These tracks are botched experiments that can't even function as interesting failures.

Now this is a terrible Liz Phair record.

Try as you might, searching for vestiges of the ol' Morcheeba is futile.

One of the most annoying records you're liable to remember.

Only the truly earless would mistake this assortment of bloated in-jokes and interminable, sub-song drones for some kind of masterpiece.

Mimicry is one thing, but at least choose wisely. You see, OK Go decide to impersonate post-Pinkerton, post-catchy, fun-by-numbers Weezer, resulting in an Ivy Leaguer Sugar Ray sound.

A mopey bunch of trite sap O.D.-type tales almost as unstomachable as the band's former crapothecary hymns.

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.

Words fail ("I'm dying to be living"). They fail early ("You could say we're changing formats" on opener "Final Broadcast"). They fail often ("Through our cell phones we shout"; "Who are you holding when you're sleeping next to me?"; "Ignorance was so blissful"). They fail spectacularly ("This distance is getting tough"), and best of all they're posted.

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

Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums.

If Moby has accomplished anything with Hotel, it's that he may have become the rare musical artist equally despised by both of modern music criticism's warring camps.

A homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity.

Like a washed-up athlete, Lee's stuck reliving his glory years.

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.

R&G has a unified sound, rare in hip-hop albums, but it's a sound based on tinkly pianos and noodly guitars and windchimes. It sounds something like The Black Eyed Peas if they tried to make a Barry White album, but with more falsetto warbling.

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.

Futures is like a rotten onion, revealing layer upon layer of foulness.

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.

Travistan fails so bizarrely that it's hard to guess what Morrison wanted to accomplish in the first place.

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.

The Handler only meagerly amplifies what he was already doing, probably pleasing his no doubt respectable cadre of core followers, but handily turning off the rest of humanity.

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

Radio 4 can be commended for at least trying to move past the purposeful lo-fi of Gotham! and into fresher territory, but there's no bell or whistle in the world that could energize the utterly impotent songs at the core of Stealing of a Nation.

Green Imagination does awkwardly stumble into some redeeming moments, but never without a slog through the banal first.

With their staid textures, the songs tend to blend into one another, sounding at best like a spiritless hodgepodge of About a Boy's weaker moments.

Spacesettings is liquidated, hookless, and entirely flaccid.

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.

Coldplaya-hatas will loathe Keane; most others will just be insulted.

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.

On their own, N.E.R.D. are the hip-hop Toto.

The Vines earn real damnation as Winning Days comes to a close. However boring and harmlessly vapid the first ten tracks are, "F.T.W." obliterates any possibility of forgiving them.

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.

A flatulent, irrelevant, self-indulgent attempt at recapturing the hotwired spontaneity of their debut through a dirge of sub-par psychedelia and try-hard freakouts.

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.

A collection of preposterously cheerless (and charmless) songs that try much too hard to achieve a poignancy-- or anything, really-- that might hide their complete insignificance.

It's not so much that Rock N Roll is incorrigibly written as that the record is unforgivably careless, unwilling to commit to anything including itself.

A career low.

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?

The beats on Fatherfucker are not only frustratingly simplistic, but the energy and surprising rhythmic complexity of the vocals on her debut are noticeably absent, too.

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

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

Liz Phair proves so ultimately unnecessary, it might as well not even exist.

At best begs to be a fan-club download, since it offers so little to anyone not Eef's bride or offspring.

What an utter mess.

Musically and lyrically, E is spent-- out of ideas, out of innovation, unable to cough up anything but by-the-numbers pop in the fourteen originals he wrote for this disc.

Juvenile, simpering, weak, preachy, pointless and accidentally snooty, Dying in Stereo is about as empowering as Legally Blonde 2.

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

It's mind-boggling that such sloppily arranged, barely listenable stuff is getting this kind of attention, but that's celebrity for you.

At best, this record is Suicide resurrected as a novelty act; at worst it could pass for an extreme deodorant commercial with swearing.

The problem with Fear Yourself is not that it sounds big, rather that it sounds condescending to the man it's supposed to be all about, and more importantly, by.

Looking like Michael J. Fox clones decked out in garage rock gear, The D4 present aural amnesia with the lyrical complexity of an even less non-ironic Andrew WK.

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?

With a bloated 60+ minute runtime and some truly misguided dabblings with e-bows and saxophones, Log 22 presents Bettie Serveert at their most self-indulgent. And it's not pretty.

It's an unrefined, poorly calculated mess.

Awful as it might be, Oskar is not easy to dismiss because awfulness has always been a part of Momus' gambit.

#1 is a mixture of sounds already available on many Human League, 808 State and Heaven 17 records, arranged by amateurs exploring their self-obsessed, nerdy sexuality.

If The Datsuns serve any purpose, it's to remind us that 70s glam/garage-rock was largely accountable for the abomination that was 80s hair-metal.

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.

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.

This album is as much of a baffling nadir as Metal Machine Music, with nowhere near the stoned bravado.

At its worst, this project is just plain retarded.

Tired riffing, uninspired lyrics, and god-awful wankery.

Roni Size's new album is vapid, boring and uniform.

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

If these tracks had even the slightest shred of originality, it would be one thing, but Tillmann's on autopilot from the moment we push play.

Make no mistake, Spend the Night defies any post-liberation role reversal debate: The album, both musically and lyrically, is so one-dimensional, it would be equally vapid at the hands of either sex.

A career-low for Thievery Corporation.

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

Heathen Chemistry also takes the time to cop riffs and progressions from previous Oasis hits.

It sounds like a home studio project, a whole album of ideas that sound almost-clever but go absolutely fucking nowhere.

As a follow-up, 18 plays it safer than a quadruple-condomed fundamentalist Christian at an abstinence rally.

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.

It's Loverboy-style lite-metal meets new wave, without the riffs, melodies or red leather pants. In other words, it's Survivor.

If anemic blues guitar riffs and half-assed attempts at white-boy soul were the only problems with In Our Gun, it might almost be passable.

Feels more like failed market research than soul searching.

Though some might say that Armstrong's music is powerfully evocative and serene, such people hate music and all its subtle possibilities and intricacies.

Perhaps the Blues Explosion is aware of the garage revival, and looking to claim some kind of Neil Young-esque patriarchal crown. If so, the dozen tracks of Plastic Fang fail miserably, giving off the appearance of a 35 year-old accountant hanging around the old frat house on Homecoming weekend.

So then, what is the excuse for a typically elitist music nerd to bow to Andrew WK's blistering tard-rock? That's right, folks: there isn't one.

All the clichés from French pop and house music collected in one shiny package.

Lacking any dynamism, complexity, or invention, the relentless drone of most of these tracks is a shallow, reactionary statement to the progress of the post-rock genre, and completely unedifying.

Their music,... while pretending to be candy-coated pop-rock, shares all of emo's key indicators, including melodramatic vocal delivery, seamless production, and shameless overambition.

Yes, Mink Car is crap. All the charms They Might Be Giants once seemed to possess have dissipated into a cloud of embarrassing awkwardness.

The Butthole Surfers have finally become shocking only in their sheer banality, like a watered-down mix of the worst Beck and Perry Farrell material you can imagine.

We Are A&C is feckless junk.

It's all third-rate bar band stuff.

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

Now, with the early new century demanding "opuses," Tool follows suit. The problem is, Tool defines "opus" as taking their "defining element" (wanking sludge) and stretching it out to the maximum digital capacity of a compact disc.

I suppose that the backstreet Black Market Music will endear itself to gender-exploring teenagers who find the girl-on-girl action in Buffy the Vampire Slayer "fucking awesome."

By bombarding the listener with innocuousness, Alpha forge a test to determine exactly when the pedestrian becomes excruciating. By the third track, they more or less have their answer.

I've listened to this EP twice; that's once more than I would have ever liked to have heard it, give or take one listen.

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.

A lackluster, continuously-mixed double-disc look back at Maas' remixing talents. Or rather, a look back at his ability to appropriate hooks from often far superior sources.

Solaris is an anthem for Eurotrash everywhere. Its sins are ultimately sloth and indifference. Eschewing the brilliantly cold futurism of earlier efforts, Photek has crafted a dull excursion into the sunnier latitudes of electronic music: a tropical cocktail of salt-rimmed drum n' bass, faux-sexual bedroom ambient and lifeless house.

Do I really wish to describe the pallid piano ballad that is "Judy, Don't You Worry," or the Euro-dance dreck that Cracknell calls "Taking Off for France?" Nico's Liquid Steel remix of "Anymore" adds a modicum of drum-n-bass excitement to the original but not enough to excuse the Vengaboys-for-Uptown-Soirees statement of vacuity, "Penthouse Girl, Basement Boy." How about if I skip the would-be anthemic were-it-not-so-Michael Bolton "How Far?"

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

Overly orchestrated mid-tempo ballads with inane lyrics.

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."