Mostly the standard fare of Tekashi throwing sounds and flows at the wall, praying something sticks.

There are a few quality tracks among these 16-- enough for a pretty good EP-- but this is an 80-minute album with at least an hour of stuff on it that sounds at best like studio outtakes.

The songs here are absent of feeling or inspiration, but even creepier, they feel absent of intent.

Their songs fuse Ashlee Simpson mall-punk with the retro 80s fetish of former tourmate Ryan Adams' recent high-profile stinker.

Slapping a brand new bag on these pasty-white-dude tunes more often bombs than not.

Nothing's Lost is a well-meaning record that just got its priorities mixed up. These tech'd-up tearjerkers can out bench press anyone in terms of sonic fodder, but the album is whiny, transparent, and a colossal hodgepodge.

On a Wire has that glossy veneer that only happens with the help of a good decisive manager, a fast-talking label guy with All The Answers, and that bloodthirsty, all-encompassing desire for yet another Big Tour.

This album, barely over half an hour in length, bears the hallmarks of a barrel- scraping reissue program.

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.

If This Island failed musically but still got Le Tigre's message out, it could be counted as a minor success. But at this critical juncture in their career, Le Tigre seem tame.

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band wasn't a good record, but its exuberance and overstuffed arrangements at least helped counter its derivativeness. But Messengers drips with resignation and defeat-- the record actually sounds depressed.

These songs highlight the poseur mentality and insincerity that paradoxically plagues and blesses The Dandy Warhols.

Maybe it's good for a laugh, but only as a defense mechanism against the cringe-inducing experience of watching artistic expression abandon a heartbroken man at his lowest moment.

Lambency's lack of contrast and its vacuum of irresolution are only symptomatic of the record's holistic problem: there's not much memorable to grab onto.

If there's any difference between this album and von Bohlen's lackluster recent output, it's that this collection somehow manages to be even more tepid.

Magnificent City is lazy and inept, devoid of force and inspiration and chemistry.

United Nations of Sound arrives with a Sunday-school sermon's worth of resurrection rhetoric that conflates Ashcroft's return with that of J.C. himself.

Tranquilzers does very little to reinvigorate or recontextualize chillwave or shoegaze and does even less to signify innovation on its own terms.

Earth vs. the Pipettes sounds like not just a different group, not just a lesser group but, in sadly off-putting ways, almost an opposite group.

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.

More deadening than the suffocating arrangements and production or the nonexistent hooks is a tiresome perspective that goes beyond the Weeknd and connects to a celebrated lineage of male authors who assume an inherent profundity in treating a psychosexual crisis of mid-twenties masculinity as miserably as possible.

It's a shame to waste the term "spectacular" on such a mundanely depressing, blatant cash-in.

A warmed-over stew of scrubbed-up psychedelia, scrubbed-up sunshine pop, scrubbed-up soundtrack music, electrofunk, and lounge that's all produced immaculately, right down to the "messy" parts.

Unfortunately, Seconds, Higgins' first album in 36 years, doesn't match the vitality of its backstory.

The trio unlearns everything that distinguished them as instrumentalists on snakes, ending up with something that’s more entertaining when seen as a potential document of alternate history.

Spacesettings is liquidated, hookless, and entirely flaccid.

He's already recorded such a wealth of great material that no mystique remains, leaving no real reason for anyone-- including the most dedicated fan-- to seek out these poorly produced musical shreds.

LSD sound like an algorithmic midden of pop music. ... More than anything, this album is both tired and wired, like drinking Red Bull after a fifth Red Bull.