Kindly Bent to Free Us works as a sort of retroactive insult: It resurrects many of the misgivings people have always had about Cynic--the overindulgent vocals, for instance, or the ponderous new-age musings--and runs wild with them.

The personalities on this album are so blank the songs may as well be performed by apps, and sung by Siri.

Most of Don’t You aims for Babyface but lands somewhere around Surfacing-era Sarah McLachlan, except nowhere near as good.

Thing is, it still sounds entirely like an Air album--just a remarkably bland one.

There's nothing truly transgressive or illuminating or innovative about Last of the Country Gentlemen.

The entire album sounds like a half-hearted compromise between what the group was and what the group wants to become.

[A] crushing bore of a detour.

There are moments of clarity when the band sounds fantastic, but they're not enough to save the record from landing in the band's forget pile.

What seems like a perfectly swell concept for a surprise gig at the local pub-- where sloshed spectators can join in on the hero worship-- feels much more suspect when reified into a permanent record.

Average from beginning to end.

Indicud has the sheen of a cinematic blockbuster.... Unfortunately, it also has no substance.

Montage of Heck is like a shaggier version of Family Tree, a voyeuristic document that attempts to plop you down in the living room of a dead hero, and it leaves you with a similar hollow feeling.

Rather than feel cathartic or caustic, it’s oddly cold and rote.

Dalley possesses neither heart nor soul as a lead vocalist, and his milk-warm emotional outpouring of tiresome, overwrought subject matter could get lost in a crowd of two.

An unwelcome presence, Morello is simply the most obvious of many elements on High Hopes that just don’t work. It’s all the more unfortunate given that there are actually some redeemable songs here, along with some brief glimpses of Springsteen the rock'n'roll storyteller.

Cry is a soulless and Styrofoam record as hollow as a booty-call text at 3 a.m. “Hey sexy, you up?” the record seems to beckon. It’s hardly an inviting proposition.

Okay, it's not really very good at all.

Sixth studio outing Beat the Devil's Tattoo is already getting billed as the one that brings all these prodigal sons' (and daughters'-- ex-Raveonette Leah Shapiro is now on drums) stylistic detours back home. It kind of is, but if BRMC's sound has cohered, their songwriting has unfortunately done the opposite.

Sasha and Digweed appear to be suggesting that, along with setting an NYC club aflame, they can also bore you to tears in your living room.

The Steinhardt who made Generic Treasure comes off as a guy far too stuck in his own head to get himself into yours.

Worlds Apart is an aspiration, an apology, the sound of confusion.

Nation is saved from being a total failure at its close, with 'Deft Left Hand.'

Mirage Rock is so lightweight and inconsequential that it really does seem more like an illusion than a record; it's wispy and indiscernible, as if the people who made it had no vision for what it should be.

Most of the cars in The Great Gatsby crash and so does Luhrman's soundtrack.

NF also shares Eminem’s shrillness and distorted sense of volume, rapping like he’s putting on the world’s loudest Punch and Judy show. He spends much of The Search darting in and out of an overbearing rappity-rap snarl-yell that can cut right through you if you don’t relate to his roiling anger.

Unless you approach Electronica 1 as a collection of unrelated songs designed to be cherry-picked for playlists--and given the generic title, maybe that's the point--there's little to hold it together.

So yeah, the tricks are clever; unfortunately, musically, There's Me... is an overstuffed mess.

Lack of focus undermines the beauty of Younge’s arrangements. The record traffics in grandeur and importance without tethering them to perspective, curiosity, or imagination. No people or passions grace his elaborate stages, giving The American Negro a vacant, bloodless feel. The American Negro is a concept album without an essence, agitprop that doesn’t know what it’s agitating for, citing everything and saying nothing.