The result is an album that is being asphyxiated by an extremely strong hand, and that proves to be the death of it all.

Truthfully, Super Collider is just a Megadeth album born of complacency and issued with only the faintest interest in remaining relevant.

Monogamy falls somewhere near the bottom rung. The indie game has changed. Without the Cursive name behind him, Tim Kasher is, sadly, not much of a player.

Overall, The Nothing is a huge step back for the band. The Paradigm Shift and The Serenity of Suffering were far from perfect, but they rode a line that balanced a contemporary vision with their stapled characteristics. This tries dearly to be nostalgic yet fresh, but the finished product just comes across forced and derivative.

It’s not bad in the sense its unredeemable, just in the sense that it fails to do what it wants to really, really hard.

Fly From Here attempts to offer, amongst all this, an image of Yes that isn't hampered by the past, with five tracks smuggled onto the end of the record but having no narrative relation to the 'epic' that sells it.

Tomboy doesn't speak loud enough for us to hear it. It hums, rather; it mumbles. It actually can't speak.

I can't help but admire the wondrous technicality of the band members, but I wonder if they could have deployed it in a more tasteful way.

Using Shallow and Waterworks as benchmarks, this doesn't even come close; it's glaringly obvious that the addition of a third member has wreaked havoc on the formula.

III is acceptable only to the loyal fans, as it ultimately does little right and sees Periphery at an all-time creative low, failing to improve on any of their faults. For all the instrumental complexity and quirky songwriting choices, it will just sound forced to most.

Not much is worth listening to here; the record's second half saves the abysmal first, yet never approaches the greatness they're capable of.

You will hear the first song five times on this album and the second song twice. Some might argue that mellow synthpop brain-emptiers of “The Darkness” and “Lifeline” constitute independent third and fourth songs, but these are such bland re-re-ree-renditions of A. G.’s longstanding crusty pop Cookbook that flattering them as autonomous entities demands a greater creative effort on your part than the man himself was ever minded to put into them.

Culture II sounds like a satire of every other rap album released by a major label these days, catering to the lowest common denominator of casual music listener. As a business decision, it’s genius; as a piece of music, it’s little more than an elaborate consumer scam.

Album Title Goes Here is simply, and honestly, a pointless release, a record designed for two very different crowds, yet lacking the ammunition to even moderately please anyone.

It’s the first track that commands serious momentum, though the closer “50/50” isn’t too shabby either. ... Its novelty burns off by the halfway mark, but there’s a strong sense that here, at least, was a direction worth doubling down on. Kudos. The rest of the record is an over-calculated mess.

The real problem with The Money Store is MC Ride's consistently incoherent mumbling and meme-of-the-day approach to making hooks.

Interview Music is a record as dense and conflicted as the frontman’s gobbledygook would have us believe he is as a writer. Whereas before his depictions were flavorful and bolstered by solid REM-like rock songs from his surrounding team, here highlight pickings for intelligent insights are slim, and Idlewild as a whole sound lost and in the process of aging horribly.

As with anything, there's catch; the 'good' only lasts four songs and about fifteen minutes out of a fifteen song, fifty-five minute record.

Arch Enemy seem content with resting on their laurels, and while that may please the kind of fans who are upset that In Flames haven't be repackaging Whoracle for the past ten years, it ultimately lacks substance.

So while Stronger has its redeeming moments, they mostly come when Clarkson does what she is renowned for doing and has already done better. It is a little too heavy on the balladry and serious tones, which are the same things that doomed her other two slightly lesser received albums.

...Of The Dark Light simply suffers from a lack of purpose, as if it was penned and recorded just to fulfil the band’s onus to Nuclear Blast. Entire cuts come and go without having done anything worth remembering, and the ones that stick in your mind often do for the wrong reasons.

Despite pulling out all the stops towards the end, The Cost is everything The Frames usually eschew: it’s bland, it’s monotonous and it barely achieves a tempo shift across forty-four minutes.

It is overbearing, pretentious, huge, and begrudgingly catchy, but most importantly, it unveils a band without direction.

Back on My B.S. disappoints regardless, making it a point of no contest that the Busta Rhymes of old is gone forever.

Sure, there are a handful of half-decent cuts included here, but even they have limited lasting value. Meanwhile, the filler (arguably half the LP) is mind-numbingly boring.

It’s a shame Eno had to make so much of The Ship’s artistic vision. Divorced from pretence and divorced from the rest of the album, his final moments here are enjoyable.

Danger Days definitely isn't worth it. If nothing else, it makes me interested to see where they'll go from here, but I find it saddening that the most likely future for them seems to be a breakup after this uninspired mess of an album.

The end result is that even when stumbling across an interesting idea, Francis botches it by coming off as childish, attention-seeking and occasionally repulsive.