This is a decently crafted, moderately hooky, fairly vacuous power-pop album, and under the right light, you could do a whole lot worse.

While the whole package is marketed as a "love letter" to fans, true followers will quickly be able to sniff out its inferiorities. If anything, this latest selection from the dwindling Buckley vaults subverts his talents and ultimately insults the same hardcore fans it's aimed at.

Druggy records are never all that good when they don't convey anything about the experience other than the blur. That's not to say you couldn't get swept up in The Mirror Explodes' churn under the right influence, but it's not something to inspire the formation of many new memories.

Patrick Watson doesn't do foundation work exceedingly well. Yet this is not to say that there aren't moments on Wooden that suggest songcraft was the foremost urge.

Replica Sun Machine is an exceedingly simple thing--with tunes so familiar-feeling to be easily ignorable--but it's presented with a false sense of intricacy, gussied up and disguised as something more than it really is.

Ultimately, the whole of Tinted Windows is so much less than the sum of its considerable parts that it's almost tragic.

Asleep feels less like an album of music meant to entertain than an assumption that you can actually bump a marketing plan in your cars and house parties.

Like Skinner's recent work, instead of woodshedding on the mixtape circuit like smarter and hungrier rappers, we're treated to lightweight albums that are three years in the making and still feel like a rushed jumble of bad ideas that just get worse as they go along.

Elixer runs the gamut of bland-but-classy R&B, from antiseptic slow jams to rote dance-pop, slick as you'd expect and completely failing to suggest what bunched Prince's panties when he initially discovered Valente.

Grrr... seems transcribed from a distant memory or read from the pages of a script.

With more experience, the group could perhaps one day drum up a more cohesive, compelling vision, something that reaches out and grabs you. For now, though, the band's grasping at straws.

The production of The Bridge sounds like it came out of an extended catch-up session, the work of a man best accustomed to the breakbeat era's techniques trying his hand at the last ten years' worth of club-rap digitalism.

These clusterfuck all-the-cooks experiments, more often than not, add up to way, way less than the sum of their parts.

Never has that rift between Pollard the songwriter and Tobias the arranger been more transparent-- and more problematic-- than on the formless, often dull The Crawling Distance, a particularly blank batch of Pollard tunes dressed to the nines in Tobias' perfunctory sheen.

Not everything here fails in such catastrophic fashion, but because the band noodles its way through Mirror Eye's druggy, sitar-laced exercises without any thought towards coherence (or completion), even its few promising tracks feel slapdash and unfinished.

Universal Mind Control is a painful misstep from a talented rapper who's decided to be as nasty as he wants to be--which turns out to be much, much nastier than we'd like.

Her own versions aim at some druggily evocative conception of 60s soul, which makes them pale next to the originals.

In the City is proof that you can co-opt the most retarded aspects of 80s corporate rock and still not be any fun.

The debut's boring, not awful, but until the band stops sounding like they have a hundred cooler things to do than be in a studio, it's hard to imagine them as anything more than surf muzak.

He issues his grievances with a smart-ass certainty, rarely showing empathy or compassion for his characters or admitting that maybe it's his perspective that's skewed.

Surely, we can do better for the platonic ideal of a rock band than four guys gunning for a spot rightfully inhabited by My Morning Jacket but instead coming up with the best songs 3 Doors Down never wrote.

Cover albums and mixes aside, Radio Retaliation is the pair's fifth studio album, and finds them once again failing to make anything but the most minute adjustments to the polite groove that is their stock, trade and--in 2009--monopoly.

Dr. Dooom 2 isn't Keith's worst album, but it doesn't do a whole lot to break recent trends.

Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, the debut LP by the London folk-pop quartet, bites its best sensitive-indie forebears and then pukes up all the most superficial chunks.

Earth is a whopping 70 minutes long, and at no point in it do we get an idea of what exactly the fuck the Dandy Warhols are trying to tell us.

The Airborne Toxic Event is an album that's almost insulting in its unoriginality.

On Untitled you get to decide whether you prefer Nas thoroughly exploring half-assed concepts or half-assedly exploring thorough concepts.

The Fratellis have comfortably nestled themselves among the ranks of British rock's most besotted, but even relative to their contemporaries they still manage to come off sounding bored, tired, and downright silly.