The whole album sounds like it was recorded to be played in an H&M. It’s bland and forgettable, fuzzed with a faux-depth like an Instagram filter.

Track after track is slathered in layers of horns and guitars and synths until the songs underneath are no longer discernible.

Technical proficiency is overrated. Taste has to account for something, which means Eminem isn’t the Jimi Hendrix of hip hop. Instead, he’s in danger of becoming Yngwie Malmsteen: incredibly agile yet musically soulless. He says a lot of nothing on MMLP2, but I guess you can admire the way he says it.

Unfortunately, an undertaking as complicated as Dr Dee needs all the accessibility that would-be fans can get. And instead it's nothing more than rabbit-hole music for Dr. Damon.

As much of Freaky wallows in the jokes, the record runs out of ideas astonishingly early.

If you don't mind a little old-fashioned leering misogyny and plenty of lobotomized choruses, the power chords and snarling vocals will shake you all night long. [Sep 2006, p.81]

Essentially, the cruise control is running onward with disregard for all the maintenance and repairs that an engine needs, and the result is the worst album of their career.

These are mediocre, and sometimes painfully inept, approximations of classic lovelorn folk tunes. At a short 38 minutes, the times aren’t changin’ fast enough.

Given Eno’s quarter-century of Bono-fides, this isn’t surprising. Martin’s interests are frequently vague--on 'Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love' he sings about soldiers who must soldier on and runners who must run until the race is won. Seriously?

Unfortunately, “almost as good as Steve Miller” is about as good as things get.

Mall-punk aesthetes might be convinced, but even before Cross of My Calling’s ponderous title-track closer comes around (with its near nine-minutes of lead-footed epilogue), most listeners owning a copy of Sandinista! will have put it on instead.

MGMT chokes on its own forced sense of whimsy.

The Outsider consistently grabs at transcendence only to watch it recede. [Aug/Sep 2005, p.110]

Ornate but unremarkable headphone listening. [Oct 2006, p.80]

At once punishingly long and oddly incomplete. [Feb/Mar 2006, p.110]

It sounds a bit like you took Captain and Tennille (or at least Captain) and down-sampled their music, ran the vocals through a pipe organ, and then shot one of their hits (say, “Muskrat Love” or “Love Will Keep Us Together”) full of amphetamines.

The result is one of the more confidently presented, mostly inoffensive and ultimately inconsequential albums in recent memory.

It's only fair to consider Saturday Nights, Sunday Mornings in the context of the rest of the Crows’ catalog, and with that in mind--to borrow a phrase from Duritz--this one might fade into the grey.

While never unpleasant, Lucky represents a slowdown from the roll Nada Surf has been on.

The album has its moments but suffers from fussy production.

So why is his new album so underwhelming? Because Petty has gotten away from his strength--whipping pop hooks into an emotional frenzy of harmonies--and has focused on his weakness: overly ambitious lyrics.

Now we get Cuomo name-dropping Eddie Rabbit, Joan Baez and "a Cat named Stevens," which makes Weezer sounds like a retread of "Built To Spill," who did the recycled-classic-rock-cliché thing back in 1999. Did it better, too.

Half the album [is] mired in embarrassing heartland cliches. [Feb/Mar 2006, p.96]

Instantly forgettable. [#16, p.139]

For an album that focuses on the theme of love, it’s really hard to find anything to swoon over on I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss.

Night on Fire is going to need a gifted remixer to transform it into the dance-floor-packer it aspires to be.

With no dramatic tension, pathos or even story arc, these songs are little more than piles of slack words from an artist who has confused saying whatever comes to mind with having something to say.

The songs are mostly weird, overly familiar, or simply bland. [Dec 2006, p.89]

The ideas quickly wear thin. [Dec 2005, p.107]

Costa’s jazz-tinged neo-folk songs are boyishly engaging for as long as they last, but they drift away without leaving a trace, as he too often settles for merely maintaining a feathery, bittersweet modality, so that the McCartney-esque tunefulness of the title track, the Mungo Jerry-like lilt of 'Miss Magnolia' and the ever-so-slight edginess of 'Cigarette Eyes' stand out by default.

The band simply reiterates earlier ideas less interestingly. [Apr 2007, p.54]

Hopefully next time he'll challenge himself to expand his palette and realize more of his considerable potential. [Oct/Nov 2005, p.138]

With none of the tension or electricity of the music PiL is best-remembered for, This is PiL is a disappointing return.

The only satisfying songs here are the two Spanish-language tracks that kick off the album with booty-shaking brilliance. [Dec 2005, p.107]

Phosphene Dream's real achievement is that it takes the band's earlier murderous attitude and makes it impossibly bland.

These songs were already so impeccably performed that Johansson didn’t have very many new places to take them, and although her effort and nerve are commendable, “not as terrible as you thought it would be” just isn’t the same thing as good.

Raditude is an album of surface appeal--there’s no heart beating inside these plasticized tunes.

Jack Antonoff so desperately wants to be Bruce Springsteen. But on Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night, he’s barely even John Mellencamp.

While Springsteen is notorious for painstakingly sequencing his albums, High Hopes was a losing battle--a puzzle with pieces that, more often than not, just don’t interlock.

An overall sound that’s been compressed and flatlined into one continuous buzz, this sounds like a tired band that had already gone through the motions before it even started.

It plays into all the worst assumptions of these artists without offering much reward for the endurance test.

The production is predictably overblown, the lone bright spot being the tender, acoustic 'I’m Trying.'

What’s hollow about The Tortured Poets Department is that the real torture is just how unlivable these songs really are.

Carpenter’s weepy soul-searching makes The Age of Miracles feel like a cheap copy of the genuine introspection that made her previous records so intriguing.

Billed as something of a multimedia breakthrough, the 10 discs here present good--and often great--music paired with sub-standard video content. Unreleased tracks? They’re here, although in disappointing quantity and quality.

On the first disc (I Am), Knowles comes off helpless and as emotionally closed as ever....The Sasha Fierce side is more like it. Here, Knowles works her confident, fun alter-ego. Still, she overdoes it on 'Diva.'

What makes Indie Cindy so egregious, so much worse than a simply bad album, is how much better it could have been.

Depeche Mode has been an easy target for complaints of stagnancy, and, indeed, the band seemed to stop progressing in the mid-’90s like a child with a pot-a-day habit. And, Delta Machine is another example of this.

It quickly becomes evident that Forget the World is less an album than a haphazard collection of B-sides and leftovers that were for whatever reason deemed unmarketable as singles.

This new one is both harder to love and harder to fathom.

It's better to be the imitation Ray Charles than the poor man's R. Kelly. [Feb/Mar 2006, p.94]

Rather than synthesizing these various styles, they sound like they're working at cross-purposes, with every component so errantly fitted with the rest that SuperHeavy sounds schizophrenic.

Back Home embodies the featureless, sickeningly pleasant sounds piped unmercifully into department-store elevators. [Oct/Nov 2005, p.121]

Everything moves in slow motion, as if that lent profundity to the proceedings, and even then the vocals rarely keep time. Perhaps Holland believes that singing off the beat creates tension, but it merely diffuses what little energy these songs possess.

Its walls of distorted, alt-rock power chords reek of the 1990s. [Apr/May 2006, p.102]

When alone, the sweeping choruses that swarm Athlete’s fourth record, Black Swan, shoot for the rafters without any substantial emotional anchor—the songs get lost in the clouds.

While Hamilton Leithauser's hoarse yowl perfectly suits the plastered proceedings, the late Nilsson woudl likely have settled for a less sincere form of flattery. [Nov 2006, p.81]

The biggest problem with his reggae is simpler: He's unequivocally terrible at it. Not only do we get fake patois, but also raging electric guitars and cluttered hip-hop production.

On his third full-length, the charisma that launched Legend’s career fails to grease the gears of a scattered and lethargic song cycle, one where he shuffles through various shades of adult contemporary and is repeatedly upstaged by high-profile guest appearances.

MGMT is like some nightmarish amalgam of those bands' [The Flaming Lips and Of Montreal] bottom-barrel ideas set to wanky synths, sometimes for up to 12 minutes (!!!) at a time.

A Hundred Million Suns? Ugh. More like a hundred million yawns.

Granted, much of the blandness might well be attributed to producer John Alagia, who perfected the approach with the likes of Dave Matthews and John Mayer, but production aside, the songs here are just dull.

Covers is his first album devoted to nothing but other people’s music and, unsurprisingly, it’s marked by his same strengths and weaknesses, not to mention some intrusive backing vocals and superlatively bland production.

A flaccid smattering of pop trends that have long since passed and melodies so transparently halfhearted, it barely sounds like a person even made them.

There’s little to defend from a musical or lyrical perspective here: This is easily Kanye’s worst album to date, an impressive feat following last year’s ye.

Funplex never swings, shimmies or threatens a disco whistle. Instead it feels like a studio-centric attempt to approximate current dance music, which is strange, because nothing here feels particularly current.

This record’s way blander than the sassy hits she played.

Thomas hasn't yet figured out that as long as he mistakes ponderous poetics and platitudes for depth, the surface trappings of his self-serious songs won't matter all that much. [#16, p.125]

Truly, the four dapper Scotsmen that constitute this group should be ashamed of their tuneless, thoughtless, meaningless new offering, which distorts the proud legacy of a band that once mattered.

Their spectacularly boring new album has so little dynamic variance that it literally pains the ear.