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

In the end, there’s nothing completely surprising or revolutionary about anything on the soundtrack.

For an album with the word 'raw' in its title, it contains virtually nothing gritty and therefore is hard to take seriously.

I Am Not a Human Being II is a poor effort for sure, but more startling might be the fact that it’s over five years now since Wayne was anything near his peak and he shows no signs of reversing the slump.

Live at Carnegie Hall may be forgettable, but it's a harmless and occasionally pleasing aside in the oeuvre of two undeniably necessary artists.

This record, though not awful by any means, is simply not up to the standards set by the God MC.

Recurring Dream is the band’s attempt to carry their sound forward by small steps. But these small steps are a slog, and Recurring Dream trips on its own repetition.

Bringing Back the Sunshine is competent, but its sheer lack of variety, and over-reliance on trying to recapture the vibe of his previous effort sinks the album in a hurry. Best to label this one for die-hards only.

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.

Faust has very little idea where they’re taking anyone.

One can only take so much well-adjustment before one gets sick of the instrumental and vocal sappiness and moves onto greener, more tormented pastures.

Listening to The Captain & The Kid, the performers’ professional composure never flags. But in seeking to replicate the effect of their classic 1975 album Captain Fantastic & the Brown Dirt Cowboy, John and Taupin have only succeeded in shining a spotlight on their own inadequacies.

For all their experimentalism, Fly Pan Am are ultimately derivative in a way that doesn't bring much new to the palette. ... Somewhere, Fly Pan Am fans are doubtless thrilled the band got back together and picking up right where they left off. Everyone else would be better off going straight to the source.

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.

There are two completely different EPs within this album stitched together with a tenuously thin thread. One is dark, one is light and unfortunately the thread does not bind them together as a cohesive musical statement.

An album like this should exist, a complete picture of the Gorillaz' story so far. This isn't it.

Our Love to Admire is the perfect soundtrack for an eighth grade dance, but for actual adults who know better, it’s best to avoid this mess.

While The Terror sharply divided fans and Oczy Mlody fails to to anything notable or interesting, Mlody isn’t a bad album: just a forgettable, dismissable one.

It's more likely that Paralytic Stalks won't win Kevin Barnes any new fans, and may actually drive away some of his longtime followers.

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.

Sadly, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel’s new love is about as ill-advised as New Coke and this makes for a cluttered, uneven, and kinda hokey listen.

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.

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.

Surprisingly forgettable.

Strange Weather is like a middling dance mix; its 10 tracks merging into a puddle of differing shades of grey that happens to have a kicking heartbeat.

The Optimist is an album for people who don’t enjoy reading too far into their favorite songs or who don’t analyze lyrics and think deeply into melodies. There’s no way to really do that on this album. It’s a poor attempt at a follow-up album. The band is too caught up in being serious to even realize that there’s not a whole going on beneath the surface.

As intense and heavy as they try to be on each song, the heaviness loses its effect when every song prior to it wielded it just the same.

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.

Spurts and spasms of luxurious sound and compelling reference, however, do not make for a great album and, mostly, the record plods.

The new album gets off to a spectacular start, but nearly 20 minutes later, for some unfathomable reason, the entire album goes all to hell, and while you really want to pull for Echoboy, you can't get the feeling of disappointment and wasted potential out of your head.

The potential is definitely there, but I can't help feeling that BSP have taken a step back from the promise of their first outing.

This isn't a terrible album, but it is annoying, and would be much more potent if his influences weren't so apparent.

As it stands, The Magician’s Private Library is an anemic batch of songs that drifts by in a blur - albeit a rich, multi-hued blur.

In the end, For All I Care isn’t a bad album. It’s just a very unremarkable effort from a band that we’ve grown to expect so much more from.

For fans of those unabashedly earnest and heartfelt records that was filling up the charts between grunge singles nearly 15 to 20 years ago, Alphabet might come as a needed relief from today’s bearded, lo-fidelity folk stars spewing abstract poetics. For the rest of us, McRae’s release is just too dated and inflated to take seriously.

If you're contemplating buying an album called Sorry for Party Rocking, then let's be honest: you know exactly what you're getting into.

So dreadful are these two [additional] recordings that they bring down all of the preceding several notches simply through their having been included on the same album.

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

[A] hapless, semi-comatose new record that should have started with the last two tracks, while the rest of the album should have been scrapped.

After a troubling and bizarre fourth LP, Permalight, for Bushfire, the band returns, and not successfully, to these college radio roots, the power of the small idea, on their latest LP, Nightingale Floors.

Sure, there are some massive tunes here, more so than on much of the band’s recent work. But by the time the chorus on “Blind” fades back into the verse, it’s so familiar that the anthem passes by without leaving a trace of emotion whatsoever.

Suffice it to say, Bob Dylan in the ‘80s is no place to start.

While it's easy to break Who Killed the Zutons? down into a series of emulations, you still end up wishing it wasn't all so plastic and more... well, lifelike.

Nothing But the Beat is in many ways a showcase of everything that is bad about pop music in 2011: derivative, novelty, shallow, rushed, Auto-Tuned to the ends of the earth and thoroughly uninteresting.

The songs are surely poppy, but their catchiness rests more on the sweetness of the vocals, and the pleasant mix of guitar and piano over measured drums. The hooks rarely stick out in the mix, so that little distinguishes their sound from other bands treading similar musical ground.

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.

Even when not exciting, the band was at least always interesting, but tracks like “Slugger” and “Umbrella People” conjure up the one word that Whirlwind Heat would never seem to encompass: dull.

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.

Aside from a few bright spots, such as the long-gestating single “Teenage”, nothing on Waiting for Something to Happen really sticks on repeated listens.

Hunger for More 2 is probably hard to take as an album that barely meets if not underperforms on expectations.

[A] worthless attempt at mainstream love.

While this album may mirror some type of personal imaginative journey for the listener, the truth is it is just too dreary and self-indulgent to endure in its entirety.

Dragging 10 quite ordinary Woodpigeon songs over 45 minutes makes Thumbtacks + Glue a sadly laborious and pedestrian listen, bereft of the wonder in the best of Hamilton’s previous work.

Most of the songs just lumber along at the same plodding, deliberate pace, boasting very few of the fun hooks that made her previous album so annoyingly likeable.

What Dummy Boy lacks in maturity and creativity it makes up for in energy and vitriol.

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.

After hearing Everything Is Boring, it's hard to imagine most listeners mustering up any anticipation for another go around with an artist who first squandered away all of his heavy buzz through dormancy and then came out of hibernation to release an album devoid of interesting ideas.

Although Beautiful Trauma does stick to an overarching emotional theme more than most of her excellent recent albums, Trauma is nonetheless an odd, morose beast that at times plays into Pink’s worst instincts (i.e. leaning towards cliché when she never really had problem avoiding it before).

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.

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

To be fair, there are a few club-friendly beats strewn about this album, but for the most part they're so candy-coated with a thick glaze of kiddie-friendly dance pop you'd hardly notice.

Rather than the careless tracks sounding like harmless asides (even if they didn’t make up a fair amount of the album), they come across like an MC wandering.

In some ways The Appeal could feel similar to Eminem's Encore, another album whose deal-breaking antics in the middle section rendered it unlistenable.

Ripping off very obvious rock songs is asking to be deemed irrelevant, and their attempts to sound contemporary are poor at best. If you must acquire this, then you might have fun with your friends picking out which songs they ripped off, or pay homage to or whatever.

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.

It's a selfish record, a me-first record, a record that exists purely to make DMX feel like a tough guy.

Gone is the lo-fi, sometimes dirty feel. In its place are over-produced tracks that lack any feeling of emotion.

Maybe it's just its drastic contrast with the chirpy and pop-friendly Junior that makes Senior seem so dreary, but even out of context, Royksopp's latest seems like a poor, thoroughly underdeveloped and, dare I say it, unfinished effort.

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."

This album is like a drunk, stumbling around in the night. You can see potential, and the sight is entertaining. But a drunk's brand of amusement gets pretty old after a pretty short while.

The direction in which Bloc Party has traveled is entirely unsuited to its strengths.

There's not a song here that feels useful outside the context of another chapter in Kasher's discography, and thus ultimately doesn't seem likely to inspire much emotion outside of the core Saddle Creek crowd.

[The] lack of enthusiasm is all too transparent on AIM, and it renders it an absolute failure of a send-off.

To avoid risking further embarrassment and degradation of their impressive legacy, McCulloch and Sergeant need to consider making The Fountain the final Echo & the Bunnymen album. Because on the evidence here, they don’t have another comeback in them.

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

You can hear skill flowing off the band, but without the actual crafting of the tunes, the end result is amateurish.

Overall I Created Disco is just a pretty confection, good for transient enjoyment at best.

The ratio of bangers to duds, however, is not great, and Death Race for Love feels an awful lot like an unabridged teenage diary; while the occasional clever turn of phrase and moment of profundity is sure to bubble up, most of it is simple self-indulgence, an onslaught of pure emotion whose sincerity is never in question, but all of which starts to blur together after a mere few pages or songs.

Repeated listens of Capture/Release uncover some songs to pique your interest, but the brevity and sameness of the songs weigh the album down.

“Harder Than It Needs to Be” finds DiFranco hitting her stride, as it optimizes her knack for blending different musical genres—in this case, jazz with country and blues—and for delivering wisdom through clear, no-bullshit vocal inflections. If Allergic to Water had drawn upon these strengths more consistently, the album might have yielded a more delicately handled, astutely observed meditation on social and cultural issues that demand just as much attention now as ever.

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.

The album fails to make any impression other than utter mediocrity.

It may only be 27 minutes, but it still almost feels too long with how similar all of the songs sound. Best Coast unfortunately has slipped into a daze of becoming too comfortable with their sound.

It’s the residue of that band making a cynical attempt to polish the gloss off their music to a dull matte to the benefit of the lowest common denominator of pop listeners.

Decidedly dull.

A strong taste of the lack of direction is evident as the final seconds of 'Drowning' trickle away and Jones’ wails turn distinctly, gratingly off-tune as they fritter off into oblivion.

If this is Ladyhawke trying to find herself, she's tragically lost sight of what made her amazing in the first place.

He's found time to let some truly enjoyable music slip through the cracks again, whether they were favors as much as personal concoctions or not, and while one still gets the feeling Khaled views these artists as products on a shelf as much as human beings, it's nice to know he still knows a good song when he hears one.

The area in which the album most falls short is the lyrics. Earley’s writing has always had a slightly hokey nature to it, but, for much of VII, it veers into truly hackneyed territory.

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

A chuga-chuga sort of electro-muddle, all pops and whistles and bon mots -- and no heart.

Time to Die will be filler for most people, a stopgap, a passing interest, at best a stepping stone.

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.

As far as such [vanity] projects go, you could do worse than Some Things Never Stay the Same. But you could also do much better.

Despite its open orchestration and more experimental bent, it is Modern Nature’s least interesting release.

Even the most hardened of cynics have to marvel at 20/20‘s sheer musical audacity, but at the end of the day, the individual songs fail to hold up to close scrutiny.

So while tastemakers are spinning his records and partygoers are responding (though it should be noted, that the biggest response, unsurprisingly, came to “Bad and Boujee”), the actual act of getting through Big Sean’s latest album is a tiring one.

In fleeting moments Grasque offers glimpses into Makrigiannis’s inventive musical mind, but too often it gets stuck wandering up in the clouds.