Essentially a funhouse mirror of 2007's far superior "Because of the Times," Only by the Night stumbles under the weight of its ambitions by lacking the songs necessary to support them

The biggest problem with Red is that as obvious as Datarock's aesthetic is, it's still boring, and it doesn't stick to the tracks at all.

The tracks on Forth are long and often overproduced. It’s a tough blow to handle when a band you’ve loved for so long comes up so short.

The lack of musical coherence here is jarring and irritating.

If the members of Rye Coalition had at least done a masterful job of impersonating their muses, we could call Curses a tribute album. Sadly, they fail even in that.

Mostly, this record is yet another reason to wish that people with real talent would stop throwing it away.

This is stadium schlock of the highest pedigree, the kind of thing that can make you feel desperately cynical about rock music.

If Hotel Sessions had a layer of banished songs or the context of label-drama, that would be one thing, but as it stands it's a very boring, commonplace, and unneeded part of music-biz procedural that never needed the light of day.

Hirway intends for much grander experience, but his shortcomings, be it insecurity or fear, do not allow him to achieve that. Instead, we're left confused over just who Hirway is, and the real loss is the lack of intimacy between the artist and his audience.

Despite the three or four keepers, 29 suggests that Adams is still struggling to nail down his musical identity.

Mostly, the record displays a jump closer to American hip-hop in both production styles and rhyming, and the urgency that was so palpable on the first installment is gone.

Most of these tracks stumble around Dick Valentine's wacky lyrics, and the limited karaoke-style production only cheapens the equation.

The songwriting is bland and the production is overdone.

A disappointingly amateurish performance.

I Am Gemini is all jerky distortion, an endless sputtering, as if Cursive set out to intentionally make ugly music.

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

It's his overwrought vocal sensibility that really drags Make Sure They See My Face down into Starbucks country.

Unsatisfying.

Now that Cuomo is older and singing about things like fame and the alienation of age, it's become harder to empathize.

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

The album isn’t just undone by Blank’s well-worn playbook of sexualized shtick, however; the tiresome music is just an egregious.

Put simply, this music is slow, the same slow soggy tempo the whole way through.

Gone is most of the musical adventurousness that redeemed the most seemingly cliché moments of the debut.

The problem is that making songs that are fit for beer commercials makes for an atrocious album full of half-baked ideas that are only good for 30 seconds of enjoyment.

When the World Was Our Friend is for third-tier tone-deaf hipsters.

Whirlwind Heat does nothing to disprove the argument that this recent flock of slinky, neo-post-punk bands aren't doing anything Gang of Four did much better a quarter century ago.

Much of With Love and Squalor is like your old coat rack: You know where the hooks are going to be even in your sleep.

One Way Ticket to Hell's blandness seems like the perfect example of the difficulties of riding a revivalist routine longer than necessary.