The songs, engaging as they are, sound cursory, as though Lee wrote them while riding the bus on his way to the studio, staring at his watch and an empty notebook.

Though his voice is strong and sincere throughout the album, most of the material has a certain karaoke-like vibe.

And though the smarter songs (the more personal "If I Had It All," the easygoing "Fool to Think") benefit from the concision, the group's newfound musical sharpness isn't that of a world-class bar band but that of an outsize stadium act -- all grand gesture and larger-than-life lyrics. Sometimes, as on "I Did It," the band recaptures the spirit of seventies rock in all its innocent fun. Other times, especially on the cloying, overdramatic "The Space Between," it recaptures only those moments that involve holding a lighter high above one's head.

Without question, 50 Cent has one of the most distinctive voices in hip-hop: He raps in a molasses-slow, beyond-laconic drawl, and chants in a singsongy patois reminiscent of dance-hall stars like Sean Paul. But there isn’t enough invention in the rhymes, and, worse, barely any humor.

Smith is capable of subtle introspection, but too many of his new songs sound like the self-pitying complaints of an adolescent venting in his diary.

Your level of interest in their music probably correlates with your willingness to be bored.

Once in a Lifetime shies away from the Talking Heads’ life force. It presents them as winking ironists, not the true black-music believers that they were.

It’s merely another nice try, charmingly forgettable.

Charitable fans and critics will probably seize on the few sparks generated by 3D to eulogize TLC as vanguards. The truth -- that their riskier impulses were often tamped down by a conservative industry -- is somewhat more depressing.

The W is the sort of back-to-basics album that rock bands like the Who and the Rolling Stones used to make when they felt they were losing touch with their audience. It's capable but uninspiring -- Wu by Numbers.

Buckcherry now captures the decadence of seventies and eighties hard rock better than anyone who actually lived it.

The Eminem Show has pretensions toward real life, but it possesses all the resonance and revelation of a sitcom.

The carefully constructed sonics, though beautiful, can be so snoozily contemplative.

Too much of Aerial fades into a soft-focus background of soothing synthesizers, murmuring bass, and twittering birdsong.

The album has its charms -- Björk's voice soars on "Scatter Heart," and her duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke has a mambo-style sexiness -- but its overdone orchestrations and outsize emotions lack the resonance of Carousel and its metaphysical overtones or even the easygoing peacetime fizz of On the Town. [Sep 25, 2000]

If he hasn’t yet invented a persona intriguing enough to live up to his music, give him credit for being one of the few white men still brave enough to make black music.

At its very best, "Superman Inside" for example, Reptile is as expressive as anything he did in the nineties. The other half of Reptile is a series of oddball genre digressions and cornball balladeering.

Like her awkward lyrical ventures into S&M and bisexuality on The Velvet Rope, songs like "Love Scene (Ooh Baby)" and "When We Oooo" aim for hot-and-heaviness but have the chilliness of her brother's famous televised kiss with Lisa Marie Presley.

The central flaw of Room on Fire is the lack of hooks.

Intermittently successful...[t]oo often, his faithfulness turns into meticulousness, resulting in an album that's as formally impressive but as snooze-inducingly detailed as a special-effects-addled blockbuster.

Many of these songs are thin schematics for “perfect” pop songs. They’re impressive in their commitment to formula--deploying catchy, whiny hooks, taut structure, loud-soft interplay, and well-timed guitar peals. Yet for all their nakedness, they offer little in the way of revelation.

The rapper's nicotine-scarred voice does sound bluesy, and his raps are serious without being arch like Beck's. The album's sound -- a marriage of classical string arrangements and sparse drum beats -- makes the guitar stomp of his rap-rock peers seem more one-dimensional than ever. But Everlast's blues are one-shaded -- nothing on Eat at Whitey's approaches the grim fatalism of the Geto Boys' "Mind Playin' Tricks on Me," Eminem's "Rock Bottom," or even Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Murder Was the Case."

Ironically, little on the album captures the imagination the way narrower genres like techno, house, or even hip-hop often do

It's full of the same monochromatic balladry and hipster references of its recent albums.

Uh Huh Herb is a disappointment, the tepid, not-quite-there record that many artists seem to make after hitting a career peak.

It is a noble effort, modeled on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, but the results are underwhelming.

Endlessly pleasing (or trying to please), Feels Like Home dilutes even Jones’s brand of comfort-food jazz, grinding it down to something like a chewy gob of baby food.

Durst offers his piggish take-it-or-leave-it stance on relationships ("It's my way or the highway," he gleefully whines on "My Way"), his fantasies of the hip-hop high life ("Livin' It Up"), and his delight with obscenity ("If I say fuck two more times that's 46 fucks in this fucked-up rhyme"). Limp Bizkit's music is just as predictable, complete with scratches, guitar squalls, and mosh-pit crescendos.

Quarry doesn’t have great songs, just not-so-clever quips.

The Massacre is as frustratingly uneven as Get Rich or Die Tryin’, but it’s longer and messier.

Nelson's voice, silky enough to sing standards, lacks the vocal grit for the blues, and he rarely works up enough energy to milk the titular cow. Most of these songs are better suited for a supper club than for a juke joint. [Oct 2, 2000]

Beck desperately aims for Johnny Cash's funereal blues, but the unremitting bleakness of Sea Change more closely resembles alternative rock's limpid whine.

Morissette seems unwilling to step into unfamiliar territory.

The note that truly dooms Diary is thematic, not musical. The disc collapses under the weight of one song about heartbreak after another.

The songwriting is scattershot... and the sound strains for punk-on-a-budget but is as three-chord conservative as other retro acts like Rancid and the Distillers.

A remarkably overt homage to seventies stadium rock?

Pink pitches a brand of seriousness that is pure Lifetime-TV mawkishness.

Clones testifies to how familiar (and hollow) the Neptunes’ studio tricks have become.

Invincible is an assembly-line bore.

Along the way, though, Aerosmith slips into the stylized studio excesses of a professional producer (it might also be their only album to have strings on half the songs), and the ballads the band does deliver are as corny as anything it's ever done.

Psychedelia is really only compelling when ego takes a backseat to kaleidoscopic music, and the Gallaghers are, of course, incapable of such a gesture.

True eclectics like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest seek out samples and inspiration -- in jazz, electronic music, even rock -- while Jean merely traffics in superficial gloss.

Reed coaxes great performances out of a few unexpected collaborators--Ornette Coleman delivers frenetic sax playing on “Guilty,” and downtown singer Antony warbles in a truly otherworldly soprano on “The Bed”--but these players are crowded out by the album’s sprawling mediocrity.

Damita Jo, sadly, is an outdated product of the turn-of-the-millennium pop scene, in which female singers conflated sexual openness with empowerment.

[It] doesn’t help in pinpointing the moment Costello veered into self-parody, but it does catalogue nearly everything that’s become impossible to take about him.

Everything Must Go is a profound disappointment.

What a curse Jay-Z's ideas represent: Nearly everything about The Blueprint 2 sounds like a retread, including its title.

Trots out an unceasingly uninteresting parade of pop personalities singing against a patina of Latin music so drained of ethnicity and soul that it makes Herb Alpert seem like Sun Ra by comparison.

For anyone with a critical reading of his long career, the album is a drowsy downer unconvincingly cloaked in interplanetary piffle.

All fifteen tracks are one-dimensional disses and dismissals of scantily clad women, vengeful boyfriends, and the group's assorted doubters.

More than ever, Blige's harmonious state just isn't an interesting place to be: Songs like "Beautiful Day" and "Flying Away" express exuberance of the rainbows-and-flowers variety. Miserable, Blige can be penetrating and profound; happy, she comes off generic and bland.

By the Way is as enjoyable as being stuck in an elevator playing a Muzak version of "Under the Bridge."

It's Coldplay's lack of humor, the very straightness of its lyrics, that makes the dourness so detestable. And where miserabilists past had a strong pop sensibility, Coldplay is content to create directionless palettes of sound.

Young's surprisingly conservative new album, Are You Passionate?, is simply frustrating, and worse, often as risk-averse as a CSNY reunion.

The Ishtar of comeback albums -- overdone, underinspired, and marketed to within an inch of its life.

What's particularly, notably bad here is its production.