Most artists, though, recognize the necessity to steal creatively, combining unlikely influences to make something close to novel. Greta Van Fleet, though, seem to lack even a passing familiarity with the last four decades of recorded music. Despite all the talk of artistic growth, the band have really only moved on from I to IV.

Kesha's willingness to be a little messy with her vocal arrangements make for the strongest moments on the album -- the back and forth on "Cowboy Blues" and "BFF" especially. Sadly, these fleeting moments are not indicative of what High Road is all about. Instead, it's an often infuriating listen, so stubborn in its commitment to cheesy, hunky-dory sentiment that many of its otherwise promising tracks are completely tanked by lyrics that have no appropriate venue.

An aimless collection of half-baked ideas that makes 33 minutes feel interminable.

I'd suggest downloading the two good songs and forgetting the rest of this album ever happened.

Black Album lurches forward bloodlessly, with no clear direction but the sensation of the moment, which is always expiring. There's no getting this zombie back on track.

For those keeping track of the hits and misses, Anthem of the Peaceful Army has a handful of truly memorable moments. ... The rest of the record is a Zeppeliny hard rock mush, the kind that happens with young people that love a thing too much haven't yet put in enough work to truly make something their own.

A handful of decent songs do not a classic album make, much less a good one. While Timberlake can't be faulted for wanting to try something genuinely new this far into his career, the laziness of the productions and overall misguided lyrics make for an awkward fit. ... Timberlake's worst album to date.

Most of it just feels utterly disposable, a series of tracks put next to each other for no discernable reason, leading nowhere in particular.

With Witness, the sleek production and rigid sonic textures end up doing more harm than good, vacuum-sealing her voice and most of her personality into dry, readily-forgettable numbers.

Unfortunately, Mount Ninji is an album that’s too obnoxious when it’s not boring and too boring when it’s not obnoxious; there’s seldom a competent middle ground and over the span of an hour, it doesn’t hit a single stride.

With the continually progressive and impressive places electronic music and its satellite genres are going, Operator is a regression to the uninspiring basics.

Long-running bands that maintain success--a rarity in itself--do so by varying their sound and by exploring new ideas, by maturing with their audience. Boxes is a sloppy attempt to follow that charted path.

Perfectamundo is essentially tepid blues rock (featuring many warmed over standards) with a Latin rhythm section slapped on for some longed for but unrequited funk credibility.

Here, every piece of music not connected to the human voice is diluted to a nearly unrecognizable form.

It’s best three tracks--“FALLINLOVETONITE”, “HARDROCKLOVER”, and “1000 X’S & O’S”--are, in the context of Prince’s amazing catalog, average at best. The rest are mediocre to bad to horrifying.

The result is mystifyingly boring and scrubbed completely of any evidence of human touch.

It’s simply the worst of generic pop music--the kind that’s existed for decades, just with a fresh new coat of EDM slapped on.

Outside of “Flight” and “Breath Out” all of the good moments are quickly washed out by waves upon waves of utter slog.

The overall sound is thin and tinny.

The lyrics are absurd, and are often problematic to women.

Anti-Flag may still have a good album or two left in them, but this one certainly is not it.

Following a rigid set of programming, they’ve stripped away the artifice from their ostensible Americana aesthetic to reveal the boilerplate alt-rock that forms its core circuitry.

It’s impossible to ignore the actual music, it’s so damn loud! And so stuffed up by the production, which is all there is. The end result is songs that that are so bright you might imagine you’re about to be blinded.

The aforementioned [producer Joe] Thomas does know who those people [guest singers] are, and he brings them on here basically to bring some media attention to a collection of limp, lifeless songs.

Kintsugi is the sound of a group resting on its laurels.

What we’re presented with here sound an awful lot like early 2000’s “folktronica” drowsiness inducers that the indie-electronica movement has worked so hard to rid itself of.

Anything but this soporific schmaltz, Diana. You’re better than this.

Unlike Led Zeppelin’s Mothership or any of the Kissology sets, Forever isn’t a particularly well organized compilation album, nor does it inspire listeners to go out and explore the band’s full catalogue the way the former two did.

As it stands, this is something that should have stayed in the vaults, largely, and is pretty much only for anyone out there who is a Slim Twig completist.

At times boring and ultimately painfully average.

These are easy, derivative songs that might be listenable if they weren’t so overladen with noise.

The desperation of the drinking and the narcissistic banality of the lyrics are matched by songs that have long guitar solos, or places where the bands play loudly against Aldean’s voice--which is often flat, and rarely works enough energy to move past a laconic speech song.

At its core, In the Wild lacks any sort of substance.

It is neither new nor interesting nor intelligent nor even at a bare minimum fun.

It bears all the hallmarks of a truly terrible mess.

Overall, Flying Scroll Flight Control feels like the cast of Glee run amok with some very psychedelic, almost Neutral Milk Hotel elements. If that sounds messy, it is.

In all honesty, the album’s listenability has not improved with age. There are 34 songs on this new version of Document and Eyewitness and, even if a number of the live tracks clock in at less than two minutes, the sheer relentlessness of the freeform, out-of-tune, semi-suicide mission wears you down by the time you are only halfway through.

A poor album due to poor production and song writing, poor sales and poor vocal delivery.

For a band once so captivating and mysterious, Smoke Fairies is a colossal step back.

For a record whose lyrics are meant to reflect a deeply personal music journey, the music finds Coldplay at the safest and most rote it has ever been.

I just spent 93 minutes of listening to something that could have been recorded by my high school music students during a random afternoon of farting around. I am neither uplifted nor healed.

Sad to say, there’s not a song on EP2 that sounds like it couldn’t have been banged out by a reasonably proficient group of session musicians.

Brimming with half formed ideas and floundering melodies, Too Much Information is easily one of the most uninspired albums released so far in 2014.

Far from being as incisive as Albini or as sonically daring as Kevin Shields, Eagulls have created something akin to comfort food, an album to soothe the fears of guitar nuts afraid that feedback-driven six-string assaults were somehow in danger of going extinct.

The problem with this rather chugga-chugga, one-speed record is that he doesn’t persuade you that he feels sufficiently strongly to let it all hang out on record.

This set amounts to nothing more than an unnecessary, embarrassing, pointless five-track.

After an hour and change of mind-numbing, ponderous songs, the thought of ever committing to one of their records again is equivalent to volunteering for Chinese water torture.

After the first three songs, Steinhardt complains about everything without actually saying anything.

Regrettably the record and the band follow a formula at the expense of song composition.

The album is just full of songs that don’t hit and seemingly don’t even try.

His relentless delivery ensures that words spill out in defiance of the breath required to sustain them. But rate does not guarantee quality, and on Nothing Was the Same, his lyrics are worse than ever.

He leans more towards his softer, folksy side here than he did on Shotter’s Nation, and works hard to preserve the instrumental slop and shamble, while ignoring compelling melodies, energy, or a sense of purpose.

A quiet clamor, with all the charm of a downmarket frisée, For Years favors sound design over songcraft, its sullen atmospheres betrayed by gaseous mass.

The tactile experience associated with The Aeroplane Flies High disintegrates when translated to a digital format. A once-prized item becomes empty.

For an album that’s this short, Love Is the Law ends up being a chore to get through.

Here on Long Way Down, neither of Odell’s gifts [powerful tenor]--or their intimacy--are given space or time, lost instead in a sea of messy arrangements and a sense that, however fatuous, more must certainly mean better.

It is Countdown to Extinction taken to its most nightmarish conclusions.

These are the cheaply licensed other songs that you fast-forwarded through on that copy of Dance Mix [Insert Year] to get to the two or three hits that really shook up the club. You skipped them then and you should skip them now too.

Authentic is just not an album anyone should be bothering with.

The Yeahs’ curiosity ultimately got the better of them, and what we’re left with is an album that bears a lot of attributes with the creature it’s named after: it doesn’t follow a set path, makes a lot of noise in your ears, but its ultimately something you’ll want to swat away and get rid of because of just how badly it annoys you.

Clocking in at just over 40 minutes, Island Universe is about 25 minutes too long and would have better served as a short EP, or an abandoned pile of demos.

There are classical references, quirky rhythms, and oddball singing as if something serious is happening. But the mix comes off as self-indulgence and childish.

Unexceptional leads and dyspeptic detours mar the disappointing Orbits.

It's all very clockwork.

Vultures is best left lying alone amongst its metal clichés and turgid song-writing.

An album which manages to sound like the a musical parade of these same awkward personal performances accompanied by Fisher-Price electronic arrangements.

Aside from all of the individual missteps that make up Music from Another Dimension, the single most striking flaw comes in production quality.

The most regrettable aspect of Matricidal Sons of Bitches is the recognition that Friedberger no longer sounds like an innovator.

For folks who love Cee-Lo as a television personality and/or demand new renditions of songs we've all heard thousands of times over, Cee-Lo's Magic Moment exists. For everyone else... well, there's probably copies of Cee-Lo Green…Is the Soul Machine lying around somewhere out there.

Stay Awake is an ungainly curiosity. Devoted YOB fans might be tempted by the possibility of hearing Scheidt in this new context, but I think they'll probably come to the conclusion that most of the rest of us will: Scheidt's solo effort would be good or maybe even great if it weren't for him singing all over it.

Quality Street Music serves as a vehicle for Drama to shine a light on some artists you may not have payed much attention to before while embarrassing and making caricatures of others, resulting in an unbalanced effort that reeks of songs constructed through emails and mix-and-matching rather than any real chemistry.

If you get a kick out of '90s Ibiza anthems and the first Depeche Mode album, than Bright Black Heaven might just put a big, goofy smile on your face; if you are looking for mature songwriting or forward-thinking electronic pop music, Bright Black Heaven is probably best avoided.

Battle Born is a confused mess of an album, drenched in influences but positively overextended in its execution, the band trying way too hard to do something grander and more complex than what they've done before.

Despite whatever success they may have had with their debut, The Darkness' return clearly signifies that the major problems underlying their style have come to the forefront, leaving the cheeky humor and catchy riffs that we all liked not too long ago in the dust.

Fortune is another overload of poor decisions.

The Ghost Inside do little to variate on the established metalcore sonic, even though they play that sonic well.

This is truly a fascinating album, but for all the wrong reasons.

Glen is in fine form, per usual--it's the vibe, the "audience track", the classic rock radio flashbacks and the fact that this is an album that was released almost 40 years ago.

Do Things, unsurprisingly, ends on a run of unimaginative songs that make it increasingly difficult to want to keep listening to it. It's an unfortunate album that will no doubt pander to a certain group of people but will likely leave everyone else cold. There's nothing here apart from the lead-off track that's worth a repeat listen.

In a live setting, this type of give-and-take could pay off, like an electro take on free jazz, but as it's presented here not only is it unspoken, it's unintelligible.

In spite of its title, Carlos and company don't really do a lot of shape-shifting on this roundly insipid record. It's depressing that Santana, an artist who is so clearly capable of creating frenetic, passionate - sexy even - music, has produced something so soullessly inert.

Lostprophets has survived in music by understanding what their fans like and catering to them, but with Weapons, the band is firmly entrenched in their comfort zone. While that might excite long-time fans of the band, it provides little to those looking for innovation or excitement out of the genre.

It's hard to see how The Promise could achieve some sort of musical relevancy.

Ultimately scuppered by too many leaden ballads and self-indulgent guest spots, this outing leaves the future looking very unclear once more for Meat Loaf and offers little to those who aren't already die-hard fans.

A colossal disappointment. Tenacious D's album number three fails to capture the comic energy of the band's prior musical output and pales in comparison to other, much funnier rock music moments by the band's contemporaries.

His most ridiculous and worst album to date.

Princeton's different desires end up pushing them towards a sound characterized by lush but repetitive arrangements and a lack of spark.

By doubling down on her cartoonish elements, she's lost all remnants of lyrical ingenuity she around the time "Monster" first leaked, let alone her various mixtapes.

Contrived, sterile garbage.

For all its tempo shifts and attempts at fun, Gemini sounds like the work of an ascetic band scared of pleasure.

Caught up in the importance of her themes, she loses sight of her music's ability to convey them.

It almost hurts to pan this album but probably not as much as listening to the whole thing a fourth time.

The idea that these guys from Amherst who made chaotic, inscrutable music are somehow ready for the rock canon seems, in itself, to be the height of pretension.

At four songs and around 33 minutes, the album doesn't have much structure, with songs starting and ending after random durations, and without the drums, it's low on beat.

These are songs calculated to make an impact on the cliché idea of what a country fan is, playing off stereotypes of Jesus loving, hard working, hard loving life in the heartland, but there's no personality here.

Power-pop needs both power and pop, and Gringo Star don't have enough of either to make this album worth revisiting.

For this particular moment, though, Oh Fortune reveals that Mangan is still a lightweight.

The repetition and sameness of the 10 songs on 200 Years quickly becomes mind-numbing, the painful plainsong wearing out its welcome before the record reaches the halfway point, let alone by the end of its 40 long minutes.