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.