Rush!, their first album recorded mainly in English, is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level: vocally grating, lyrically unimaginative, and musically one-dimensional. It is a rock album that sounds worse the louder you play it.

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.

Musically, it’s unfulfilling, lacking standout melodies or exciting rhythms. The sound of Come Home the Kids Miss You, in turn, is about as sophisticated and interesting as a Daniel Arsham sculpture, neat at a glance but vapid upon any extended interrogation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There is no fight in these songs, not even the faintest stab at hope. There’s just empty moaning, and a lone, feeble guitar that chugs for all eternity in hell.

The album never makes a case for X as anything other than a thinly subversive figure and never even rationalizes the baggage that comes saddled with it. X’s musical legacy will forever be interlinked to violence. Skins is merely a shallow attempt to overwrite that legacy gone awry.

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

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

Yes, these are songs, supposed expressions of a character, but they are as artless, discursive, and slapdash as a to-do list or a diary entry; the central character seems to be only a deep sense of self-pity in need of external validation.

Despite the attempts to recreate the dense power chords and pained whines that made Saves the Day emo poster boys, the formula fails when applied through Conley’s rose-colored vision of his own glory days.

What they lack in self-awareness they more than make up for in rigid self-consciousness, failing to make any fun or campy choices to lift these songs out of a morass of the worst impulses of Rush and Cream. The back half of the album alternates between the ignorable and unforgivable.

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.

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.

The Deconstruction produces no eccentricity, pop smarts, orchestral creativity, or emotional revelation.

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

The lack of honesty doesn’t really matter--nobody’s going to Sheeran for gritty soul-searching. But the lack of imagination does.

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.

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

On My One is precisely the kind of mistake that pop stars make when they think they’re smarter than the system.

It doesn’t help that Nine Track Mind is all ballads except for three tracks, two of which are duets (Trainor, a sleepy Selena Gomez) that somehow still feel like ballads. Puth cannot fill this frame of sentimentality with any genuine sentiment.

Dead Petz is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can.

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.

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.

For the most part, Déjà Vu is rickety and wholly unnecessary.

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.

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.

The result of so much suspicion is an album that’s somehow both loud and timid--all clamor and no soul.

The greatest-hits disc is a misnomer: It's mostly a grab-bag of Shady throwaways and deep cuts.

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.

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

With every bungled attempt at pop, metal, or pop-metal, Get Hurt just rewrites its own worst case scenario.

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

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

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

The four new songs here are less blank than the four on the first, if only marginally.

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.

This music wasn’t just written or recorded without any regard to the quality of the Pixies legacy, it was done so without regard to songwriting quality at all.

Mixed and mastered without nuance or mercy, the relentless blare of Excuse My French becomes a paradoxically ambient experience.

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.

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

Pillowfight is technically flawless but thoroughly unexciting.

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.

The versions of Winehouse's repertoire that turn up on At the BBC's audio disc, though, are almost all sloppier than their studio counterparts, and she rarely manages to reveal anything we didn't already know about her songs.

These are dance songs so strident that no one could ever hope to move to them, pop songs so thin that no one could choose lines worth singing along to, rap verses so fumbly that practically anyone could rewrite them and make them better.

The main issue here is a distinct and debilitating lack of craft.

Bafflingly outdated alt-rock songs that could comfortably sidle between choice cuts from Marcy Playground and Semisonic [circa 1998] and get their asses handed to them.

An often unlistenable album from WHY?, a group whose music is often excellent.

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.

Is the band's self-titled album under the new moniker a brave change-up? Sure. Is it any good? Not even a little.

Despite attempts at lyrical heft detailing a too-vague sexual awakening ("Sebastian") and an encomium for a friend ("Ghost Bike"), Ulicny undermines himself on a second-by-second basis by finding no lyric that can't be subjected to at least six different forms of contortion regardless of its content.

Let the People Speak feels utterly passionless and perfunctory.

Sounds From Nowheresville makes me want to buy chocolate, try on clothes, take a holiday--anything but listen to this record.

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

(together) is borderline unlistenable taken as a whole.

His art is 144,487 times less remarkable than his first week sales numbers would have you believe.

While Glover's exaggerated, cartoonish flow and overblown pop-rap production would be enough to make Camp one of the most uniquely unlikable rap records of this year (and most others), what's worse is how he uses heavy topics like race, masculinity, relationships, street cred, and "real hip-hop" as props to construct a false outsider persona.

Ersatz G.B.'s abrasiveness, inscrutability, and tedium are increasingly tough to take with repeated close listening... a shabby, grueling album.

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

Audacious to the extreme, but exhaustingly tedious as a result, its few interesting ideas are stretched out beyond the point of utility and pounded into submission.

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.

The edge that sparked Spank Rock's best moments back in the day either isn't there or flails around without direction.

This year, we've seen Taking Back Sunday, Saves The Day, and the Get Up Kids attempting to play catch up with themselves, but here Braid bafflingly jettison the goodwill of their past: the palm-muted verses and squeaky choruses, the one-sided conversations of the lyrics, the antiseptic production -- I'll say it could come from anyone because you probably don't remember who the Pinehurst Kids are.

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

In execution the whole thing comes off as nothing more than a thinly disguised, crass attempt to smoke latent Oasis fans out of hiding. Unfortunately for them, Beady Eye already beat them to the punch.

Though they'd probably be better off rehashing Bring It On's supplicant roots-rock in the current climate, Whatever's on Your Mind begins with a fumbled acoustic strum, and after exactly three seconds of human touch, you get all the elbow grease, brow sweat, and rock'n'roll heart of a dubstep record Cut Gomez and they bleed Purell.

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

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.

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

The problem is that this was, at best, a 1997 cash-grab that probably would've worked in that economic climate, and now you just get to debate whether it's a cynical move on Soundgarden's part or, more likely, something they had absolutely nothing to do with at all.

She comes across like a severely dumbed-down Lily Allen at best, and at worst she seems like someone you would want to root against in a televised singing competition

Lupe often has enough trouble staying out of his own way, yet Lasers doesn't suffer for that reason; it just feels like the flaming wreckage of a project that never had a prayer.

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.

You almost hope Young the Giant acquiesced to some music executives' request to compromise their style, because nothing else sufficiently explains a debut so devoid of personality.

With inchoate, banal lyrics and blustering tunes that go for it all, all the time, Degeneration Street sounds like the product of too much euphoria. Definitely catch the Dears on the comedown, if at all.

More streamlined than their older music, Mine Is Yours' relative simplicity allows its songs to more transparently deal with love lost and found.

Problem is, for the second straight album, they do so with the same exact set of tools as every other band in this sphere. So critiquing Ritual threatens to be a process of listing obvious influences that's just as dull as actually listening to the thing.

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

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.

Codename: Rondo sounds like two people doing the least amount of work possible before something can be considered a "song."

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.

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.

Maybe Funstyle will be liberating for her; maybe, as with Self Portrait, her deck-clearing exercise will let her shake off aspects of the way she's understood that she finds burdensome. At the very least, it's a shrewd way to lower expectations. After this, whatever she does next can only be a pleasant surprise.

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.

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.

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.

Out of all the depressing aspects of Recovery, the worst is the realization that for listeners the album takes the opposite arc-- the more he motors on about having reclaimed his passion for hip-hop and finally figured out who he is, the more draining the album becomes.

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.

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

No matter what their exteriors, Keane still seem incapable of anything other than the most heavy-handed gestures, peddling the same populist mock uplift that leaves you feeling pushed when it's meant to move.

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.

What we've gotten instead is a forgettable collection of fairly generic, overproduced rock songs that feel, oddly, like a put-on.

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.