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.

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

The Only She Chapters is strictly for those who are already die-hard fans of Prefuse 73 and not really anybody else.

Likely to go down as one of the year’s most disappointing belly-flops.

It is not an offensive album by any means, on the contrary, much of it is very, very nice. This is stuff that mom will like, that you can play at work and nobody will notice.

A hollow release, the veneer of a good album covering up an otherwise unremarkable and sometimes disappointing collection of songs.

With Prism, those expecting a sequel to Teenage Dream are getting exactly that: the same tropes, themes, and even some of the occasional production tricks all carry over, Perry revealing nothing new about herself, but still mining the same songwriting vein she’s been at without any signs of slowing down. For her fans, it’s exciting. For anyone else, it’s a disappointment.

It’d be a little too easy (and inaccurate) to say that Shine Your Light is a bad album; there’s certainly a lot of potential on display here. What it is, though, is frustrating.

Billy Corgan can't ever quite muster up the magic of the Pumpkins' early years because, to be honest, the songs just aren't good enough.

If you enjoy hearing young men discuss "clothes, hoes and liquor" at length and in detail, to the accompaniment of varying sonic backdrops, this is the record for you. In case the above doesn't make it plain enough: this is a party album.

The Rejects' return features too many reheated elements of their older sound, and often disastrous deviations when they stray from it.

Without knowing the musical and political climate at the time, and without knowing Dylan's future place in both camps, this disc is slight at best.

To Careless World's credit, at its worst it's an album that's really hard to feel any sort of way about. But it's also hard to completely ignore how well made it is.

Nothing on Wild Animals is interesting or distinct enough to set Trampled By Turtles apart in this increasingly crowded genre.

If you’re deeply invested in the Guided by Voices catalogue this record won’t disappoint you. You’re getting exactly what they’re selling. If there’s not much to the album past that point, well, that doesn’t have to matter so terribly.

Ultimately, #willpower is an overstuffed pop album that tries too hard to be trendy while not trying hard enough to be cohesive or truly meaningful.

The flair of the opening and chorus shows a promise that Trullie leaves mostly unrealized on the rest of the album.

For all its louche jangling, for all its pleasant naivety, there isn't very much here that's worth waking up to, nor lounging to, least of all gently lamenting the passing of the seasons to.

With a delight/track tally of about one in four, this compilation won't make Lali Puna a lot more fans (nor does it deserve to), but it will keep their fey indie followers convinced of their own dreaminess whilst providing the illusion of alternative cred and strangeness.

Bishop’s self-indulgence stunts any suggestion that anyone other than a serious aficionados is going to express anything more than passing interest.

Whisper House just isn’t strong enough to hold up to his previous work. There’s no doubt that a great deal of meticulous work went into the orchestration and songwriting of the album, but the end result isn’t a coherent whole.

There is little innovation within these sounds: there isn’t a song on here that feels like it couldn’t have come out in the past decade or so.

A band that is only one-third New York Dolls--no matter how good their intentions--still sounds like it.

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!

The Hiss are not bad per se, but they add yet another corpse to a coffin that should have been nailed shut months ago.

13 certainly isn’t the all-blunts-blazing return Sabbath pledged, and with songwriting that imitates rather than evokes the past, all the goodwill in the world doesn’t change the fact that Sabbath has failed to deliver on its promise.

They're no longer teetering on the edge anymore; with this record, Boyd and Co. just fell hard.

Forcing a similar style [as heard on All We Grow] through a filter of laptop presets and masked vocals only highlights how those convenient, but more limited, tools require tighter songwriting than Carey musters up on Hoyas.

Even Kasher's werewolf vocals do little to elevate these songs above the average.

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.

Eyes Open is far from a horrible album. It’s easy to listen to, it’s melodic, and it’s well-read. But you’re a strong (or naïve) listener if you can get past the calculation, the number-crunching, the crassness with which Lightbody has taken aim at the MySpace demographic.

Not all of High Anxiety works fantastically, but there is still great music to be found, and a consistent sonic “theme” throughout does a mutable job of keeping your attention throughout the project.

While the mundane nature of everyday life can be fertile for songwriting material, here the album sounds mundane in all the wrong ways.

It’s mainly miss. The limp steel guitar backing “Cold in the Summer” is too low-key to maintain any interest whatsoever; same with the forgettable strummed final track “Wind in My Blood”.

On Time Stays, We Go, as on their previous EP, the band seems to be trying on a range of ideas and identities, without being willing to really commit to anything.

It's not a very good listen, but it's kind of fun to watch someone be so free.

Volume 3 is so incredibly derivative of their previous two original recordings that you could easily splice in any number of older tunes in this new tracklisting, and you’d be hard pressed to discern which songs are old(er) and which are new.

In the end, far from making “prog” a four-letter word, Muse have done worse and opted out of the playing field altogether.

After "One More Summer"... and the inconsistent but decent title song, the album becomes so filler-centric that even the tracks' titles are interchangeable. "Undone", Push and Shove's primary ballad, at least offers a change of tempo, but the song itself is a total bore.

The 2nd Law certainly isn't the career bomb that many might worry it to be, but that doesn't mean it's not any less of a red flag.

The album consists of a number of tracks that failed to stick on prior releases as well as a few tunes that seemingly attempt to capture the sound and feel exemplified a year earlier.... For an album that slogs along unassumingly, it’s not surprising then that the bonus material fails to make much of an impression either.

Blow Your Head, then, is your basic pedestrian DJ mix of old and new tunes, though it is merely collected rather than mixed or interpreted by Diplo himself. As a result, there's really not much to get excited about here: some songs stink, some songs sound neat for a minute or two, and it all goes by without provoking much attention from the listener.

Lacks the clarity of some of Mono's earlier work.

Ultimately, Bun ends up feeling like a bit of a guest on his own LP, similar to Rick Ross' Teflon Don effort, and though Trill O.G. is full of quality-sounding music it simply fails to make any argument for its necessity to anyone but the most strident fans of Bun B's monolithic presence.

Instead of amplifying and strengthening the already delicate structure of his songs, Oldham and company strangely strip the songs of any emotion.

It’s as if Keane desperately wanted to move past the “three blokes playing simple little songs” label, but didn’t have the technical skill or the guts to pull it off.

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.

You'd expect a fuzz-heavy, distortion-laden outing from this crew, and you'd be right, yet the band's sound is oddly flat.

Without the harmonies and counterpoint of sister Claudia to lend interest and texture, Alajandra is left to rely on the instrumental background for support, and frankly there just isn't much going on to help her out.

On previous outings, with tighter pop sensibility intact, I never noticed how thin Mya's voice sounds. But with an album constantly swishing in languid R&B balladry it sounds like a sugar wafer caught in a lawnmower blade.

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.

He does express regret about the marriage breakdown on Papers, but it rings hollow, as does most of this so-so record.

Fans of Pantha du Prince could be drawn in to hear how other artists interpret as the vital elements of his work, but many of them will leave XI Versions of Black Noise wondering why all these producers seem to think his music's so boring.

Madeleine Peyroux is an artist literally without her own voice. Borrowing from one source heavily and dabblingly from myriad sources, her Standing on the Rooftop is the sound of nothing so much as hip confusion.

All Harm Ends Here is another deliberately sludgy, dragging attempt at slowcore revivalism, but where influences like Red House Painters and Low so aptly used sparse atmosphere to convey emotion, the Early Day Miners' sobriety has yet again choked any potential life out the album's nine sorrowful songs.

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.

At more than five minutes, 'Noah's Rules' is the longest song on Paint the Fence Invisible, symptomatic of the album’s most crucial problems: too much and, simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically, much too little.

A deeply, deeply flawed meditation on love, image, and fame in the 21st century, and a collection of ideas thrown at the wall to see what sticks.

Slash goes through all the proper motions (distorted guitars, squint-eyed staring-into-the-distance guitar solos, loads of star power), but the end product doesn't satisfy me on a visceral level, and closer examination only magnifies the fact Slash can't establish instant chemistry with just any name he pulls out of his address book.

If We Loved Her Dearly is any indication, Lowell has simply run out of material, if not ideas, musical or otherwise.

The problem is that the lines may be good, but the danger is gone.

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

The problem is that everything they’re putting out sounds like some project a highschooler might come up with in order to impress his too-cool guitar teacher.

The Mooneys are guilty of bringing songs to the album that aren't so much dumb (though they're that too) as they are lazy.

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.

An album of contrived power-pop songs that chart the lows and lows of yet another failing relationship.

It's catchy fluff, yes, but fluff nonetheless.

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.

The material on Life with You doesn’t give much hope that the band will break past their “one-hit wonder” status, at least for a while.

It's a hard pill to swallow, but the truth is this: Codes & Keys is the worst album of their career.

There’s a certain pleasure in watching celebrities like Justin Timberlake, Natalie Portman, or T-Pain take the piss out of themselves. Unfortunately, this is largely drained when you’re listening to the songs sans-video.

Who You Are tries very hard to swagger, but it trips over its own feet and continues to self-consciously limp on through thirteen tracks, as if to suggest that's its hobbling is its normal walk.

Beyond its opening hat trick, Emoh dissolves into a retread of the same psychic wound, recycling the same themes with less inspired, more pedestrian results.

Crazy Clown Time is clouded with studio experiments that attempt to hold up weak songs.

Wondrous Bughouse doesn’t expand Youth Lagoon’s sound so much as pour neon-colored Kool-Aid onto it until it’s diluted to a point where it’s almost difficult to hold onto much of anything in these songs.

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.

If you’re going to study O’Connor, stick with the short stories. For clever electronic pop, start anywhere but here.

Ben Folds has finally taken the focus off of his ever-evolving cast of inspired characters, and has finally written an album that centers on himself; unfortunately, it seems entirely possible that his trademark humility has finally gotten the best of him, as he has fashioned himself the least interesting of any of his own characters.

It’s too bad really, that Have One on Me is so overdone because there’s a decent album hidden somewhere in there.

A perfunctory listen yields little that stands out, offering none of the instant classics that the earlier albums earwormed into steady rotation.

They seem to know how they want to say something on Go With Me, and it's a formula that could work in its humble way. They just need to figure out what they're saying first.

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

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.

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.

Right down to its utterly garish cover, Blackout is utterly disposable and ultimately forgettable.

On Doom Days Bastille falls into a sonic rut, but its best music gives us plenty of indication that this need not spell doom for what's to come for this still-young outfit.

This album marks a transition rather than an arrival.

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.

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

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

What's most unfortunate is that Shopping can do better--evidenced not only by their previous work but by a few stand-out tracks on this album.

Blood Red Shoes is an album firmly wedged in comfort, occasionally straying out into more interesting waters, but usually retreating to old tricks. For an album that tries so hard to be angry it’s just mild.

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

Sadly, with Anti the intent and promise is more admirable than the end result. There’s a certain dreary joylessness to it that saps any energy the songs might possess.

The end result is an album during which the main protagonist seems unaware of what's going on, playing second fiddle to the ruminations of backseat A&Rs and misguided grasps at populism.

Flawed as it is thanks to some truly dreary lyrics, and too many tracks that are as flimsy as they are forgettable, Outbursts doesn’t quite provide enough evidence to suggest Turin Brakes should be written off.

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

While the songs are undoubtedly catchy, there is little to really give Dignity and Hilary Duff a defined sound of their own.