For better or worse, RJD2’s talent is beat-making. While it’s easy to applaud him for following his dreams, we can’t give him extra marks for his output.

Kingdom Come is exactly the kind of rote product Jay-Z seemed to want to avoid when he "retired": It's a victory lap without a victory, a rare instance of a rap superstar blowing his own horn and yet sounding half-hearted about it.

Ultimately, they don't come across as unbearably pretentious so much as just really, really misguided.

With all due respect to Mr. Albini, perhaps it’s time Nastasia broadened her collaborative horizons.

The Outsider is a mix tape. The artful flow that defined Endtroducing and The Private Press has been eschewed in favor of individual tracks, and the album succeeds or fails along these lines.

It's hard not to like music this well-ordered and composed, but in the end it sounds as if The Album Leaf has taken a break on innovation and is settling for being derivative -- of itself.

The most frustrating aspect of Idlewild is its lack of energy.

How We Operate earns points for stylistic adventurousness but, unlike In Our Gun, doesn’t meet its self-imposed challenge with the strongest batch of tunes.

The back end of the album trundles along, failing to rival the opening energy or offer anything as interesting as the non-anthemic detours.

Omnibus is more a historical artifact for the Decemberists completist than a riveting overview of a criminally neglected band from the late ’90s.

It's difficult to listen to the album without coming away with the impression that it should really be two different records. Casablancas' disaffected monotone increasingly seems to belong on a different record from the assured sounds of a band slowly feeling its way out of its pigeonhole.

A grab-bag assemblage that simply doesn’t flow together very well.

Rehearsing My Choir is too self-consciously hip to be a twilight reflection on things past and is filled with personal asides only blood relatives can relate to.

Sadly, Tanglewood Numbers just doesn’t sport enough memorable Bermanisms to make it a truly satisfying Silver Jews album.

The pair overextend themselves often enough to appear to be posturing, costing them some of their charm.

Unmemorable and inoffensive, Death Cab has gone from oddball indie-pop kids to mature professionals who now have a lot more people counting on their success.

Barring a few notable exceptions, these are the songs that either weren’t good enough or didn’t fit into any of the New Jersey-based group’s proper releases.

JackInABox lacks the consistent flow of The Optimist LP and doesn’t match the sturdy songcraft of Ether Song.

At times, Callahan's penchant for clever phrasings gets the better of him.

Lack of energy and a dearth of hooks adds up to one of the most tepid releases Matthews and his crew have released.

Cold Roses’ first set is by-the-numbers, brokenhearted MOR fare, sometimes maudlin (“When Will You Come Back Home?”), infrequently dramatic (the piano-driven “How Do You Keep Love Alive”) and mostly forgettable. The second disc redeems Cold Roses from an even-less-enthusiastic recommendation.

By the halfway point, it becomes too easy to zone out and for the music to fade into the background.

Despite obvious talent and wit, it fails to leave more than a marginal impression.

Black Sheep Boy has bold ambitions, but Okkervil River hasn’t quite reached the point where polished execution equals or surpasses preliminary concept.

It’s official: The robots have won.

Space-rock aficionados will dig the zero-G atmosphere, but it meanders through excessive pockets better left unexplored.

Worlds Apart is the first TOD album that sounds like it was influenced by a marketing department.

Razorlight is more than The Strokes, London Bureau -- all nervous guitar lines and neither-here-nor-there bar-hopping energy -- but what's left of the mucho-hyped UK outfit's identity feels second-hand borrowed, as well.

Its sporadic pockets of accessibility aside, it's difficult to listen to Around the Sun without hearing it as a holding pattern, or worse, a piece of product released simply to keep the R.E.M. brand out among the public.

This stylistic-tryout grab-bag exposes a quartet that has yet to find a voice solely its own.

Dead Cities reinforces the French pair's penchant for distorted vocals and cheesy synthesizers, but the tracks here ultimately add up to far less than the sum of their assorted parts.

Porcelain's aggressively hopeful, generic alt-rock anthems just aren't very interesting.

Much of The Cure slogs along at the same churning, monotonous pace, and Smith, rambling in a croak-shout variation of his normal singing voice, does the material few favors.

To the 5 Boroughs is continuously distracted from its titular dedication by political concerns, severely dampening not only its replay factor but also proving to be the least fun album the normally surefire trio has made.

Now, this wouldn't seem so bad, or filler-friendly, if !!! offered an advancement on "Giuliani." Alas, no.

In its reverential tone and the sheer joy expressed by Clapton and the all-star collection of session men joining him, the album proves utterly incongruous with the form it champions.

The album dies far more often than it flies, mistaking a crazy-quilt musical approach for creativity, and wrongly miscalculating the strengths of its anemic vocalist.

Even if you slipped the album into your player without the slightest preconceived notion of who Courtney Love is or was, Sweetheart wouldn't be able to help but strike you as a document of sheer desperation, of a frantic need for approval. Worse, it's the audible sound of a talent in serious decline.

The Beatles don't meet Jay-Z as equals; they're sliced and diced, the innate musicality of their work all but compromised into nothingness, into vaguely familiar square pegs crammed into the comparatively round holes of Jay-Z's original vocals.

Nightfreak is imbued with an appealing, frantic punk energy, but hamstrung by third-rate Zappa lyrics.

As tough a slog as the backend of Part 1 is, it's Part 2 that truly reveals just how rushed, haphazard and ill-formed Adams' stab at morose mope-rock is.

The songs comprising both parts of Love Is Hell constitute the worst songwriting by Adams ever stamped with a price tag.

That's the problem with Skull Ring: It's the work of an artist who should be looking within himself to create a modern-may masterpiece, rather than trying to catch a spark from either his chart-topping successors or the band he once fronted so triumphantly. Both acts, in their way, give a whiff of desperation.

Fans of the Scottish foursome will be disappointed with 12 Memories, which plays like a wimpy, distant cousin to Good Feeling.

More a novelty than an essential addition to the Dismemberment Plan legacy.

When he strikes the right balance of mischievous charm, rapid-fire wit and genial bravado, Ludacris proves why he's at the top of his game. But Chicken -N- Beer too often flashes us threatening glimpses of a less-likable persona behind that avuncular veneer.

Lacking its predecessor's edgy tone, Life For Rent offers up one bland, polite tune after another.

Where Teaches was brash, Fatherfucker is dim; where Teaches was shocking in its gender-bending, sexually charged language, Fatherfucker is bland, repetitive and obvious in its attempts to turn standard conventions upside down.

Too many of the tracks on Some Devil simply take longer than needed (five minutes on average) to reach their conclusion, most running out of gas somewhere around the three-and-a-half minute mark.

Even by the standards of Black's previous Catholics and solo offerings, Show Me Your Tears is a disappointment.

Young's nomadic narrative requires its own Cliffs Notes, and the lack of cohesion or focus (which Young pretty much cops to in the liner notes) give the record less heft than the irate rambling of your neighborhood curmudgeon.

As with Carrabba's earlier work, though, the problem with A Mark is the utter lack of personalized context in which his heart-on-your-sleeve songs operate.

Feels stuck in a holding pattern.... A misfire from a talented band.

Birds of Pray just seems clueless, like a high school kid who doesn't realize that his strident need to seem interesting just makes him a joke, and not a particularly funny one at that.

One would like to think there's a subversive statement here about the blandness of much of commercial radio, but it's far more likely that the vocal turns by Dave Matthews and Bush's Gavin Rossdale are as free of intended irony as those songs' lyrics are free of fresh content.

Coming from a group whose debut offered a glimmer of hope for the expansion of the genre's boundaries, such creative laziness is all the more disappointing.

While the results aren’t exactly groundbreaking, they're undeniably loose, spirited and just plain fun.