about it is spectacularly absent from Prism.

This is a Chinese whispers record, one that has been passed through enough cultural and aesthetic filters as to make it utterly meaningless.

A tedious album from an otherwise great talent.

The pacing is tentative, the tone one of suppressed pain, and the FX custom-designed to denote ‘meaningfulness’ or emotional sensitivity--all rustic organ sounds and tinkling guitar notes.

It all comes across as fairly overwrought, working very hard to sound effortless and losing its sense of self in the process.

The production on Dirty Gold--generic, consistently uninspired, gauche--bears absolutely no relation to the album’s subject matter, and jars horribly with Haze’s dark forceful flow.