The failures of his latest effort don’t simply center on that side step from audacity to reckoning. It’s in how that move has somehow left him struggling to write a listenable song.

His tunes and/or jokes plop out like forced turds. [Mar 2005, p.92]

[The Datsuns] now sound unfit to carry the Donnas' jockstraps. [Oct 2004, p.120]

These hammerheads still sound like the touring company of Grunge-a-Mania. [Jan 2004, p.100]

Spastically twee, painfully saccharine. [Jun 2005, p.108]

He tries hepcat jazz-piano bop and balladry with pitiful results. [May 2006, p.91]

People from New York trying to sound like people from England trying to imagine what Neil Young would sound like if he were in Coldplay. [Oct 2005, p.137]

While Transplants' self-titled debut caught the trio at that moment when the third-beer buzz kicks in... the new record seems to have picked up several pints and bong hits later, when shit starts to get grisly. [Aug 2005, p.96]

Listening to this disc sorta gives new meaning to the phrase virgin sacrifice. [Oct 2005, p.142]

Everything presents a harder-edged JT, who tries a little of everything over 77 minutes but adds remarkably little to the pop landscape.

But it's not Eve 6's purely commercial aspirations that makes them so horrid...

Maybe the entire album is a meme itself, a grand existential joke critiquing the all-conquering rise of Internet culture by parodying its overwhelming randomness. Whatever it is, though, it's a bad rap record.

Over brutish synths and hammy bleats, the puerile brosefs' third album shares, among other witticisms: Gonna have a house party in my house.

By the time one gets to the final track, a head-scratching take on Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," the overall effect is a decidedly uncomfortable numbness.

You've heard these overheated tales of wild girls and outlaw boys many times before. [Mar 2007, p.97]

The music, such as it is, is a river of fat-free, dirt-free, melody-free jazz Olestra. [Feb 2002, p.112]

It's "disappointing" only because it isn't dreadful in funnier, more interesting ways.

X's overlong albums have always been exhausting, and this time he sounds bored and fatigued. [Sep 2006, p.100]

Sounds like the Band in a coma. [Jul 2006, p.82]

Soul-free, thirdhand melodies housed in songs that any halfway decent bar band would reject without a second pass. [Feb 2007, p.85]

Apparently, this American movie is the story of the predatory woman who comes to your house, whaps the crap out of you, and makes you play the same song over and over again. [2/2001, p.107]

There is Michael Jackson bad, there is Ed Wood bad, and then there is BAYTL, a union so unholy that it cries out for a show on Bravo.

They make each shimmer of postnatal whimsy seem like an eternal gulag of the spotless mind. [Sep 2005, p.109]