On Off to Business, he accomplishes another step toward canonization, making a late-period album that removes any semblance of what made him great in the first place and is a largely uninspired trip down memory lane.

Keep trying N.E.R.D., you’re not even close to blowing us away here.

Sure, this is a relatively slight effort--those in search of adventure had best look elsewhere--but for the aural equivalent of a fluffy blanket, this is your crack rock.

Takes could have used a few more experiments of this nature, because while his versions of the Breeders’ 'Invisible Man' and Yo La Tengo’s 'Tears Are in Your Eyes' are tasteful enough, there’s no real sense of adventure, no real feeling that these songs needed to be covered in this way, no real attempt at making this anything other than a stopgap between records.

It seems they have forgotten that no matter how appealing this concept is to them, nothing is more appealing for the listener than experiencing the artists as they really are, not as they want to be.

Johansson simply lacks the intensity to stay afloat in Waits's whirlpools of ear-drummed madness.

Narrow Stairs finds Gibbard more than willing to play to type, offering the same staid character sketches he’s used since his first EP and songs that reiterate his point, that, like, love can be rough on you.

The Long Blondes sophomore album, Couples, is a disappointing follow-up to their sublime 2006 debut, "Someone to Drive You Home," but not as disappointing as it initially appears.

Transcendent tracks like 'Your English is Good' and 'In a Cave' indicate that there’s still room to grow on subsequent Tokyo Police Club releases. But for now, the band seems to have lost its mojo.

The Kooks come off like a Ringo to most of Britpop’s Paul.

You Have No Idea What You Are Getting Yourself Into is not a record to take seriously, and I suppose on some level it succeeds in reveling in that, even if it wasn’t the intention of the band.

Two forgettable bonus tracks tacked on to Sub Pop’s U.S. edition of Antidotes don’t help on that score. We don’t need any more of what’s already here.

And though it's doubtful that any of these qualities will duplicate the success that Moby had in 1999, Last Night is a surprisingly solid and fun listen for anyone who ever gets nostalgic for MTV's Amp.

Even if Anti-Flag’s hearts are in the right place, Bright Lights of America is too vague to be impactful.

With Consolers of the Lonely, the Raconteurs are still content to play record-collection plunderers, but instead of ripping what they can from the '60s, they spend much of the album as twenty-first-century stand-ins for Grand Funk Railroad, Blue Oyster Cult and Three Dog Night, playing big, limp, calculated rock 'n’ roll.

There’s nothing wrong with a band being crass. But when that band tries to act like they’re doing it in order to make a vague, nonsensical statement on twenty-first century love and sex, the result is albums like Reality Check.

Sixes & Sevens feels more like movie-hopping at an art-house multiplex, an exercise in genre formats and stolen identities.

Ultimately the album is merely a reward for sitting through a season of reality-show high jinks.

In their desire to avoid repetition, however, they’ve indeed strayed somewhere they’ve never been before: the middle of the road.

Discipline, is nowhere near the high point of her career, but it is better than its predecessor.

To extend the title’s metaphor, Golden Delicious has the taste, but none of the bite.

This is rut music and The Mars Volta are still stuck in it; even if they’ve managed to avoiding digging themselves any deeper with Goliath’s frenetic lateral slides into pseudo bedlam, momentum is only momentum if you’re going somewhere.

Charmed and Strange, however, is a collection of interesting guitar playing with a few lyrics thrown in for pop legitimacy.

With such a young, singular talent, it’s a shame to hear him aping other styles when he clearly is full of a wealth of unexplored talent.

A sprawler is always a dangerous gambit for a band. It can easily trip over the line from cracked genius into failed experiment, as The Evening Descends does.

This is a solid set of songs that’s mannered and restrained to a fault.

Unfortunately, Sigel has taken a step away from reconciling the truth on his fourth full-length, The Solution. Instead of shedding the one-note dimension of his popular Broad Street Bully persona, he simply cloaks himself in another unconvincing and uninteresting trope: the mack-lover.

So are The Hives stuck in a stylistic corner, or is The Black and White Album just a rocky bridge to something new and revelatory from the group? The material seems to drop hints in both directions.