Jones still croaks out songs with that wretched voice of his, an amalgam of nicotine, alcohol and AOR. The guitars still churn out feeble riffs more appropriate for a Hot Wheels commercial than a grown-up's rock album, and even when they're on to something it feels like they're only fumbling with a good idea.

Ambitious production can’t quite cover the fact that none of the songs on Run Fast Sleep Naked have a conceptual core.

At just over 33 minutes, Earth Junk is a short recording, but even at that length, the limited sonic range and repetitive tricks are ultimately draining.

The point of horrorcore is to both piss off church moms and find a language and vehicle for rage and misery. But there is no aching, tortured self at the center of clipping., just three fanboys’ overworked hearts palpitating into the abyss. While you can’t deny the imagination, you also can’t fathom the point.

While this sort of proactive fandom hardly qualifies as bad art, you'd have to get pretty smashed to ignore the album's missing spirit and just dance, which, sadly, may be the point here.

Now, for what it's worth, Dirty Vegas won't rob you of the gift of sight or make your ears bleed; it's just boring.

As the next step in Kittin's conflicted evolution, Two is not that much different from (or more enjoyable than) what's preceded it. As a supposed remembrance of the heyday of electroclash, it's a nostalgia trip that's best left untaken.

I Love You, Dude doesn't shake off the confines of genre to reveal a shiny new pop act underneath. Nor does it meaningfully improve on Digitalism's previous formulas.

We Can't Fly's stylistic knuckleballs lack just about everything we'd grown to love about Aeroplane: namely luxurious grooves and effortless cool.

This album drops four consecutive hard rock stinkbombs to kick things off... Senor Smoke's saddest aspect, however, is its yearning for another dance-floor single.

This is an album that suffers in the context of Fink's career. She is an obviously talented artist working well below the standards she's set for herself as both one half of Azure Ray and a solo artist, and if that makes for a disappointing album.

Cale squanders whatever momentum he accrued on the estimable avant-pop of 2003's HoboSapiens by adorning these new songs with such unflattering, generic alternarock textures that they often render their author unrecognizable at best, and irrelevant at worst.

Ultimately, it's the unbearable triteness of the lyrics that does Long Knives Drawn in.

There are flashes of coherence and grace in all the furious noodling, but overall, you probably had to be there, bathed in the glory of mortal combat.

If the teaser EP Splitting the Atom is any indication, that Burial remix joint will probably make a better and more convincing Massive Attack album than the next actual Massive Attack album.

A few brilliant left turns that feel almost accidental mixed in with a sort of end-times hunger for a top-40 audience that doesn't seem to exist anymore.

That’s how Spring feels: a lot of planning, a shrug to finish. Like OK Human, this is a product of the pandemic. Unlike OK Human, it actually sounds like it.

These many mismatching, criss-crossing threads create an incredibly convoluted 77-minute slog that is as tough to listen to as it is to digest.

Unlike so much of Voigt's past work, it's not an idea worth exploring at this length. Zukunft's only impressive feat is making Voigt's elegant, pristine work under guises like Studio 1 and Gas seem like the work of a raving, impassioned romantic.

As overblown as You Can't Take It With You is musically, Nigro's not one to be upstaged by guitar pedals.

Virtually every song enunciates its central joke, then repeats it and repeats it and repeats it. And repeats it. And repeats it. And so on, with the repeating. (And repeating.)

Ghost Stories certainly sounds like the product of someone working out their private pain in public; unfortunately, the results are less Blood on the Tracks and more "Can I Borrow a Feeling?".

There is a resigned quality to Hungry Bird that stands in sharp contrast with the sprightly, slightly goofy tack the band took on 2001's career highlight The Ghost of Fashion.

While Kasher’s platitudes are presented as hard truths forged from experience, most of the time, it just sounds secondhand, scripts written by someone whose worldview has been shaped mostly by Cursive records.

Double Bubble is neither deep or dense enough for electronic connoisseurs, nor is it brash enough to spawn another "Connected" with kids sprung off of Justice or Hot Chip.

The songs are fine but largely feckless, and what could be an animating contrast between glum lyrics and upbeat music is too often hobbled by clunkers both generic ("I am lost in my mind when you go to sleep") and specific (something about tarot cards).

Anything But Words is the rare side project that might have been better off if both parties had cared a little less.

The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade.

I's a 40-minute, 12-track dance-rap full-length without a single hard punchline or trenchant moment, the sort of thing that sounds like it could've been banged out in a couple of weeks.

Sleep Mountain's lack of originality is made worse by the fact that few of its songs actually go anywhere.

Let Her Burn is so, so dry.

So even if I Am the West is little more than another reminder of what Cube's day job was before becoming a Hollywood supermogul, if it does result in someone's hearing AmeriKKKA's Most Wanted or Death Certificate for the first time in 2010, it's done its job.

Clearly, these boys can't grasp the concept of "say when."

Raditude doesn't have that stench of minimal calculation on it; if anything, it's as earnest as the famously confessional Pinkerton, just written by someone whose age doesn't match his POV.

Despite their best efforts, nothing on Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak is even half as interesting or poignant as the CD casing itself, and musically, the decision to focus on this album's mood and textures largely falls flat.

But without the name recognition and expectations that go with the first new Meat Puppets album in five years, Golden Lies likely wouldn't even see release. And I can't say that I'd consider that such a bad thing, having heard it.... It's representative of the sad state of affairs that the best moments on Golden Lies transparently recall highlights from later albums already past the Meat Puppets' prime.

Mostly, though, this is a depressing reminder of the distance between what Depeche Mode once were and what they've become.

The overall stylistic consistency that made Listennn unusual now makes for an exhausting hour.

Fall's worst moments are queasy and charmless.

Climb Up is filled with an odd (for indie listeners, at least) brand of stadium-sized rock that can't quite escape the notions of cheese and bloat that accompany that term.

The joy of watching them not fly off the rails made even the weaker shows worth hearing. But in turning that experience into a scrapbook, Remember kills the magic.

The oddest development of Angelheaded Hipster is that most of the 20-plus participants opt to inject angst and torpor into Bolan rather than revel in his pomp and frivolity. ... Sadly, Willner’s last great tribute album tells us little about its subject.

Every now and then, he can still crank out his signature sweeping production or drop a line that stops you in your tracks. But no minor edit or revamped version of Donda 2 can conceal the album’s inherent flaw: It is presented as a revolutionary work but it is decidedly a non-event.

Although songs like “King of Hearts,” a pummeling Eurodance stomper, or “Castle in the Sky,” another pummeling Eurodance stomper, might allude to urgency in their lyrics and music, they still feel totally anemic and bereft of passion.

This record is the SoHo-boutique equivalent of a Thanksgiving dinner: it tastes all right, but good luck staying awake 'til dessert.

For now, though, Kimbra's status as "That singer from the Gotye song" woefully underserves her full potential, but so does The Golden Echo.

Though Time is never less than competent, its biggest problem is an unfortunate lack of personality.

Pacific Daydream, in spite of its name, mostly just gives you a feeling of being nowhere.

End Titles rewards just about any amount of listening investment equally, and it completely lacks sharp edges.

I'm sure defenders of the band will champion Mars Volta as a keeper of the prog-rock flame, but The Bedlam in Goliath renders the term meaningless--the result couldn't be more averse to actual progress in rock music.

Pale Communion only toys with the building blocks, revealing influences that were already apparent but refusing to invigorate them alongside each other.

A 19-minute EP bookended with the Billy Ray Cyrus remix and the original version of “Old Town Road”--he opens himself up to the criticism that “Old Town Road” bypassed. Each new song on 7 is an attempt at stumbling into another lighthearted hit. ... For the entirety of 7, it’s unclear if Lil Nas X actually likes music.

When it isn't a high school poetry recital, Lustre often feels like a disappearing act-- an attempt to put on a few musical disguises to see if anyone likes them better than the musician beneath.

The Return is supposedly a Kool Keith album, but four of the 14 tracks are skits, two mangle his vocals so the producers can show off their DJing, and one is a Princess Superstar song with Keith on the hook.

On Carnation, he tries and fails to be something other than himself.

le there are bits of great humor and wordplay scattered throughout (occasionally spat out in dizzying double time), the fogged-over choruses, tough-guy posturing ("In Gotti We Trust"), and spurts of disquieting misogyny ("Scrape") feel like too much padding.

He relies on inane songwriting concepts, rote misogyny, and feelingless flexing. The lyrics are puerile and half-baked.

Four years later, though, all Blonde Redhead has to show for its lengthy studio hiatus is another too-obvious bauble.

They're sounding less and less relatable, leaving us pining not just for the days of a little grunge trio from Seattle, but for the relentlessly catchy and charismatic Dave Grohl of the Foos' still-fantastic self-titled debut and the better half of "The Colour and the Shape."

A bloated and expensive version of the rap he’s always made but without that signature effortlessness.

The Adventures of Bobby Ray is a curiously lonely affair, the sound of a singular talent being drowned in a tidal wave of cheerful banality.

Even the songs here that show flashes of congealing eventually end up falling apart into a watery mess.

The Vision seems to be exactly what Joker wants: UK pop R&B of the vainest and most vacuous possible variety.

Loewenstein's problems seem to spring from a penchant for textbook hard rock and an almost astonishing lack of range, failings that are amplified by his choice to record all of At Sixes and Sevens' instrumentation himself.

A mellow, slightly sub-decent album delivered at the wrong time.

Unfortunately, bare-bones arrangements, train songs, and good intentions are no shortcut to supposed authenticity, and still less are they a guarantor of overall quality.

Once Upon a Time in the West is pretty dull itself.

Most of Weathervanes is serviceable modern rock, so it will find an appreciative audience despite its egregious derivativeness and a lyricist who seems like he'd use the word "inebriated" to talk about how drunk he got last night.

Kittenz and Thee Glitz is Housecat watered down by trivia and outside egos.

It is an anodyne pop record for a post-EDM world, one where trap and trop-house mix with pale imitations of the Migos flow and Coldplay’s cornball sentimentality.

This is the band's most autopiloted effort yet, a hacked-up last-gen rehash of said space jams, only now with greater emphasis on glitz and glam. Somehow Muse, always loveably lame, have managed to take a turn for the lamer.

By co-opting and debasing punk-disco's vitality and sincerity and thereby rendering the style accessible to the botox-and-bulimia set, Jackson betrays the visions of those whose ecstatically powerful music he lavishly degrades.

Their bar band approach sounds as if they've taken a book of rock history and, dutifully following along, bookmarked some of the most unremarkable passages.

VHS or BETA have moved on, like so many bands this year, to pillaging the dance-friendly template of late-80s Cure.

True Colors does traverse familiar, populous formats that may be difficult to innovate on top of, but other posi-tinted, mass audience-focused projects have found success by mixing their own cocktails of EDM, soul, and of-the-minute rap production. Zedd’s True Colors, though, feels underformed and unoriginal.

Form & Control immediately shows the band's strengths and their weakness: It's a smooth, utterly precise study of the formal elements that make disco and electro-pop tick, but with far too little of the body heat that actually gets that stuff going.

Dead Media works on occasion, but primarily when Hefner revert to the traditional pop trio format of bass, guitar, drums.

The underlying problem here seems to be that Hebden still isn't comfortable in his own skin while improvising, with Reid or otherwise.

Live It Out is stymied by lame riffing and unqualified wonkage.

Lemonjelly.ky's nine tracks consist largely of samples from atrocious Nana Mouskouri songs and soundclips nipped from 100 Strings mood music albums. What binds these samples together is a series of predicable hip-hop beats and root-note basslines.

They feel like the pieces that stuck to the wall when he threw everything at it.

Picture, the more ambitious of the pair, simply sounds unfocused, overly concerned with effects and production--with moments and sounds--than with songs or overall shape.

On Ten$ions, they replace what made them sometimes intriguing and slightly subversive with tired tropes and lazy lyrics.

Only the spirited, psychedelic chug of “Spitfire” and the handclap-catalyzed go-go of “Hey Now” come close to clicking with—let alone recapturing—any portion of the band’s former glory. The remainder of the record is filled out with either bland mediocrities or downright embarrassments such as “Flying Like a Bird”, a sappy ballad that sharply delineates every weakness Inspiral Carpets has, from a dearth of energy to a lack of melody.

Look at the Powerful People begins with 54 of the most exciting seconds of music I’ve heard in 2017. And then they start talking.

Billy Corgan needs someone on his shoulder to whisper "no."

[Come of Age] is even more of a dystopian nightmare than Kid A or an El-P record: The Vaccines draw us into a universe that revolves entirely around Young, and if he's got nothing to say, his only possible conclusion is that nobody does.

The album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms.

The lack of any sort of critical thesis or undergirding may seem merely academic, but it translates into performances that are wanly reverent and unanimated, celebrating the music mainly for its age but not its actual history.

Weird to say about a hippie, but it's humanity that's missing in Sharpe's mild but mannered and certainly unmemorable music, which feels focus-grouped, stone-washed, and artificial.

If Samson's voice had the full-blooded verve of her old bandmate Hanna, she might be able to sell this stuff. Instead, she delivers all the album's lyrics in the same flat monotone, and she just sounds bored the whole time.

Overproduced, under-written, swaggering nonsense.

Too much of the album either throws the group into truly unflattering contexts or returns them to the hamster-wheel formalism they’ve been running into the ground for years now.

Like much of X&Y, Magnet is exceptionally unobtrusive, music to ignore.

Despite good intentions, the wincing lyrics border on pandering and even exploitative, revealing little in the way of insight or palpable compassion

Not all of Diamond's new songs go awry. Most just go away, their melodies dissipating, their lyrics flimsy even through those tremendous pipes.