Hologram Jams (that title remind you of Oracular Spectacular or Robotique Majestique?) is a vastly inferior record to Sea, replacing the dynamic punk psychedelia of their debut with sugary overstimulation and rank nostalgia.

Every hoedown on Sigh No More-- every rush of instruments in rhythmic and melodic lockstep-- conveys the same sense of hollow, self-aggrandizing drama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone clinically extracts whatever trace of messy humanity made it through the first time the Bravery worked the nu-wave shtick, on their debut; Stir the Blood is a parodoxically bloodless listen.

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

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.

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.

He's only a middling guitar player, but insists on soloing and showboating endlessly, drawing out songs to unnecessary lengths.

A few good hooks, in fact, would go a considerable way toward redeeming Blank's largely forgettable debut, I Love You.

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.

She shows greater range than expected, but the clatter of Johannes' busy production too often obscures her charisma and renders her odd punk melodies sadly lifeless. She's better than this perplexing project.

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.

There is an alarming lack of imagination in evidence on Skeletons, and virtually nothing in the way of strong emotion.

They've jettisoned just about anything that ever made them perversely enjoyable.

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

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

While the whole package is marketed as a "love letter" to fans, true followers will quickly be able to sniff out its inferiorities. If anything, this latest selection from the dwindling Buckley vaults subverts his talents and ultimately insults the same hardcore fans it's aimed at.

Druggy records are never all that good when they don't convey anything about the experience other than the blur. That's not to say you couldn't get swept up in The Mirror Explodes' churn under the right influence, but it's not something to inspire the formation of many new memories.

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.

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.

Ultimately, the whole of Tinted Windows is so much less than the sum of its considerable parts that it's almost tragic.

Asleep feels less like an album of music meant to entertain than an assumption that you can actually bump a marketing plan in your cars and house parties.

Like Skinner's recent work, instead of woodshedding on the mixtape circuit like smarter and hungrier rappers, we're treated to lightweight albums that are three years in the making and still feel like a rushed jumble of bad ideas that just get worse as they go along.

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.

Grrr... seems transcribed from a distant memory or read from the pages of a script.

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.

The production of The Bridge sounds like it came out of an extended catch-up session, the work of a man best accustomed to the breakbeat era's techniques trying his hand at the last ten years' worth of club-rap digitalism.

These clusterfuck all-the-cooks experiments, more often than not, add up to way, way less than the sum of their parts.

Never has that rift between Pollard the songwriter and Tobias the arranger been more transparent-- and more problematic-- than on the formless, often dull The Crawling Distance, a particularly blank batch of Pollard tunes dressed to the nines in Tobias' perfunctory sheen.

Not everything here fails in such catastrophic fashion, but because the band noodles its way through Mirror Eye's druggy, sitar-laced exercises without any thought towards coherence (or completion), even its few promising tracks feel slapdash and unfinished.

Universal Mind Control is a painful misstep from a talented rapper who's decided to be as nasty as he wants to be--which turns out to be much, much nastier than we'd like.

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

In the City is proof that you can co-opt the most retarded aspects of 80s corporate rock and still not be any fun.

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.

He issues his grievances with a smart-ass certainty, rarely showing empathy or compassion for his characters or admitting that maybe it's his perspective that's skewed.

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.

Cover albums and mixes aside, Radio Retaliation is the pair's fifth studio album, and finds them once again failing to make anything but the most minute adjustments to the polite groove that is their stock, trade and--in 2009--monopoly.

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

Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, the debut LP by the London folk-pop quartet, bites its best sensitive-indie forebears and then pukes up all the most superficial chunks.

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.

The Airborne Toxic Event is an album that's almost insulting in its unoriginality.

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

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.

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 brio of an amateur would almost have to be preferably to the overzealous professionalism of Beautiful Lie, whose frilly "classicist" pop gets all dressed up to go absolutely nowhere.

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.

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.

So this record's creative and artistic value is pretty much nil--in fact it only just hits competent.

More so than the album's overall malaise and inconsistency, it's this ridiculous (and in some cases, offensive) attempt at "edginess" that's most off-putting.

Trilla, Rick Ross's inexplicable second album, is every bit a fatty contemporary American disaster.

Like hearing DLR's lonely voice doing its best in the absence of accompaniment, most of Robotique is just sort of depressing.

Bell X1 generically compartmentalize everything instead and end up with a record that doesn't even top the work of their former bandmate.

The slightly more dynamic Louis XIV only give you testosterone-fueled rock at its least appealing extremes: heedless lust or, arguably even more repulsive, cheesy balladry.

Yoav goes about his expecting some sort of kneejerk praise for rolling dolo, but thanks to a total lack of depth, sonic or otherwise, all I see is the gimmicks, the wack lyrics.

Neither here nor there, the funklesss would-be dancefloor fodder of P.D.A. frankly comes off D.O.A.

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.

Pull the Pin might be going for the uncluttered "production" of older Rick Rubin, but instead it cops the sterility of newer Rick Rubin, each song lumbering on a chassis of waterlogged tempo and Jones' wooden melodies, begging for just about anything to grab you.

Beyond the Neighbourhood is the sonic equivalent of a beautiful coffin.

Yet another standardized LP of glorified Dave Matthews tunes.

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.

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

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

As annoying as Endicott's mascara-tainted bellyaching was on the Bravery's debut, his histrionics-for-the-masses commandeer the group's stylistic direction on The Sun and the Moon, cheapening already trite regurgitations of Robert Smith confessionals by bloating them to anthemic proportions.

The problem with Twelve isn't the staid song selection so much as this dogged insistence on staying faithful to the originals.

I highly recommend that Animal Collective fans seek out the re-reversed copies of Pullhair Rubeye [available illegally on the Internet]. They are enjoyable.... But then there's, you know, the thing that sits on store shelves and costs money. And that version of Pullhair Rubeye is remarkably dull.

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.

On Paths Taken, the Junkies sound like a band battling obsolescence and trying entirely too hard to make an impression as an inventive and therefore relevant band.

Ghosthorse and Stillborn tends toward lazy, meandering nothings.

Traffic and Weather finds them treading water in the worst possible way.

There's virtually zero worth to this album, a combination of zealous experiments with Garage Band and would-be Music and Lyrics soundtrack cuts.

On his lonesome Anderson is oppressively unimaginative.

It's plenty catchy and big, but it's also wildly uncreative and predictable.

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

An album that hideously disgraces the band's original work.

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.

She spends so much time rambling about her pain that she never bothers even to try to make us feel it.

Whenever Rice risks truly touching us emotionally-- say, when he's asking a former lover, "Do you brush your teeth before you kiss?" on "Accidental Babies"-- he undercuts himself with go-nowhere melodies and formulaic arrangements.

Born is his blandest, most non-descript offering yet. Even the so-so Have You Fed the Fish? seems like a masterpiece in comparison to the downtrodden piano banalities that slosh all over this latest nadir.

Synths lap, strings weep soppingly, ham-fisted fingers tap, time signatures flash, and the amphetamine Beat poetry...is amphetamine Beat poetry.

It's as if Primal Scream have run completely out of ideas and so they've reverted to the detestable fallbacks of honking harmonicas and bar-band choogles, acting like college freshmen who just discovered blues.

They've jettisoned nearly all their Strokes, Television, and other grab bag post-punk propensities, turning instead to adult alternative as a foundation for this late-20s midlife crisis. I guess if ya can't beat 'em, just quit and make soft rock!

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.

A treacherous, crashing disaster.

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.

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.

The first hour or so of It's Alive is perfect for Cars fans so diehard they'd not only pay for a live album of songs they mostly already own, but a live album 20 years after the fact with only two original members and a different lead singer.

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.

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

On the stupid loud songs, Craig Nicholls sounds like a bored Kurt Cobain. On the stupid slow songs, Craig Nicholls sounds like a bored Liam Gallagher.

Swept up in maudlin strings and chintzy brass, Ashcroft blurs his anguished syllables like Tom Petty doing Bob Dylan, embraces U2-jerkoff bombast, and follows his idiosyncratically generic muse into uncharted depths. Keys to the World is as hilariously indulgent as "Trapped in the Closet", if vastly less self-aware; it's also a more laughable satire of contemporary music than Bang Bang Rock 'n' Roll, though less durable and totally accidental.

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

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

Generation is a sonic mess, all weightless synth swish, dull beats, and maybe-ironic midi horns.