It's pure driving music, the type that's fun to listen to while blasting through a deserted stretch of prairie highway, but it's also something you wind up immediately forgetting the second you stop for a bathroom break.

They are the rare band that loses juice when the arrangements are tight and the focus is keen. Unfortunately, too many songs on L.O.O.P. stray from primary strength, producing a surprisingly stolid feel for a group proven to be experts at fun.

Nocturama isn't an awful record, just a problematic one, mostly due to the fact that the spontaneous studio atmosphere under which he's trying to operate doesn't allow for the careful crafting that bore his prior masterpieces.

The songs range from interesting and cool to blah and by-the-numbers, the footage hops from self-aggrandizing and boring to beautiful and big-hearted. It's all very precise and perfectly done, if you like that sort of thing.

True to form, The Bar at the End of the World is an all or nothing album. From its first moment, it is bombastic, pompous, obscure to the point of disturbing.

A pleasant, if not always engaging, slice of post-grunge, post-Britpop guitar rock.

The candied pop that characterized much of the Pumpkins later work is still out in full force.

It reminds me that equilibrium, in chemical terms, is stasis -- I get through the whole thing without hearing much chemistry at all.

There's very little variance in tempo or tone from track to track, the shadings almost imperceptible to the casual ear. At times You Win Again, Gravity! seems more a study in monochrome than an album in full living Technicolor.

Evil Heat lacks a coherent vision and sounds, if anything, like Xtrmntr's cast-offs.

Beneath it all is an album that betrays its bland uniformity after just a few listens; a collection that for all its appearances of excitement, is actually more than a little boring.

If you liked Come on Over, you'll probably like Up!, which continues her signature big sound with its disco beat and perky grrrl-power lyrics.

Unfortunately, a talented producer doesn't a great album make, as is the case with the shabby Under Construction.

Despite showing several flashes of brilliance, Jay-Z stumbles through his most uninspired and disappointing album to date.

Plainly put, there's something missing in Have You Fed The Fish -- something fresh and whimsical, a tie that binds the songs together, and that endearing twinge that made The Hour such a masterpiece.

A disappointing mishmash of simple electroclash beats and basslines and forceful, constant vocals. Gone is the dreaminess, the floating melodies, basically everything good about Simian's debut.

At its best, Finisterre finds Saint Etienne exploring new moods within their familiar formula of '60s acoustic sounds meet '90s electronica rhythms; at its worst, which is far more often, it clumsily grafts hip-hop and electro-synth on to the group's increasingly shopworn pop hooks.

The rock hardly rocks, the ballads are flat, and the efforts at mature storytelling are sadly uninspired, and, often, utterly cheeseball.... [B]ut regardless of its flaws, it's a welcome addition to the Bon Jovi collection.

A solid and passably interesting piece of work by a band that long ago learned its niche.

A couple of the tracks have a very strange motionless ambience, and others initially seem like failed attempts at post-jungle. And I'm ashamed to say that the final track, a remix/cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart", is actually without a soul.

Dirty Dancing works best when there is something to balance against the brittle, Atari-era underflow.

After a while, the music becomes repetitive and, well, uninteresting.

Maybe while stoned it makes sense, but sober, Mind Elevation is more confusing than uplifting.

There is certainly no doubt about Dresselhaus' knack for the keystroke. He takes pins and needles of sound and builds rather interesting fields. But it's the additional elements that he drags into each track that end up running him in circles.

Sure, there's some filler here and there but it's far from a Frank Black B-sides collection.

This is a fascinating record that doesn't quite work in all places and, in others, seems to work all too well, and maybe too well for their own good.

What's missing on Sirena... is the fire or edginess of the work of [Scott] Walker, Pulp, or even Tindersticks.

This is a fun, lightweight side project. And it sounds like the ear candy that it is.

When the album fails, it usually does so by not capitalizing on her honey-burnt pipes or by creating musical backdrops that are muddled, meandering dumps of dull.

Fact is, a good song's a good song, no matter how derivative it is, and Free All Angels is loaded with them.

It was a phenomenal album two years ago, when it was called Movement In Still Life and BT released it. Now, in 2002, it just seems dated.

Creative beats and wonderful musical arrangements are constantly spoiled by Wyclef's below average flow and ridiculous thug aspirations.

God Loves Ugly might not be the freshest or most innovative hip-hop album you'll hear, but it does have an edge. It's also more complicated than it seems on the surface.

Pleasing, accessible, but ordinary and lacking depth.

An album that lacks its own distinctive voice.

A disappointing combination of promising musical experimentation and uninspired lyrics.

Creatures is by no means a bad record. It's just not very imaginative, especially from a band that has staked a career on the endless scope of druggy, quasi-psychedelic imagination.

While there's nothing on Topsiders that's outright bad (except perhaps "Mango Tree", but maybe that's just me), it is, all in all, a frustrating record.

Control finds Bazan wallowing so completely in the dark side of the human psyche that it becomes stifling after awhile.

The band seems to have lost the fire under its collective ass that propelled its previous records to greatness. Without it, they sound merely pleasant and adequate rather than intense and fiery as they have previously.

At its best, WK's music is a refreshing blast of skanky air on the current stale music scene, but at its worst, it's disappointingly monotonous, unoriginal, and very, very dumb.

The problem is that the band seems to have switched onto autopilot when writing these songs.

There's nothing on Jump Leads that makes me want to dance, or even roll a joint and lie on the floor, which was the main attraction of much of Fila Brazilia's prior output. Instead it all just makes me want to rest my chin on my hand and mutter, "Hmm. Interesting."

Now Dunckel and Godin have permitted other artists to put back the tackiness that they eschewed.

It is slightly schizophrenic, but the addition of two new tracks, together with Tom Lord-Alge's guiding hand shaving the excess off some of the songs, improves things over the original.

The Divine Comedy's abandonment of their precious, nose-thumbing snobbery is abandoning what made them so great in the first place.

Many of the tunes are good for a romp around the kitchen (or the dance floor, if you prefer) but the girl is right when she says she is yet to come into her own both as a woman and a recording artist.

By the time Present/Future reaches the halfway mark, Cherry has pretty much played out his hand in a weary show of repetitive music and uninspiring lyrics.

For anyone who loved Emergency and I, or any of the Dismemberment Plan's other two records, Change sounds like The Dismemberment Plan on Quaaludes.

The most depressing thing about this album is that DMX's passion for rhyming seems to have been eclipsed by his success.

For the first time in their history, Garbage sounds like they just want to fit in. The problem is that they do.

The tracks on this album contain the right beats to make listeners' heads bounce. But more thoughtful music lovers will simply shake their heads at the profuse profanity and misogynistic philosophies Ja Rule perpetuates with Pain Is Love.

The group has effectively reinvented/refound itself as a crack power-pop band.

The stylistic mix is dizzying, from Dylanesque odes to Motown soul, but more than that, Adams's influences are so prominent that you often feel like you're listening to other people.

It's all essentially background music, in the end.

Much like the last four releases, [A Funk Odyssey] is bland background party music with a few moments that sparkle.

Folds seems to want to please everyone on the disc, making the listening experience a bit haphazard, if not a little predictable.

If the CD player is programmed to just skip a couple of songs, then one can believe that Better Than Ezra really did hop off of a major label and create the assured album they've always wanted to make.

It seems like an act of uninspired repetition.

Like Remedy, Rooty is either a brilliantly innovative record, or an unlistenable mess, depending on your point of view. To my ear it's somewhere in between, the work of two very talented house producers and songwriters with a taste for old-school sounds that's sometimes entertaining, but often unfortunate.

Deep Down & Dirty adds a few twists to the old formula, but there's something constricted about the record -- it's as if the decibel levels have been lopped off on the top and bottom, eliminating the high treble and low bass.

Once you've digested the uneasy listening of the technique itself, there's little in the way of emotional engagement to carry the album.

The music on God Bless the Go-Go's is as entertaining as anything when they were hitting the charts, only some of the lyrics are not quite as intoxicatingly bubbly and fresh as even a few years ago.

David Gahan, is in excellent voice throughout, whispering and cooing delicately into the mike in a way that is really quite rewarding.... It's what he's given to sing is where the problem lies.

The breadth of material is both a curse and a blessing.

The Mix is pretty much what you might expect from a big, mainstream DJ: a well-crafted blend of house and trance selections. No big surprises or groundbreaking material, but pleasant enough.

999 Levels of Undo shows that Fisk's transformation is still a work in progress, but when he's on, the record is right up there with any of Fisk's other accomplishments.

Stick with the up-tempo tunes and this is solid enough fare.... But I don't think there is anything new lyrically, despite the various claims.

Despite the fact that some of this album makes me Just Push Skip rather than follow the instructions of the title track, there are numerous moments of pure Aerosmith brilliance that justify tolerance of the weaker songs.

At its weakest moments, From the Desk of Mr. Lady sounds so '80s or early '90s, teetering dangerously on the brink of nostalgia.