Back to the Web finds the band at its best when Elf Power shakes off its drowsiness and recaptures glimpses of its former weirdness. [Aug 2006, p.95]

Forgiven has bits and pieces, like a bunch of base hits, but not even one song possessing homer status, much less a grand slam like “Heaven.”

Here winds up an album of originals, sung by the people who wrote them, but somehow resembling more than anything else a campfire sing-along of someone else's songs.

The first nine tracks of the record, referred to as Death, are solid, listenable, weirdo rock that fans, or anyone who appreciates creative music could enjoy. ... Two minutes into “Cradboa Negro,” the last track of the Death portion of the record, it all starts going south. The subsequent 14 tracks of Love, aside from some funny song titles like “Chicken Butt” and “The Asshole Bastard,” are utter baloney.

Sadly, this album gets bogged down in hollow harmonies and filler songs that merely scrape the surface of emotion.

On Astro Coast Pitts stared at the bright, unwritten future in front of him, but on Pythons he’s locked in place, rendered motionless by the oppressive chip on his shoulder.

What we're left with is an EP full of hollow gestures. But at least it's an EP instead of an LP.

They're so determined to conjure a gothic America and its black-and-white morality that they fail to acknowledge the grace and sophistication of their source material.

At times, Mascis and Co. sound perfectly at home amidst a wall of distortion (see the bouncy, hook-driven 'I Want You to Know'). But for the most part, they sound exhausted.

Trouble Man is less senile in general than "Hello," but for too many of the album's 71 minutes, we listen in horror as T.I., 32, tries flaccidly to get down with the kids.

No less than four producers--Mike Elizondo, David Kahne, Jeff Lynne and Garret “Jacknife” Lee--contributed to the album, and their collective efforts have resulted in a mid-tempo muddle of pseudo-lovely tracks plagued by a hovering cloud of meddling strings, slappy drums and perfunctory triangle chimes.

Amos fails to find an entryway into these songs that justifies her willingness to bury her personality inside them, ending up with a well-meaning but ultimately inessential vanity project.

Combining swelling '60s throwback harmonies and the sweet, swift wit of '50s songwriting, they parlay clichéd notions into winning melodies.

The bulk of Roadhouse Sun, however, hews too closely to bland bar rock, as if they’re drinking Bud Lights instead of Shiner Bocks.

The bad news: Los Lonely Boys are much better players than they are songwriters.

The concept was ambitious but, unfortunately, in releasing Tomorrow as an album, the team divorces the music from the stage and leaves the songs stranded in a mire of effects and noise.

[The] familiarity brings you to the cereal, the soap and the market, and some people will be drawn to Be, okay with seeing the imitation. The rest are better holding off for Oasis’ inevitable reformation.

But the overproduction and studio gimmickry haunts the halls of this collegiate rock, constraining Hynes’ squeaky-clean instrumentation between alternating tedium and banality.

Ultimately, Russian Circles pummel too politely.

There are flashes of the brilliance that made the youngster such a trendy buzzname, but it's hard work wading through the awkward muck.

Fans may feel it’s more of a long slog than they remember, with the slower tempo stretching many of the songs beyond their natural length, and the spoken word passages lending a languorous quality that may induce drowsiness.

Here the Get Up Kids sound a bit confused and rusty, making There Are Rules a late career footnote of limited urgency.

Everything from the stilted production to Manson's lyrics to that awful album cover seems hopelessly mired in 1998.

For a 14-track album that feels interminably long at only 44 minutes, three songs is not enough to save L.A. Divine from sustained mediocrity.

The result is an awkward balancing act between a premature lust for accessibility and an obvious knack for the avant-garde, shirking traces of the latter in an ill-fated attempt at evolution.

Progression doesn't make a convincing argument for rap's return to the golden era. Instead, it feels a bit too grumpy and too reliant upon the good ol' days.

Sitting through a slogging collage of beats for 40 minutes before ever hearing a verse is no easy task. It would be one thing if these tracks had a common theme holding them together, but there’s no central voice to bind one to the next. ... The only thing that will keep listeners pressing on is the star-studded back half of the record. The incredible amount of talent Shadow recruited is exciting.

Unfortunately, the only thing that The Temper Trap's self-titled album proves is that they may have been a one-hit wonder all along.