Granted, this stuff is far from cutting edge, but the album, produced by Gil Norton... has enough polish to make even the duller moments glint just a bit.

When the Internet do short and romantic, their songs are tight and purposeful. Other stylistic excursions don't work out as well.

Let’s not kid ourselves, though, that this is anything more than formulaic, spiky, anthemic pop.

Amber Headlights is neither a holy grail of unreleased Dulli tracks nor an insightful glimpse into the goings-ons behind his velvet curtain; nevertheless, it's by no means a major disappointment.

So, no matter what you hear from the PR spinners, this album is not groundbreaking.

As far as lightweight, easy-listening charts pop goes, V doesn’t totally offend the sensibilities, and that’s surely more than can be said about some of Maroon 5’s overly pandering, less exploratory “pop-rock” peers.

The bulk of A Dramatic Turn Events finds Dream Theater perhaps too settled into their ways.

The significant flaw of Music of the Spheres is that it spends a lot of effort telling us that humans have this capacity for love and goodness, sometimes in overly saccharine terms, without getting us to feel it.

Rise of an Empire is likely only a bit of a disappointment because it opens so strongly and refuses to become outright terrible.

This record is an approximation of something real and true and traditionally resonant, but it ain’t anywhere near the real thing.

Ultimately Full Speed feels like an album struggling to recreate “Body Language”‘s success over and over, sing-rapping his way through a variety of pretty familiar scenes exemplifying just how hard it is to be a talent in major need of a vision.

If they’re not really adding anything new to the Clash/Gang of Four sound, at least Radio 4 is doing it with conviction.

There's not much that's dangerous about it, and the guests are guests you'd expect for someone who's suddenly as famous as Rick Ross.

Ultimately Hymns leaves the listener as exhausted and listless as Okereke’s downbeat lyrics (which too often read like adolescent poetry). The elements just don’t come together.

On Hold My Home, their attempt is a failure, featuring no virtuosity, no experimentation, no honesty, no power of any kind, just stodgy, empty confidence in place of anything worth saying.

As bad as The Silver Lining is, a knee-jerk reaction would obscure some redeeming moments.

This time, the band added a dash of retro synths that, ironically, help the music sound more fresh.

Willett pledges his love in the face of obstacles in the same way that the guitars get loud in a Nickelback song. It passes for emotion in the absence of anything spontaneous or unrehearsed.

There are some pretty nice tracks on there, but nothing as strong as the previous peaks.

10, when it’s all said and done, lacks exceptionalness, polish, and memorableness.

Perhaps they have already hit their peak with their Relapse debut, Taste The Sin, a record that does not hold up after a few listens, needless to say, Tend No Wounds itself growing tired fairly quickly as well.

Sexorcism is not perfect, nor is it the sort of album that could ever be enjoyed front to back, or played in broad daylight. But it does stand as the second coming of Brooke Candy -- in all of her nightmarish but playful, horned-up but at least honest, seedy and sexy glory.

If Mobb Deep didn’t have their own history, their own discography, and their own mythos, contributions from 50 and friends wouldn’t be a hindrance. But here, those contributions become intrusions that keep the Mobb from telling their own stories, flashing their own green, getting their own groupies.

What is blatantly obvious is that Mr Dunckel should politely be steered away from the microphone at all future recording sessions.

While it may be a difficult task to get through all 12 psycho-babble-filled tune on havoc, it's not entirely a wash or without merit. Ultimately, if you're not into hearing someone use their artistic expression to vent their frustrations and contemplate fairly uneducated meanderings on the current social state, or you're not struggling with your own identity lacking the mental capacity to understand your surroundings, you need not apply.

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

It's this sense of melody that worked on projects as diverse as the Neon Neon album and Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse's "Dark Night of the Soul" record. Unfortunately, this is the failing of The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness where more should be read into the "vs" in the album's title.

As ponderous as Music for the People can be, it does have some forward momentum, and it’s an undeniable improvement over "We’ll Live and Die in These Towns."

It’s hardly going to break any new ground, but it might allow Editors to escape from their past to some degree, and allow them to branch out and explore new--albeit, already charted--territory.

While Wonderland may have its moments, it can never sustain them, and although it stands as a surprisingly listenable album in contrast to the usual dance-party-only affairs to come out of this genre, it's never more than merely good.

You can't simply put strings on next to every song and think that makes you a mature artist.

Regardless of the overall quality, it’s nearly impossible to resist the urge to dance. And in that, Déjà Vu succeeds.

This is an album of mostly good songs by a mostly good band.

Voigt has creative skill, and he’s using it on Zukunft Ohne Menschen. It’s just that, in order to fully listen to it, you probably have to see it.

A few tracks on Shock Value are exactly what you’d expect and hope for from someone with Timbaland’s recent track record, a few are straight-up awful, and most get your head nodding well enough as long as you’re prepared to turn off your brain.

The CD is not all bad, and it's certainly not the complete disaster some critics want it to be.

The album's largely a series of almost good songs and will likely get a fair amount of play both on college radio and in clubs.

Overexposed is not a great album, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting. What we're hearing is the band actually learning to have fun again, and with any luck, they'll only get better from here.

The EP shows the talent they had built in a short time, while also exposing their limitations on six similarly downtrodden and key-driven tracks.

Michael Jackson's career might have plummeted in the last 20 years, but in death, his cultural significance and nostalgia offer enough so that new music is greeted with hushed reverence. It's enough reason to continue listening, instead of simply dismissing.

The problem is that it should feel more intimate than it really is; a minimalist approach to an ambient recording should breathe emotion into empty spaces, but on With Our Heads too many instrumental passages fall flat on their own.

The effort has its moments, but there are also more generic moments that lack distinct personality or emotional connection.

Right now, though, he’s just a force to realise. Not necessarily to be reckoned with.

I Dreamed a Dream finds Ms. Boyle casting about for some kind of musical identity.

A more mature direction for the music seems to be a good next step, since by this point the band is literally declaring an aging target market in an album title.

They could stand to pick up the tempo quite a bit, because for all the heart that seeps out of the best parts here, too much of it sounds like it doesn't have a pulse.

If you’re in it for the live-it-up-till-morning jams (and they are entertaining), then you’re going to be spinning this record at plenty of house parties. But artistically speaking, the album isn’t a progression of the rapper’s career; it’s content to stay on the same eternally- stoned playing field as 2012’s O.N.I.F.C.

Like so many ‘80s rockers of old, from Y&T to Lita Ford, the Donnas’ attempt at an accessible sound has come at the expense of what made them so appealing in the first place.

There's talent and potential here to do so by the boatload. But if they continue down this path, holding onto the nostalgia lever on one hand and trying desperately to expand and shed it on the other, they run the risk of becoming something even worse than a handy Sugarbabes reference; in the Pipettes, our generation could have our very own Sha Na Na if they aren't careful.

The Crüe have managed to serve up another satisfying platter of ass-jiggling drag race rock for the NASCAR set and beyond with Saints of Los Angeles.

Without any truly standout tracks, it’s easy to call Hood Billionaire unnecessary.

Basically, when the Boxmasters stick to a country format with Bud’s baritone nestled in its ideal range, they succeed. The band drifting too far away from its comfort zone results in somewhat boring, grating musical moments.

The few peaks of Christopher are heavily outweighed by its deep valleys and plodding middle ground, which pass by without so much as a signpost of remembrance.

He has some solid ideas and keen sense of production; the problem is that his solo songs, by and large, suffer from a frightening lack of creativity and a remarkably shallow lyrical outlook.

Minnesota native Adam Young, the one-man band behind Owl City, has crafted an incredibly upbeat album filled with starry-eyed lyrics and electro-pop fluff.

By the end of the album, the listener will surely be overwhelmed by Arie’s earnestness, both musically and personally, but like her previous albums, Testimony is for those who seek a motivational guide for living a conflict-free life.

Ultimately, Matisyahu's latest plays like an experiment in reinvention rather than a fully-realized piece of musicianship, seemingly more concerned with sounding commercially viable and dancehall-ready than operating as a musically-competent catalyst for hopeful moralism.

Silence is easy, and apparently being boring is, too.

Uneven though sometimes enjoyable, Reincarnated is surprisingly better than expected.

All in all, Acoustic Sessions is pleasant but not entirely memorable.

The sheer number of things happening in each song and the volume at which they are performed causes almost instantaneous sensory overload on all but a few tracks.

While All the Lost Souls will very likely appeal to the exact same folks who made Blunt’s first album a success, I listen to this album and can’t help thinking that this has all been done before-and better!

Probably the weakest Robbie Williams album to date.

Fly From Here is not a disaster. It has too much enthusiasm for itself to sink like some of Yes' more embarrassing transitional albums.

The strangled-by-a-megaphone vocal style sort of makes sense for the garage rock sound the band is going for, but it's also really distracting and definitely not easy on the ears.

Unfortunately, State is an album that is cautionary only in how it shows that Todd Rundgren’s ego still sometimes gets the best of him, and is rather lacklustre and surprisingly dated, for all of the intent behind it to make it an up-to-the-moment sounding record.

It’ll work pretty damn well in the car at 60mph, but that’s about it.

If you decide to dive into the feature-film length collection of songs, you’ll find West firmly in the sonic palette of his post-TLOP run. There are messy, antagonistic productions akin that extend the Yeezus formula of pummeling listeners into submission. ... There’s a rare moment of humility in “24″, where West sings – shouts really – “we gon’ be okay” alongside a choir and over a discordant organ playing for an imagined too-hot summertime congregation. It’s as close to sublime as the messy, deeply flawed Donda gets.

For all his sprightly humour, he doesn’t always come off like the most pleasant of dudes--wonder how controlling of a bandleader the style-juggler is--and on Matinée, he’s less than charming.

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.

Just underwhelming.

The randomness and self-aware satire is forsaken in favor of more simple party music, but if anyone's custom built to deliver that sort of project, it's a millionaire 20-year old who's had free reign to do just about whatever he wants in his personal life since he was 17.

There's not too much to make that vision stand out.

These few highlights could make the 39-minute listen justifiable, but you wouldn’t be missing much by skipping Animal Ambition completely. Although fun, none of these songs are up with the best of 50’s career.

It’s a serviceable album, but for an artist like Ginuwine, who created three near perfect albums, this is a cynical attempt to stay relevant.

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

"Kick Clap Speaker" is the richest, fullest-sounding track out of 10. Ghostland Observatory should make a whole album as gripping. First, they'll have to realize that a beat isn't always enough.

This album marks a transition rather than an arrival.

A flat, underdeveloped vibe prevails.

Sure it’s full of unwavering confidence and some pretty songs, but the dull groove Richard Ashcroft seems to have settled into is striking.

Despite the grand aspirations and the faux-profound statements peppered among these 11 tracks, Razorlight’s third album falls short of anything they’ve previously done.

Heartfelt? Yes. But who would have ever thought Eric Clapton's music could become so disposable?

The whole effort, a mere 33 minutes worth but seemingly longer, is disappointing, save one or two songs. Multiple spins just can't save this one.

Usually when a band reforms, fans hope it's because the group has something to say with its new release. Unfortunately, Blood Like Lemonade, has little to say to even Morcheeba's most dedicated fans.

Odd sonic and thematic tonal choices plague the album.

Filled with exhilarating highs and some confounding lows.

Animal is a techno record trying to be New Order, but it tries to do so with a small palette of raw synths and the antiseptic tenor of Cox. It neither displays the vaunted pathos of New Order nor much in the way of sonic experimentation to give the listener something to munch on since the lyrics are nothing much either.

It’s an ambitious mess, but it’s a mess.

The sound’s lack of distinctions allows for an occasionally powerful wall-of-noise to amalgamate into a delectable din that sounds massive and organic, but elsewhere the music sounds more like the catalogued memory of an impressive performance than the distinctive sound of a band at its best.

Ultimately, this smoke-and-mirrors approach will not do. The smoke is too smoky, the mirrors too reflective of too much else out there at the moment.

After some severe front-loading, the album is filled out by songs that are too dark or lifeless to work alongside the Candyland motif of the cover and sunbeamy splash of California Gurls.

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.

It may be a slight shift in style, it may be totally harmless, and it may contain the occasional surprise, but Rebirth is anything but the renaissance that its title promises.

[Jump on Board] has its moments and is a pleasurable listen. But it neither matches the killer pop soul of say “Black Eyed Boys”; nor is it a sufficiently radical departure to make it the stand-out album they had in mind.

Eliminate the stilted pursuit of Artistry oozing out of the cracks here, and ignore the notion that there’s some sort of emphasis on an unraveling journey-through-song, and Break Up is actually a pleasant enough detour as a light-hearted, retro-pop affair.

While the New Kids are definitely capable of making a great album (seriously...if you’re an R&B or pop fan, go to a used record store or half.com and pick up a copy of 1994’s "Face the Music"--you’ll be very pleasantly surprised), this album is only great in spots.