Now this is a terrible Liz Phair record.

Bafflingly outdated alt-rock songs that could comfortably sidle between choice cuts from Marcy Playground and Semisonic [circa 1998] and get their asses handed to them.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

On his lonesome Anderson is oppressively unimaginative.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.