All in all, Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, even with its mortality obsession, is mostly a statement of nothing, but at least it sounds good most of the time.

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

Calamity is a good record, but is merely adequate beside Cohen’s extensive catalog with [Deerhoof].

Generally devoid of memorable melodies, and as stale as airplane air, All of Us, Together lands, with a few minimal exceptions, with a gigantic barely mediocre thud.

It feels of the moment in that it borrows from very recent pop trends without adding much new.

When [the album] is all over the lingering echoes are of dizziness and disappointment.

It still sounds like so many other Moby albums. And by that, I mean the synth pad presets softly juggle the usual chords around and around while samples get the hell sampled out of them.

These lads from Leeds clearly realize their business model needs tweaking, though it's their songbook that benefit most from an about-face. [Review of UK release The Future Is Medieval]

Black Eyed Peas, at this point, have left the socially-conscious party raps of their past completely behind, in favor of club hits and the type of radio fodder that’s going to be filling the airwaves all summer long. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if that’s what you want.

This Dashboard has rock hooks and not much real emotion. This Dashboard is devoid of the only thing that actually made the band good: sincere heartbreak.

Much of the album seems far too content with sleekly produced, mid tempo numbers that sterilize one of the band's strongest assets, Conley's voice.

It’s all very sweet and likeable, too much in fact. The shtick is so cloying that its sentiments melt on contact. This is the fundamental flaw of Rooney’s work on Calling the World - the effect of their craft, delivery, and emotion disappears as soon as it arrives.

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

It isn't that Splinter is such a bad disc per se, but more so that it is incredibly unsatisfying.

As idiosyncratic top 40 pop--it's a success. But concentrating on it can be a huge burden on the ears.

Too often the songs here are forgettable, but Ditto continues to sing impressively.

Although this is mildly successful, Yukon Blonde fail to takes any real chances, a problem they must deal with if they are ever going to grow.

Thank You is an interesting album in that it shows musical growth for Meghan Trainor while simultaneously moving her closer to the more homogenous sound of mainstream pop. It’s not great by any means, but it is definitely catchy and easy to sing along with.

A more limited use of Lindberg's voice and cutting out less essential tracks would make Out of Frequency a more tolerable listen.

It's all flawlessly performed and comforting in its predictability.

Pillowfight is a fun little distraction, but ultimately feels mostly like dressing without much cake underneath.

Sometimes it sounds like a deathly serious joke. Other times, it sounds like nothing more than a nicely produced notion that happened to cross his mind one day.

Symphonica certainly offers a heady, luxurious soirée, proving genuinely moving in parts, but it’s also quite exhausting and yes, occasionally bewildering.

Decent Work for Decent Pay is choppy and uneven, as many compilation albums are inevitably going to be.

Like XOXO, HSH is consistent, just not consistently good.

while Under the Boards may not be "Through Being Cool" part deux, it’s still a solid effort from a man that will never be able to escape his past--no matter how fast he may try to run.

They sound worn out by the struggle in a time where one more burst of energy, from them or anyone, can go a long way.

Side A is all the big, obvious, high-sheen rock, meant to be heard blasting out of speakers in a sweaty dive bar, but it’s stuff that tends to mash together in the haze of a few PBRs. Side B, tho, while hardly a sea change, shows a willingness to grow and experiment.

There are only two songs here on Blanket Waves, and they both go well past 10 minutes, and are certainly pleasing if not extraordinary.

The countless line of garage revival bands that extends featurelessly into the past just makes Xray Eyeballs' beginners approach stand out even less.

This album won’t set the world on fire like Millennium did--quite likely nothing they do again will. But for what they’ve become, it is definitely a step in the right direction.

It’s more work to listen to than any previous Rjd2 album; listening is a constant quest for the remarkable within the unremarkable.

Don’t write the Black Ghosts off after hearing the first track, “Some Way Through This”. I’m not a fan of the Lord’s whimpering high-pitched vocals, either.

Unlike other emo bands, Youth Group is blessed with a singer who can sing and a talented team of players which makes them slightly harder to write off. But only slightly, because the final straw [is] their lyrics.

The newest incarnation of Sparta has that “trying too hard” sound to it, a sound that’s careful and measured, a sound that sounds just a little too bound to the studio for a rock band.

As a beach album, Lucky Old Sun is remarkably little fun.

While the production might be just a little too loose, the songs are just the right fit.

The Postelles may not yet have reached the heights some predicted, but it doesn’t seem to have soured their outlook.

Aside from these three songs [“Balmain Jeans,” “Going To the Ceremony,” and “Too Bad I Have To Destroy You Now”], there’s little reason to listen to Satellite Flight. Only the biggest of Kid Cudi fans will be able to squeeze much enjoyment out of the remaining seven tracks here.

The results are never short of lovely, but the chosen limitations do sometimes lead to less lasting impressions than those left by their more fleshed-out counterparts.

When Luda gets all serious, you want old Luda back; when old Luda’s back, you find yourself trying to calculate in your head how much longer you have to listen to it.

Unfortunately, Free Kitten’s ambivalence toward rocking--not even the occasional guest appearance from Dinosaur Jr. guitarrorist J. Mascis can convince them to do it--becomes a liability when Cafritz takes the microphone.

Ultimately Rapture isn’t the only thing that’s Secondhand on MS MR’s often underwhelming and frustratingly predictable début.

Another accomplished, warm, and welcoming record, one whose open-hearted generosity of spirit ultimately proves hard to resist.

At times, these tracks strain to find a middle ground between pop stardom and thoughtful reverence.

It’s an interesting album, just not interesting in a way that particularly compels me to listen to it again.

Tillmann seems to have finally found a sound that more aptly showcases his generous abilities. However, lyrically he’s erratic, veering from the incisive to the hackneyed often in under two minutes, still suffering from the need to undercut anything meaningful with the same frustratingly ironic sheen that has marred his career to date.

At the end of the day, Start and Complete is hardly essential listening, but it is what it is: a dalliance.

Fantasy Ride is at worst a highly competent contemporary R&B album. It's also oftentimes thrilling, which is no small feat considering how much the album was labored over and how often its format and players were changed.

This new record has a genuinely hopeful and perhaps truthful center which drips with promise but elsewhere lacks excitement, eroticism, soul, humor, and breadth.

Over half of the album would benefit from a more lived in persona that the twins evade for the majority of their sophomore set.

Without the dance visuals, the bulk of Paul McCartney's Ocean's Kingdom stands as pleasant and moderately engaging classical music that leans heavily on already established forms.

"We live in a time bomb that's ticking down" begins the lead single... If they keep producing music like this, their time bomb may blow up in their faces soon enough.

Musically competent ... [but with] a few snoozers.

Whatever generic associations critics wish to make, thefearofmissingout is a solid, if unfocused, effort.

It may be possible to have an intimate relationship with Ritual, but White Lies' love of bombast would seem to mitigate against it.

While clearly wanting to be a legendary piece of extravagant and influential work, it suffers the most from its inherent apathy, a type of intangible element that makes it come off as equal parts careless and desperate.

When they break from the norm, they are wholly compelling, yet when they play it safe, the results are merely fine without being exceptional.

Overall, Ghost may feel a little too loose, like it resists coming together when it really should. But listening to the overcast minor chords of closer “Bat Lies” proves Trevisan is clearly a voice to pay attention to.

If this album is a concrete example of Wayne's policies as a rap artist going forward, however, I don't see how he'll keep pulling in accolades. As a possible swan song for Lil' Wayne, Best Rapper Alive, Tha Carter IV ranks among hip-hop's most disappointing.

Not every song is a winner, but there are enough fine ones to dismiss the notion that Tweet is a has been.

An ambitious, sprawling sophomore effort that doesn't quite succeed in setting the group apart from their many influences.

Natural History is a fine album. The other ten tracks offer much pleasure.

All in all, Pick a Piper is not a bad album, and, despite its similarities to the better-known group that Weber belongs to on stage, it earns some respect for being warm electronica instead of being clinically cold and robotic.

Not a whole lot about Wish Hotel really points into a new direction or finds Mondanile straying too far from his comfort zone.

It’s doubtful Everything At Once will arrest gentle Travis’s steady slide. But they are certainly not done yet; their rabbit is out of the bag and it’s worth catching.

Someone mistakenly told Will that his talent deserved to be showcased more than the other guest artists on this album, and it winds up turning what could have been a fantastic genre cross-pollination experiment into a slightly better than average album almost ruined by a guy who needs someone to tell him to stay on the other side of the microphone a little more.

If you liked the formula then, you’ll like Revelations now.

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

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.

The vocals of Clients A and B fall completely flat; abetted by simplistic lyrics, monotonous delivery and accents (Scottish and upperclass English) that frequently make their hackneyed lines sound like a couple of bored, unimaginative teenagers trying way too hard to be rebelliously outré.

This handful of keepers is unfortunately not enough to redeem what is otherwise an entire record’s worth of vapidity.

Fall Out Boy have risen to be emperors, and though Make America Psycho Again is a dull excuse for a remix record, several features make it so that the ride is at least bearable.

The album is convincing as a collaboration between friends, the obvious downside being that it also sounds like an inside joke, an indulgence on a whim that few others share or can access. The record is a slow parade of gothic vaudeville, like a less-convincing Emilie Autumn album without the thrill of the accompanying subculture.

The more you dive into these strange Dreams, the more it’s obvious that after trying to stylistically copy various groups on Ghost Stories, here they’re outright ripping them off.

The more outside the box Barrett gets, the less enticing his songs become. When he sticks to more traditional pop songwriting and really concentrates on creative instrumentation and sonic palette within that framework, the album takes off.

While the group’s carefree attitude toward genre saves Limits of Desire from becoming yet another “Millennials-do-the-‘80s” clone LP, these songs on the whole don’t pack much of a punch.

Perhaps that’s a tad cruel, but to their credit, what the Von Bondies lack in originality, they make up for in style.

As far as a full-on comeback album, Fearless Love‘s songs as a whole aren’t strong enough to make for a great rock album, due to a lack of indelible hooks, yes, but also because nothing here really boogies.

Killing Time isn't a very compelling pop record, although I suppose there are much worse ways to, well, kill time.

Here, the best and worst moments come about when he’s working with others (which is the majority of the album), perhaps because Mr. Oizo’s trying to match each collaborator’s style. If this is the case, All Wet results in an as-yet unbalanced back-and-forth of not getting lost in his own sound or not adding enough of it in.

Just as the TRON: Legacy soundtrack was sometimes stirring, then, these remixes are sometimes danceable, but despite what their rote efficacy might trick your ears into believing, that doesn't make any of them worth a damn.

American Capitalist is not a terrible album, but it's definitely a regression for Five Finger Death Punch.

A mixture of pleasant, melodic love songs and dour heartbreak songs, with a couple of songs about his Christian faith thrown in.

Everything's inflected with the little smidgens of goofiness that Ben Lee's been mining for years, but the vibe of this album is more sleepy than dreamy.

Yeah, his lead guitar playing is strong and yeah, his idiosyncratic voice has its charms, but much of the material is forgettable, most of the songs washing one into the other into the other.

Simplifying things is fine, of course, and Bishop Allen does quite a bit with a little on Grrr..., but there are small moments when it feels like the band is putting a glass ceiling on these songs.

Truthfully, it’s not that bad of a record by usual standards, I suppose. It’s just that this is the D-Plan, after all, and you’re expecting something better.

It's not without its bright spots, yet it reaches dramatically but clumsily for the diversity and freshness of the first album, and comes up short.

Education, Education, Education & War is an album that gets better on repeated listens. That must mean that the best bits--and there are many--increasingly obscure the mediocre parts--and there are several of those too.

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.

If there's one major point of contention about the songs on A Drink and a Quick Decision, it's the vagueness in some of the lyrics.

It all makes for a bewildering package, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes middling, and sometimes astonishingly bad, and while a good 45 minutes’ worth of Nostradamus is fully deserving of high praise, on a 100-minute double album, that’s nowhere near enough.

Every “new” power-pop tune produced in the last 30 years is already a practical cover of these songs, so producing actual covers of them is redundant.

Such is the blessing/curse of surviving and thriving in the music business for over 30 years. When you strip all that away, though, Never Cry Another Tear is a promising debut from a new band that’s still searching for an identity all its own.

The last four tracks (which are remixes of old As I Lay Dying songs) on this compilation album are unnecessary, for the electronic and overly-beaty sound of synths and drum machines sound jarring combined with metal-core breakdowns, death growls, and clean singing.