Caught up in the importance of her themes, she loses sight of her music's ability to convey them.

It almost hurts to pan this album but probably not as much as listening to the whole thing a fourth time.

The idea that these guys from Amherst who made chaotic, inscrutable music are somehow ready for the rock canon seems, in itself, to be the height of pretension.

At four songs and around 33 minutes, the album doesn't have much structure, with songs starting and ending after random durations, and without the drums, it's low on beat.

These are songs calculated to make an impact on the cliché idea of what a country fan is, playing off stereotypes of Jesus loving, hard working, hard loving life in the heartland, but there's no personality here.

Power-pop needs both power and pop, and Gringo Star don't have enough of either to make this album worth revisiting.

For this particular moment, though, Oh Fortune reveals that Mangan is still a lightweight.

The repetition and sameness of the 10 songs on 200 Years quickly becomes mind-numbing, the painful plainsong wearing out its welcome before the record reaches the halfway point, let alone by the end of its 40 long minutes.

Only the first track on this EP is a new and original song, and even though it sounds generic, this collection would have worked a lot better on a whole if the next four tracks had been original songs too.

It's sure to sell on brand recognition alone, but I doubt a series of mannered and soulless hooks are going to find much life outside of the European remix circuit.

Unless you're a die-hard fan of Bozulich's impressive and vast body of work, or like your "music" to be as willfully oblique as possible, In Animal Tongue is the type of record where you can save some precious coin by taking a pass on it.

Even a cursory listen to the album is enough to push the listener into a music-induced coma, and not in a good way. It falls so flat that he should just give Cattle Callin' away for free.

At no point does Lou Reed sound like he is singing with Metallica, and the same is true the other way around.

With Costey's 21st century modern rock production, everything on this album is blown up a dense roar that in its attempt to overwhelm with volume cannot obscure how dull the songs really are.

Staind is one of the worst albums I've heard all year, a top to bottom exercise in bland, formulaic, boring rock.

Through the Green just drags on and on.

Next to his material, In the Grace of Your Love sounds as forgettable as the dozens of nameless bands who came in Echoes's wake. The Rapture could still regroup on their next record, but it's difficult to see where they'd go from here.

As a record that Geffen plus Newell and co expect anyone to pay for, this album is a distillation of all that is wrong with British guitar music, peddled by a band so consumed by their own deluded egotism that they think of themselves as its saviours.

If these sons-of-Foo acts want to stand half a chance of being remembered, they've got to master the hooks as well as the edge.

The trouble is, Satisfied at Last is a weak album, period, whether it bears the name Joe Ely or Joe Blow.

There's a difference between appealing to a broad audience and pandering to one, and that difference is having some sense of artistic soul. This has neither.

The rest of the album varies the sonic assault in various ways, while striving to ensure that there are only occasional moments of listenability.

You get the impression Credo came this close to being pretty good then overshot the mark and crashed in a tangled mess. Yes, the Human League are still laboring on. But dignity? Fast running out.

F.A.M.E. will satisfy 12 year Malibu and Miami beach frequenters, but anyone with a soul should steer far clear of this mess.

Paris Suit Yourself appear to approach writing music by subtracting any trace of form, melody, rhythmic consistency, excitement, emotional resonance and animating purpose.

I think for most listeners, if Khalifa can't find a way to reconnect to his Kush & OJ and, to a lesser extent, his How Fly magic there wouldn't be any tears shed if he slinked back to the internet underground by this time next year and stopped bombarding the market with such limp tunes.

See My Friends will not be a stain on Ray Davies' soul. By the same token, it will be forgotten pretty quickly.

My jaw remains affixed to the ground, my main goal from this point onwards remains to never hear Lasers in its entirety again.