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

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

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.

Death in Vegas wants to be a scary rock band. As such, they've crafted a scary album with scary guitars, scary beats, scary distortion, and scary Iggy Pop. But Death in Vegas isn't even a rock band. It's two pasty English DJ-type guys and some session musicians.

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.

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

The lengthy, indistinguishable tracks could pass for a Daniel Lanois-produced collaboration between the Dave Matthews Band and Kenny G.

A homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

#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.

Overly orchestrated mid-tempo ballads with inane lyrics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Feels more like failed market research than soul searching.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's an unrefined, poorly calculated mess.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

An unfathomable album which will be heard in the squash courts and open mic nights of deepest hell.

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

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

Nothing on Outbursts turns out to overblown sonically, but "Sea Change" does signal a straining quality that runs throughout the album.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

-, pronounced “subtract,” which responds to them much like its predecessor, 2021’s =, did to its themes of turning 30 and becoming a parent: with the usual beige palette, generic hooks, and vapid lyrics. The songs on - are almost uniformly dour, often slow, occasionally drumless.

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.

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

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

What an utter mess.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.