A foreboding chronicle of the unpleasantness to follow, the typical arc of a break-up tale never materializes as "The Beginning" promises.

The only things you hear on the album are Wainwright's voice and his piano, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that he wants you to luxuriate in both when it's far more likely you'll feel like you're drowning, given how rarely Wainwright buoys the listener with an actual melody or memorable lyric.

Machine disappoints on an almost unprecedented number of levels, and its unfortunate length is the least of its problems.

That air of obligation presides during The World We Left Behind, a nine-track slog.

The only moments where Wayne sounds marginally interested in his own music come when he veers furthest away from rap.

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.

Instead of offering playful, engaging pop music, we get new wave retreads and a couple of rock journeymen and the whole thing comes off like an overgrown episode of MTV's "Making the Band".

The idea that a producer of his caliber can’t put together something resembling a likeable LP-- particularly in light of his endlessly amusing Gangsta Grillz mixtape, In My Mind: The Prequel-- is insane. Here, he’s shot himself in the foot. Where the mixtape exploded with enthusiasm and wit, In My Mind the album is corroded and ineffectual. Worse, it’s predictable.

Lamb of God's general lack of adventurousness makes them mostly indistinguishable from their heroes and, budget excepted, the bulk of their contemporaries.

Deer Tick try to score points simply by sounding like they could drink all those bands under the table, and the self-absorbed and even downright hateful Divine Providence ends up drinking at you, not with you.

Costello has eschewed all sense of melody and humor in favor of rambling, mock-jazz noodling.

Rarely has a genre sounded so tried and tired, so forced, formulaic and reliant on its own mythology as country music is made to sound on Regard the End.

Even as a record of adequate, vaguely politicized mook-rock, it mostly falls flat, whether by lazy lyrics or some uninspired drumming from Galactic's Stanton Moore, who adds plenty of percussive touches like the judicious cowbell of 'Clap For the Killers' but sinks more straightforward tracks such as 'The Oath' like a stone.

Pillowfight is technically flawless but thoroughly unexciting.

We have 12 microwave-nuked approximations of Drake songs circa 2013 and Kanye songs spanning from The College Dropout to Yeezus, with none of the wit, soul, or edge.

The songs are generally slow, samey, and sleep-inducing, and the lyrics, any language differences notwithstanding, are hard to take seriously, even for a guy who raved about I'm From Barcelona.

You’re Going to Make It makes life sound like one big bouncy castle of fun, and that unquestioned contentment renders Mates of State musically anonymous.

To catch a glimpse of these guys' past glories in 2009, your best option is still to go see them live; this is just a souvenir.

Yours to Discover never feels like a dishonest record, just one where it’s incredibly hard to grasp the intentions or ambitions of its creator.

Outgunned is a mess of unfocused energy and uncomfortably irrelevant sonics, an odd mix of cartoonish immediacy and tired youth-cult ideas that would be the perfect soundtrack to Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie: The Movie.

As it is, Peace & Love sounds like a rough draft full of rookie mistakes, rather than a veteran defiantly going it alone.

The Misfits' schtick should stand the test of time. But The Devil's Rain makes supernatural feel like fairly workaday stuff.

Death in Vegas wants to be a scary rock band. As such, they've crafted a scary album with scary guitars, scary beats, scary distortion, and scary Iggy Pop. But Death in Vegas isn't even a rock band. It's two pasty English DJ-type guys and some session musicians.

A career-low for Thievery Corporation.

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

Everything Everything's debut LP, Man Alive, is proof that enthusiastic experimentation can't save your end product when the underlying elements are so incompatible and unappetizing.

Everything about Laugh Now, Cry Later feels utterly tapped of inspiration and vitality, and Cube's former greatness only makes this exhausting slog that much more depressing.

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.

The problem isn't that Red Carpet Massacre pushes Duran Duran out of their comfort zone. The problem is that they sound just a little too comfortable there to make the most of bad situation.

It’s an album that seems to exist primarily to be disliked, and it couldn’t seem prouder of itself for achieving that sad goal. Credit Joan of Arc for this, though: 20 years in, they’re still finding new ways to alienate and infuriate.

Let the People Speak feels utterly passionless and perfunctory.

True Sadness is a record that can’t seem to get out of its own way. Almost every track is bloated with instrumentation.

Argos is still witty, but here his punchlines tend to be predictable, due in part perhaps to the disc's overstretched answer-song conceit.

While many adolescents go through mixed-up times, most have the sense not to let Wyclef Jean remix their accounts of first love into a four-minute bowl of mush called "Dancing Lessons."

On We Are the Night, the Chemical Brothers have switched from integrators to imitators.

At its worst, this is effectively a contemporary acoustic neo-No-Depression record with Costello's signature vocal tics slapped on top.

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

Beyond stripping Pop of his personality, the most offensively bad [tracks] on Faith are the ones that have no shame in hiding their financial intentions.

-, pronounced “subtract,” which responds to them much like its predecessor, 2021’s =, did to its themes of turning 30 and becoming a parent: with the usual beige palette, generic hooks, and vapid lyrics. The songs on - are almost uniformly dour, often slow, occasionally drumless.

Throughout Post Traumatic, you can sense how unmoored Shinoda is without that spectacle. His chest doesn’t puff out as far as it did on Fort Minor. His compositions don’t detonate like his best work for Linkin Park. His bandmates aren’t there to lift him up when he falls short. He sounds abandoned.

Conceptually, they're close to Mumford & Sons: opportunistic in their borrowings, yet entirely unimaginative in the execution. Theirs is a thoroughly timid, tentative take on Americana: roots music without the roots.

The album is stacked with cartoonish approximations of what she thinks a rap song should sound like: shivers of bass, the occasional “skrrrt,” Mad Libs of designer brands and bodily fluids. Many sound like direct imitations of the rappers she admires.

Too much of Man of the Woods is musically and thematically shallow; at 66 minutes, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep.

A few fatal flaws eclipse all of Rooty's abundant qualities. Basement Jaxx have taken kitsch a few steps too far.

Belladonna sounds technically flawless-- every marimba strike and fret run has a specific texture that's almost miniaturist in its realistic detail-- but it's all in service to vocal-less songs that are ponderous and dull, whose strict adherence to an overriding motif hems them in.

Let Go's only plausible use is to forcibly expose us to mid-90s alt-rock in the context of today so that we might come to grips with just how damn crappy it sounds.

There is no scrape, no tension, no noisy bullshit, and Destroyed is eminently un-replayable as a result.

Break Line is a musical without an audience, and its creators might be better off if it fails to find one.

Nothing on Outbursts turns out to overblown sonically, but "Sea Change" does signal a straining quality that runs throughout the album.

Pump’s only motivation is to stunt on his old high school teachers. That theme is heavy-handed on the album, as Pump bashes us with a running joke about how he used to go to Harvard before dropping out.

Replicants' problems extend beyond vocal limitations; the real issue is that, at 13 tracks and 40 minutes, this record plays like a shiftlessly uninteresting, self-parodic slab of warm-in-2010 pastiche.

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.

Full of the kind of basic strum-alongs and diaristic musings that yield showers of Starbucks praise.

What [3rdEyeGirl] don’t have is much of a personality. Recorded live in the studio using analog equipment, the album is nevertheless too proficient, too slick, and too professional to come across as much more than anonymous.

Maybe once the Ting Tings stop trying so hard to convince everyone they're having a good time and start actually having a good time, these cute little ballads will no longer be their sole redeeming quality.

In the end, Barbara could've been made by a computer with a specific coding procedure: bass riffs align themselves into right angles, sharp synth lines blare, hi-hats sizzle, hooks dissolve on contact, and 2004 never ends.

It just feels like empty tribute, lip service for someone who really does deserve something more: the dignity of being left alone.

Much of the material sounds rushed and half-finished, like a high schooler trying to write a research page paper during his lunch period.

It sadly turns out to be an unsettling piece of evidence that he's lost without someone else's pre-existing sounds to extrapolate from and transform.

At only 33 minutes, Subtítulo doesn't leave Rouse, longtime producer Brad Jones, and their small band much time to recover from such miscues.

I just always felt comfortable in my thinking that one Toad The Wet Sprocket was more than enough to fulfill a specific emotional and intellectual niche. Am I wrong?

At nearly every turn of their flaccid debut, Up All Night, Razorlight squander the ideas they've snatched up from other, more talented acts, then somehow find even more ways to ruin already perfectly uninteresting songs.

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

We sound like everyone's favorite old rock bands, we have insipid lyrics, we say 'Come On!' and 'Oh Yeah!' every five seconds, we have no discernable identity, and we're from Australia. What could people possibly dislike about us?

Son Volt's label debut, American Central Dust, is some of the sleepiest protest music ever made: Every song saunters by at a slow tempo, Farrar's voice sounds increasingly inexpressive, and John Agnello's production makes everything sound real purdy but lifeless.

It's sort of a catch-22 that Editors can write songs sticky enough to be memorable in unfortunate ways.

Positively pillaging Oasis and The Stone Roses (whom Oasis pillaged in the first place), Johnny Marr + The Healers' mediocre debut is a defeated regurgitation of danceable Britpop and Madchester traditions that, in its best moments, recalls a second-rate... Soup Dragons.

All of these moments lurch through time without any thought of build or denouement—no tension, no release, no narrative. Muse parade their influences while giving us all comical winks.

Harris reduces pop's limitless possibilities to one-joke self-parody, his youth his most distinguishing characteristic, an unremembered yesterday always more vibrant than today.

Lateness never does much to prove Clare and his producers were on the same page (let alone reading from the same book).

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

Yet another standardized LP of glorified Dave Matthews tunes.

Ultimately, this particular dream is less one of flight or past glories, and more one of going to work and finding you've forgotten your trousers.

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.

Acoustic has all the ponderousness of a forgotten episode of MTV Unplugged, and that setting only highlights Band of Horses’ worst tendencies.

With precious little exception, these songs are just so wispy, and the band's treatment of them so delicate, it turns Courage into a museum piece, stuffy, bloodless

This could be the group's most accomplished record musically, but when Anthony Roman opens his yap he consigns the band's good deeds to the remainder bin.

While the songs certainly do the Whigs no favors, the production and mixing on Dark are downright unconscionable, making one long for the relative restraint of Don Gilmore or Andy Wallace.

Charango reeks of Warner Brothers' attempt to find a viable audience for this waning band.

The problem with Kane’s emulation of past performers is that he remains a tourist lost in his time warp, lacking the originality and vocal grit to elevate fandom into innovation.

Drama in music works perfectly fine in mediated, tactical doses, but for Tourist, the stakes are unrealistically high.

Come Around Sundown is, and it ends up being no different from a lot of the phony populism in the air these days.

Eels' latest, Tomorrow Morning, is far too insular to mean much of anything outside itself. It's an exercise in self-referentiality, which might be more impressive if the music didn't sound like the folk-with-beats path Beck was smart enough to avoid.

As with his last two releases, Baby I'm Bored is gutted by under-worked, inconsequential two-minute ideas.

Love Sign's belief in the righteousness of its intentionally big, dumb songs being big, dumb and nothing else ultimately sets Free Energy up to fail.

He’s settled into the comfort zone of songs that will haunt weddings for years to come, like “2step,” in which he raps about “Two-steppin’ with the woman I love.” Even at his most passionate, Sheeran sounds as threatening as a meringue peak. ... Sheeran’s reliance on clichés is especially unfortunate during the album’s back half, which is where he placed a majority of the songs about death and fatherhood.

Elefant's latest is only as deep as its clenched-jaw fake-Brit hooks.

The mix here is guitars to 11, everything else to 6, as the slurring, inebriated Liam is buried under mountains of riffs for better and worse.... Familiar to Millions reheats leftovers of better songs written six years ago and force-feeds them as reminders that Oasis could once write an uplifting song. As for those looking for a compact, two-disc set of Oasis' best, it's called What's the Story Morning Glory? and Definitely Maybe-- available for the low price of $8 at your local used record shop.

Helium moves with the numbing pace of a stubborn hangover, and its drums have the grain and snap of limp celery.

As a clearinghouse for an increasingly prolific band, False Metal isn't particularly generous. In fact, judging from its wacky title/cover combo, 10-song tracklist, and overall quality, it dubiously achieves Cuomo's stated goal of creating the logical follow-up to Hurley.

Given which songs are chosen and when this is being released, Scab Dates is a neither a concession nor a step forward, revealing inclinations that feel half as indulgent as they should when following a record like Frances the Mute, and about half as interesting to listen to.

Ultimately, the songs XXXTentacion has left behind are insubstantial and narrow, and Bad Vibes Forever only weakens the case that his view of himself was ever a worthwhile lens with which to process his art.

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.

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.

It's overproduced as hell, filled with all manner of electro doodads and backmasking effects, but it also boasts an immediacy and pop smarts heretofore unheard from the band. Unfortunately, that directness applies to the lyrics as well, and they simply cannot be ignored.

Even as Sledge and Jessee work to add some rough edges to the music, their frontman keeps his distance on Sound of the Life of the Mind, as though he can't quite get outside his own mind. As a result, the album sounds barely able to polarize, like Folds is rockin' the suburbs gently to sleep.

Indeed, there are lessons to be learned from Automato's debut, the foremost being that the golden touch of Mssrs. Murphy and Goldsworthy can't save a band from their own indie-rap dullness, horrible cybernetic-produce bandname, and absolutely atrocious MC.

I'm sure there are kids out there that think Basement Jaxx is great dance music, but the odds are, they don't know much about jungle.