For a band that once never failed to make an impression, be it positive or nauseating, the fact that the best Hysterical can muster is indifference is simply disappointing.

Red Carpet Massacre feels almost like a weird sort of jam session between band and producers, and the quality is about as patchy and uneven as that description implies.

Rumors of punk's demise may be exaggerated, but perhaps someone should tell Almqvist and company that it's long over for them.

As expected, Duck wants to please everybody and this is the reason it fails to take off. ... They prefer the safety of the comfort zone, although they fare much better when they show some grit.

Meandering, extremely derivative 2000's metal.

As much as Travellers drags in the middle after the novelty of hearing new Apples in Stereo has worn off, it does redeem itself near the end, more on the basis of Schneider hitting on some of the best melodies of his recent career than on any variance in sound.

Koi No Yokan is a passable alt-rock/metal album by a band that is capable of much more.

What Relentless Reckless Forever boils down to is a pair of decent, if not good, songs at the beginning, several painfully average songs in the middle, and a mish-mash of mediocrity at the end.

As it stands, we have Neighborhoods, large and vapid, every bit an inconsistent mess as it is a guilty pleasure.

For those who don't mind a slight drop-off in substance, Future This packs all the energy needed to fill arenas and get people jumping and swaying in a U2-inspired trance.

Crystal Castles is definitely a fun listen just don’t expect something highly experimental or interesting.

These songs all sound like Gaga, but they're more abrasive, less focused, and that's not a good thing.

This bare regurgitation of conflicting sounds is what hurts The Above the most, presenting as a (not so) greatest hits compilation from purgatory. It feels cobbled together, without care for global coherence nor the refined execution of any one sound, instead counting on the excitement of variety and disjunction to make up for its less considered, less interesting content.

A distinct spirit? Always. Forging new ground? Only in the minds of marketing execs.

Gutter Tactics flow and overall rhymes pale in comparison to those found in "Abandoned Language." It is as if Gutter Tactics thick, doom sound that defined Dälek’s approach has now turned back and smothered any attempt at a unique change.

Blank by the numbers, blank’s the result.

Just as the Arctic Monkeys do not belong in the American desert, Hard-Fi has little to no place at a London rave. It is such a waste really, since the catchy songwriting nous that still makes Killer Sounds bearable, is also why it is such a disappointment.

Dream On is missing something, and as long as Boman continues to trudge the path of minimalism (that almost borders on indifference), her music will struggle to differentiate itself from the thousands of other indie-pop/folk songstresses out there who all write and sing about heartache in a similar way.

Sort Of Revolution is nothing short of brodacious.

While any change from that tired normality is appreciated, it’s disappointing that so much of this is mediocre, that so much of this imitative, that so much of this is overblown, and etc.

Intimacy, as an album, is hit-or-miss.

The songwriting is certainly not poor and Glenn’s voice is far from shot, but what makes this album so average is the combination of the lazy arrangements and the poor production which makes the album sound as if the veteran vocalist is singing over a backing CD.

The bookends of this record show flashes of potential--with gems sprinkled in between--but far and wide, this is a disappointingly vanilla offering from a group that has already proven itself to be capable of ensnaring our minds and ears. If you’re looking for a silver lining, though, at least these guys have matured.

This isn't a slight dip in quality, it's an avalanche.

The album musters such little excitement from its arsenal of dynamic guitar solos and yells of self-affirmation.

The high points of Pop Negro are where Diaz-Reixa is at his most celebratory and unrestrained and moments like the vocal hooks in "Ghetto Facil" and the stop-start pounding of "FM Tan Sexy" prove it. Unfortunately, the exuberance that bursts out of the clutter of his best songs is a characteristic seen too rarely here.

IDLES wanted TANGK to be their Kid A, but they ended up delivering their Tranquility Base Hotel Casino.

There are a lot of cosmetics present to cover up the band’s shortcomings, but not even the most epic posturing and glossy production can hide this record’s blemishes.

Disappointingly, Our Version of Events, with the exceptions of "Heaven" and "Daddy", is as flimsy and mushy as they come.

Agora is a lot of things, but one thing it is not is corny. But in the process he has sacrificed a whole lot of virtues. Where Fennesz once generated productive frisson in the mind-body continuum of his listeners, now his music stares blankly at them, as if hoping that their and not his affective dispositions will create the passion that sustains worthwhile musical practice.

The end result is a record that runs quite average, there are some quality songs that can be picked from it ("We Are the Night," "Do it Again," "All Rights Reserved") but by itself it will lose many listeners.

It’s too much. As much as I enjoy the solid starts a la “Monochrome” and “The Double Helix of Extinction” there’s a lot of filler and needless over indulgence in the form of gimmick.

Illusion is a decent release, but it doesn't differentiate itself from anything Fleet Foxes would have written.

Poppy seems to be restrained here – as if something is holding her back from embracing her typically wild and unconventional whims. Next time, I hope she grabs that sword and cuts herself free of whatever led to this.

Its strongest moments don’t quite stand with the best that The Menzingers discography has to offer, but they’re well worth a listener’s time and showcase the group’s inherent songwriting prowess. What’s sad is to see a band now nearly 20 years into the career suddenly desiring to be entirely different, independent of the type of music they are writing and releasing.

Overall, Ritual is too much of the same.

No longer supported by two decades’ worth of prophetic scope or career-highlight compositions, Godspeed’s revolution feels as performative as it always has - and a good deal more hollow.

In general, 'Axe to Fall' speaks towards the stagnancy of most bands in the metal genre. The collaborators here can't even help a band as good as Converge make a solid record and when examining Converge's almost flawless discography that is wholly unexplainable.

I would love nothing more than to tell you that Nobody's Daughter is a massive ***-you to the haters, but unfortunately, all this does is give them more ammunition, meekly soiling the legacy of a band that deserves far, far better.

It's hard to slate Harps and Angels too much, because the music is actually quite good in places and it's nowhere near bad enough to be a chore to listen to.

As it stands, Us lies at a precarious crossroads of self-help preaching and black history compendium, succeeding at neither and exposing a serious disconnect between lyricist and producer.

Sure, the album is a commendable attempt at maturity which suggests that the five-piece are unlikely to take their careers for granted. Unfortunately, Everything's Fine is another example of a band attempting to grow up far too fast, and coming unstuck because of it.

Any halfway interesting endeavor is either quickly discarded or frustratingly bereft of further exploration and expansion.

All these songs just sound too much like Gorillaz songs, in an uncomfortable, self-conscious way.

Wonky is a work full of many flaws and too few shining moments, but as ammunition for the obvious tours to follow, there's enough here to be effective enough in a large enough setting.

The truth is that there are things to like here – namely some new percussive elements and O’Connor’s ever-rich voice – but Solar Power comes across as painfully flat compared to her first two records.

The thing about Emerald Forest and the Blackbird, though, is that it has no logical direction and no cohesive force, despite its strong and intriguing concept.

While Transistor Rhythm ends up as the superbly-produced album that Addison Groove has always hinted at, it's the uniform sterility and refusal to tread water beyond the reach of his peers that stops it from succeeding beyond anything more that simple idol worship.

There’s no question about which side of the disc is the more interesting- sleaze beats manufactured sentiment any day--but ultimately it’s the country half that most people will pay attention to, and to that end there is very little to actively criticise.

Without a doubt, it’s ‘heavier’ than past PoGs on a moment-to-moment basis, but its constituent pieces of songvomit are frequently disjointed and undeveloped to the point that you straight-up question why the band were so unwilling to dig any deeper into them.

The Weakerthans are still writing pretty, tender music, but they seem to have lost their immediacy and potency.

It's a nice project that might have been put to better use as a one night only concert, because it's certainly not the crucial next step in the continued evolution of this otherwise fascinating duo.

It’s clearly leagues below what they’re capable of, but they’re at least moving forward with the styles of music that they want to create, uninhibited by expectations rooted in the past. This is essentially a synth-pop album, one that is at times exciting and unconventional and at other times tasteless and rudimentary.

Repo isn't a bad record, but it's certainly the least fresh and consistent one I can remember Black Dice releasing and both of those traits are a big deal with 'difficult' music like this.

If we got 10-12 solid tracks in the vein of “16 Carriages” or “II Most Wanted”, Cowboy Carter could have been a slam dunk. Unfortunately, the record stands as a bloated mess that doesn’t fully know what it wants to be.

When an emcee sounds interrupted or unbalanced by the guitar and most of the music appears to be ripped from a bedroom jam session, it’s painfully obvious; Street Sweeper Social Club would better benefit society by performing said namesake operation.

There are still traces of their recent, more mature outings, but those moments are predictably outshined by the ones that harken back to the band's glory days.

There are a couple groovy licks scattered here and there which are half decent, but otherwise it's a tepid exercise in mediocrity difficult to even feign interest in.

My World 2.0 is effective and innocent Top 40 material, if not terribly inventive.

Even where the record shines--and it does at points--it really only does so against a background of blinding light from Muse’s back catalog, which is an unfortunate, but inescapable point.

Unfortunately, it is hard to embrace these strengths on such a predictably unfocused album.

There’s something for everyone, and OCS do well to cater to a crowd who are afraid of falling with the rest of us into the future.

Tapes is hampered by unimaginative mixing and a serious lull in proceedings at the halfway point.

Carry On is not a bad album, nor is it a good one.

Working at breakneck speed, Vivian Girls is sloggy, hampered by the cloying feeling that the lo-fi shtick is simply too on-the-nose.

Most of the tracks emulate what could be B-Sides of a post-Lemons Ant, doing nothing so groundbreaking as regurgitating mid-90's soul.

Every once in a while, Myself In The Way’s commitment to boringness leads to some Nice Music.

S/T is a valiant try by a band that has a strong history of trying, but it’s neither an impressive return to form, a nostalgic trip back to 90s emo, nor is it a breakthrough in Rainer Maria’s sound, it mostly just exists.

The disc is hook laden but the hooks are bland. The rapping is heartfelt but forgettable and, 'So Far To Go,' easily the highlight of the album, is actually a track of J Dilla's posthumous "The Shining."

As a soundtrack, it works. Moody music fills the background, and in that respect it is largely a success. Yet as a standalone listen, the record is a weak and almost slap-dash display, with Arnalds feeling regrettably uninspired.

Riceboy Sleeps isn't quite awful; on the contrary, there is enough warmth and prettiness to give the record some value. But by the same token, it's certainly not fantastic either, and therein lies the great problem with the whole project.

The album is still very much a tale of two cities: for every half-baked wobbly anthem that the rooster-haired cockney thug has in his pocket he still manages to surprise with an occasional outburst of borderline genius.

It aims to give fans something different, but it does the bare minimum.

Grande is far too talented to be crafting forgettable pop albums, so here’s to hoping that she regains her footing soon.

As it stands, it’s just another Vampire Weekend album, except the songs are less catchy and more sterile this time around.

It's hard to mess up a good thing too badly and there are certainly enjoyable moments on The Green Album.

MGMT have (purposely?) lost that instant magic that they effortlessly whipped up with those debut singles, and in trying to re-establish themselves as artists that don't need the commercial mainstream to survive, they've created a record that lacks any defining characteristics to call its own.

Artpop is the third album by pop recording artist Lady Gaga. Therefore it has similarities to her previous work but is inherently different because it is a different album.

Despite the similarities, there’s actually a few brief moments in The Floodlight Collective where Pundt one-ups the band he derivates from, but there’s unfortunately as many that are boring enough to negate any previous triumph.

Shinedown has the raw talent to keep Amaryllis afloat, but the album is full of holes and it always appears to be on the verge of sinking.

This latest Lana del Rey record does contain some measure of robust and moving songwriting about topics other than sex, death and California. ... Secondary highlights “Paris, Texas” and “Kintsugi” disappear into the background; otherwise cogent hip-hop flirtations turn into innocuous daliances (“Fishtail”); the middle of the road becomes the most desolate of wasted spaces (“Fingertips”).

Frankly, Mercer’s unfiltered production makes Heartworms an exhausting listen.

In the end, what you’re left with is a generic rock album with a couple of noteworthy moments and an aftertaste that will probably alienate a few long-time fans of the band.

You Will Eventually Be Forgotten offers nothing new nor does it pay respectable homage to its influences.

While an interesting concept, neither CD contains enough strong material to match up to either of her previous releases, and at times, the constant barrage of R&B cliches and adult-contemporary production make it sound like Beyonce is rapidly transforming from hot, hip pop goddess to your standard bored diva.

Picture Perfect's silver lining comes in that it is, at the end of the day, a perfectly serviceable pop record replete with euphoric headrushes and the occasional tenacious earworm ("Impossible").

Mission Bell isn't anywhere near a disaster, but it's also nowhere close to being a great album. Whatever it is Amos Lee went off in search of at the beginning of this album, he should have kept looking for it.

The music itself isn't really the issue. It's the conceit, the fact that even though Kanye and Jay-Z truthfully are nailing what pop can sound like, they use their royal stature not to communicate fresh ideas but pander to their subjects because they f*cking can.

That consistent album we're waiting for still hasn't come just yet.

The album is just standard rock/alternative affair.

In the glutton of pretty records, With Our Heads in the Clouds and Our Hearts in the Fields presents itself as a merely a needle in the haystack; the likelihood is that it will be lost in the mix, not good enough to be remember, but also not bad enough to be singled-out.

It’s a series of surprisingly coherent and original steps forward, followed by a series of steps both backwards and sideways. I’d venture to say that’s better than continuing to rummage around the status quo at least, even if the cumulative results are still decidedly average.

Overcome is but a grain in the sand on an oversaturated desert; a metal album you'll enjoy while you play it but won't ever be something you‘ll yearn to hear.

Devoid of any country heart, country soul, or country swing, if Bon Jovi had started out a country band and decided to play mainstream rock, this is what it would sound like.

777 - The Desanctication leaves the band treading water, unable to escape onto dry, firm land... This leaves Blut Aus Nord in a funny situation: they are 2/3 of the way through a trilogy that has no character other than its egg-shell atmosphere – thin and prone to cracking with no solid musical base underneath to resist and hold the shell in place.

Perhaps Sky Full of Holes will be that album to some impressionable youth whose idea of power pop revolves around Justin Bieber ballads, but for longtime fans it just sounds tired and dusty. Fountains of Wayne are still doing what they've always done, but I think I've finally grown up.

An unwieldy, 80-minute record that was barely promoted and likely rushed to release. It's not 22 tracks of straight garbage, but the idea that Chance had three very viable debut album candidates but chose this as his big day would be funny if it wasn't so deeply frustrating.

Copycat Killer is an unexpectedly clumsy release and often fails to spotlight the subtitles that brought its tracklist close to excellence. Its clear attraction is that Bridgers’ gorgeous vocals are more prominent here than on the original version, but this is cancelled out by how awkwardly the string pairing tends to clash with her performance.

AmeriKKKant falls on its face pretty fast.

Good Nature recaptures the brightness and pop sheen, sure, but it's a trip back to a treasured childhood location only to find that the palace in your mind was always just a fallen tree, and the river your dreams used to float along forever is just a kinda gross, muddy little stream.

There’s glimmers of the old brilliance here and there of course. Exotic BOP may be a pale, miserable ghost of the glory days, but there’s life to be found in Angela, its funk line feeling like it's going to be the root of something that’s about to flourish, but whoops, there it goes into its weird low-effort basement style as Stas THEE Boss delivers a verse that’s passable enough, but which doesn’t do anything to dig the rest of the track from out of its own mire.

For lack of a better word, it’s dull. The subtext of this record is rich for those firmly invested in Swift’s personal narratives but, perhaps for the first time, outright irrelevant for anyone else.

This disconnect between intent and delivery is explicit the entire album through. From the harried, unfinished-sounding "No Mistakes" which is built on a skeletal Slick Rick sample and almost nothing else, to the choppy breaks for chorus in "All Mine", to "Wouldn't Leave" which is basically a Francis and the Lights demo with a Kanye scratch vocal quickly added in.

As a Lily Allen record, it’s a sneering, vapid imitation: a Lily Allen stereotype.

The Tortured Poets Department is too pulseless to inspire anything at all – and so when Swift does lay down the occasional track with colour in her cheeks, the results tend to tower over the rest of the album regardless of any visible issues they bear. Practically every one of the its greatest highlights is a glaring case-in-point for one or another of its recurrent flaws, yet transcends them through sheer pep and conviction.

Volume Three can’t flourish under the force of her considerable personality or Ward’s craftsmanship, because the latter has been deadened and the former is unwilling to break the illusion.

M is painfully bland and too on the nose.

Ultimately, A Fine Mess is a subpar offering that sounds like you’d imagine it to: a handful of B-sides with varying degrees of enjoyment, made worse by a myriad of problems. Devoted fans should find a meagre portion of redemption here, but to the casual listener this will bring little enjoyment to the table.

There is roughly an EP worth of songs here that bring something remotely interesting to the table, rather than simply rehashing past ideas and reproducing beats you’ve heard in 100 other tracks before.

Heaven to a Tortured Mind eliminates the diversity and nuance of its predecessor in favour of underdeveloped avant-pop.

The Dead of the World, well, doesn't do much of anything. It's cold without being chilling; it's colorless without being dark.

Too bad it doesn’t come together better as it merely buckles down into a messy heap of proggy tomfoolery.

Every single song is still about smoking with girls, and every song is the same stale, tired, derivative indie/emo I’ve heard a million times.

The frustrating desire for something daring or interesting is never satiated. To be blunt, Evolution is essentially a blander version of Immortalized, which was the flavourless porridge version of Asylum, which was the graham cracker version of Indestructible. Even the song titles are uninspired.

Music to Be Murdered By doesn’t improve on Kamikaze, that’s largely down to its run time and hodgepodge of styles, but I can say there was at least some effort put into this one. The production is decent, the vocals occasionally hearken back to his playful era, and the guests do a pretty great job throughout, but there’s still too much baggage being carried over from the ‘10’s Eminem albums, and it kills a lot of the potential here.

Given Jónsi’s past solo releases and Sigur Rós’s discography, Shiver should have been much better than it turned out. While not a complete trainwreck, it disappointingly features a minimum of the signature greatness listeners have come to expect.

Aside from its occasional highlights, Crisis of Faith feels haggard, tired and lost: branching in a handful of uninteresting, jarring directions with little apparent rhyme or reason.

Near to the Wild Heart of Life succeeds only in proving that the Japandroids of 2017 will have a hard time matching their former glories.

“She Shines” displays fleeting snippets of raw emotion over chunky guitars, while “In Time”’s surging, punchy, melodious hooks bring some recognition of greatness to the forefront, but overall, the majority of the album seems pretty content with functioning on passive, prosaic ideas with little staying power.

The End, So Far is lack-lustre at almost every turn.

The bulk of EVERGREEN does little more than yeeting a distorted riff at you, copy-pasting vocal melodies on top and subsequently repeating a few lines by way of a chorus (and, if you’re lucky, this is the part where Gunn’s vocals get a little grittier, yay!). While this affords the record an inherent sense of cohesion, none of the songs here are particularly memorable or uh, good.

FM! might have personality, but it's of the more obnoxious and self-obsessed "Get the Fuck Off My Dick" variety, and there's simply not enough quality on display to justify its own brief and largely annoying existence. Next.

The result is an unfortunately hollow album, recycled in its sound and empty in its emotion.

All in all, not the death knell that it could have been but not the triumphant return it so could have been at the same time, Descension is another addition to the Coheed saga.

You’re Not As ___ As You Think feels like the conclusion to something that was never started in the first place, it hasn’t earned any of the things it takes without asking, it’s a shallow pretender desperately fumbling in the deep end, and it’s an unfortunate development for a band that used to write dumb, fun songs about girls.

In fairness, Witness isn't a failure, and its good intentions, both politically and sexually, aren't insufferable as much as they are listless and unsatisfying.

Sadly, the relative adventurousness of Girl of My Dreams has been traded in for trite stadium-pop fodder that doesn’t play into Fletcher’s core strengths as an artist.

Almost all these songs are dynamically stolid and melodically immemorable to the point of interchangeability; the drum parts are phenomenally disappointing coming from a musician as talented as Jimmy Chamberlain; Corgan’s voice still sounds like old tarmac with inconsistent numbers of cars passing over it; and every song follows an identical progression from midtempo verse to homogenous chorus.

It doesn't help that the music in general is so stubbornly tepid. Sure, overall it's a step up from The Black Market, but there's nothing here that gives the hope of Rise Against vaguely recalling what they used to be good at.

These slightly above average hooks/melodies deserve better. I deserve better. So tell me it’s over.

Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon doesn’t expand on its original ideas, it gives you less – a familiar, now tenebrous and barren wasteland. The bottom line being; when your reimagined version makes an already lethargic album look like an action-packed thrill ride, you know you've got problems.

These tracks of moderate length are dull and lack any sort of imagination or emotional intensity.

NAV is front-to-back one of the blandest takes on the genre so far.

There's a minor detail to enjoy in almost every song on here, but the whole is average to the point of being physically sickening for anybody who fell in love with their magical debut.

The Stepford wives of shoegaze.

The end result is a tepid, lifeless album devoid of everything that we've come to expect from them in this part of their career, leaving only the most traditional aspects of their sound intact.

Bleeding Through's self-titled album is yet another Bleeding Through release that tries to skirt by on the bare minimum. For every good idea presented, there are three more trite and tired ideas weighted to it, dragging it down into the abyss.

A gimmicky novelty album that has a handful of redeeming songs but will ultimately fade into the ether within a few months.

Taking into account that half of Leave This Town was never intended for headphone listening, and is better heard blasting on a car stereo or a jukebox, it can seem somewhat picky to criticise the album for being poorly-written or for sounding like compressed dog poo.

More often than not (and this is the kicker, ladies and gentlemen), Pretty. Odd. is just pretty dull.

With a good production, some of these tracks could have been saved, but by all accounts, Let the Bad Times Roll is the worst album The Offspring have ever made.

Outer South is too long, too uninteresting, and too uninspired to be anything better than not good at all.

The band is out of gas and has been for a while now. Wonderful Wonderful fills the same role as Battle Born, taking mid-tempo pop-rock with aimless verses and marrying them to one stab-at-the-radio chorus after another.

As a whole, Cardiology is an attempt to leave behind the band's failed newer sound and return to their pop-punk roots.

A huge chunk of the record comes across as a potent reminder that even at the height of her powers, Lopez tended to provide second-rate, filler radio pop which was distinctly inferior to what Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and even Shakira were pumping out at the time.

Unfortunately, it’s little more than a bland exercise in pop that the band needs in order to sell records and tour again.

The biggest failure of these songs, and the most confusing thing about this album, are the melodies.

The album is just a bunch of incredibly inoffensive hard rock masquerading as metal, and while its not good by any stretch of the imagination, it isn't a travesty to music either.

With a hackneyed focus on forcibly juxtaposing several random styles into their main rock sound, the stupidly long track names, and the uninspired hard rock instrumental work we get on here, essentially the album comes across as a tasteless meme.

The production quality is a crowning grace throughout the album in the face of some very dodgy writing and bad musical choices.

This is just lazily done and disappointing considering it’s been marketed very well to appear mysterious.

At a mere thirty-six minutes, it’s not a stretch to see Britney Jean as a half-baked effort, more of a commitment to be completed and shipped off than the labor of love it was touted as.

For as poor as Man of the Woods was, at least it was ambitious…unlike whatever this amorphous clump of hackneyed trends is.

The record's ADD can be felt with every unbridged leap between ideas to its shocking lack of transitions, and the whole time there is this pervading sense that Heritage doesn't really have anything to say at all.

Abnormally Attracted to Sin is, by quite some distance, her weakest album yet.

There you have it; young lads just starting out make poor-to-average debut record. Not an unusual occurrence, and no doubt a thousand other albums released that day were no better or worse than 180.

Dig Out Your Soul isn’t the worst record Oasis have produced, but even the heavily shat-upon (an unfairly so, in this writer’s opinion) Heathen Chemistry was comfortable within its own skin.

While it's not without its obvious highlights, All Hope is Gone feels too much like a demo with professional production values to make me recommend it as an album.

It’s big and postured and goes by without saying anything of significance. A lot of the blame for that goes to Brandon Flowers, since he is the voice of The Killers and all, but it seems like his band, drunk with success, doesn't have the slightest idea what to do next.

For metal devotees seeking heaviness and shred paired with otherworldly curio, Crack the Skye is the be all and end all, but for anybody without a Celtic Frost tattoo, do not follow "the wise man's staff / Encased in crystal."

What we’re left with is a somewhat novel approach that’s bolstered by improved songwriting, but ruined by a sheer lack of direction--or anything interesting to say.

Strictly speaking, it's a Gorillaz album in name only. You could commend Albarn on one hand, but then slap him with the other; the use of a 'rolling studio' and the latest in technology is inspired, but it ultimately represents the downfall of the album.

The ambitious sound of The Bright Lights of America is a dreadful fifty-two minutes long; with an average song length over three minutes.

It's not that it's post-rock-by-numbers, although at times it really is, but more so that it doesn't even sound like there are painters behind the palette.

What we get is listless by the numbers "latin rock", dull, sleepy ballads, and overblown Diva numbers I wouldn't wish on Whitney Houston.

Of course, nothing on This is Forever is really new territory; the 80’s influenced synthesizers, the electronic drums, the monotone vocalist, it’s all been heard before. It’s all been done so much better.

Sure, Blitzen Trapper attempt to vary the formula a bit--there's the jangly campfire number, or that one about astronauts--but when it comes right down to it, everything's all the same.

Korn feel tired, bland and dated.

Ufabulum is perhaps not a terrible album in any respect, but at the same time it simply is an incredibly boring one.

X is a vapid and overly confident album that feels more like regression than progression for Ed Sheeran's indie folk sound.

For its faults, Gallipoli is nice. It’s pleasant. But it’s the type of nice that makes you wonder if there was any substance there at all.

Small Craft is an attempt to puncture that bubble, but doesn't quite do it; but, hopefully, if Eno's focus is still there, the next one should. I'm at least optimistic that it will.

The flow of Times of Grace's debut is so jagged and stop-start.

The artificial sense that permeates as a result of the album's forced nature may be its largest detractor, and it is one damning flaw whose shadow Human Again can't seem to escape.

Audio, Video, Disco has neither creativity nor moxie, except in the sense that Justice is damn determined to give homage to the worst excesses of macho rock posturing.

Fans of the band are either going to be blindly loyal, or extremely disappointed with this release. Meanwhile, those who felt that Editors were overly generic will either be interested in their new direction, or simply feel they are now generic in a different genre.

Walk It Off combines songs that attempt an idiosyncratic progression, but fail to expand upon things like, say, songwriting, with songs that struggle to capture a bright ol’ Indie Rock flame that was once there.

They’ve crafted a record that feels more like imitation than originality.

Zach Hill is a talented drummer, with some great ideas, but certain elements of the album just tarnish all of the positives. This album is even unlistenable at moments.

We've been left with a blatant emulation of a tired sound by a band that seems so uninspired that they couldn't even be bothered to make enough effort to differentiate their own songs from one another.

It fails as dance, as rock, as pop, and as art-rock or art-pop. Really, should we be settling for an average, inoffensive midpoint between all these, given all the music that exists in the world?

Despite being Simple Plan's poppiest release yet, it is also their least catchy, indistinct and forgettable.

Ultimately, jj has the concept and the intrigue down; if only they could get their music to match.

J. Cole’s raps, but KOD sounds like someone who is either unfamiliar with drug abuse, or is completely unsympathetic to the dynamics of drug abuse in America.

Graduation is consistent, yes, but it's consistently boring.

In the end, Fucked Up aren't nearly as good as Refused were thought to be, but hey, Refused aren't even as good as they were supposed to be, so Fucked Up may yet be remembered as revolutionary.

As a lyricist he’s dull and unimaginative and as a singer he’s extremely limited: both facts detract considerably from the obvious passion he exhibits elsewhere for his music and his politics.

The band sounds like they're simply trying too hard to keep up with their more contemporaries, and it shows; the song writing is poorly executed, the syrupy hooks are, for the most part, dull and unimaginative, and the band fails to cover any ground it already hasn't before.

Despite its long gestation period and pristine production, it sounds as though no one believes in What Matters Most less than Folds himself, and this bleeds through every single vocal performance and instrumental arrangement on the record.

It does nothing to distinguish itself from other BR releases and some of the premier punk albums released in the past few years, but it also can immediately trump most of the stuff being put out these days on the virtue of BR's tight and likable style.

Ultra Beatdown features the same guitar riffing, theatric singing and the rest of that stuff that doesn’t matter in regards to Dragonforce.

Almost every song is terribly alike--each featuring the same hallmarks Nadja’s become known for, besides their most important aspect, being their relentless creativity--and this bland similarity becomes taxing.

To summarise, Man of the Woods is an astoundingly poor, inconsistent, and sloppily constructed outing from an artist whose defining feature has been his ability to cleanly reinvent his image.

I can forgive a couple of transgressions if Teenage Dream redeemed itself with songs that were more than trashy, one-dimensional pop, but, alas, the rest of the album is just as predictable as the VMAs and only marginally more entertaining.

Too often, the melodies are listless, the song structures are underdeveloped, and the album’s weaknesses are masked by waves of synths and ambience that add nothing to the experience other than time – and that, unfortunately, is time that we’ll never get back.

Unfortunately, he forgot he cannot sing or write coherent lyrics.

Del sways wildly between hit and miss. And Eleventh Hour, for all its boisterous and awkward handling, fails with a resounding thud.

Much like the average modern-day Playmate, Dirty Work is essentially a manufacturer's dummy: air-brushed; soulless; custom-built to exacting specifications; aesthetically-pleasing but ultimately empty and devoid of any real distinctive character. At the risk of butchering a metaphor, All Time Low are New Found Glory with grotesque, misaligned implants.

As it stands for now though, Red is a mixed bag, and it's up to you to sort through the majority-holding bad in order to find the good.

The massive dip in quality towards the end, including the progressive worsening through closing, bonus and hidden tracks, is disappointing, considering how well the album begins.

Like Radiohead and Panda Bear before Bon Iver this year, it's not a problem that Vernon hasn't created music in the same style of the last successful album: the problem is that he isn't able to make that creative jump to a new aesthetic, or direction, successfully at all.

Vaxis II: A Window of The Waking Mind takes everything questionable about Vaxis I’s overall charming forays into stadium rock, castrates it of any semblance of grit, urgency or personality, and subjugates its once formidable trove of catchiness to an almost impressively bland slew of commercialised hard rock templates that, in conjunction with the record’s militantly pop production, render it a gormless caricature of everything once endearing about the band.

Although the guitar sounds are very pretty and sublime it’s tough to listen to an album where the songs follow the same exact boring formula.

Magnetic generally lacks the catchiness and vitality of past efforts, as the band tries in vein to reinvent the wheel but fails to accomplish anything as impressive as ‘Iris’, ‘Here is Gone’, ‘Black Balloon’, ‘Let Love In’, [insert hit single here].

Although the album barely brings its head above the water-line marked "passable", it's still too slick, too unified and too perfectly structured to convince you that apart from the vocals of Stanley and Simmons, the rest of the album is nothing more than a hodge-podge of contributions from various pony-tailed musos from somewhere sunny.

Sadly, ‘Coloratura’ is not enough to save the LP from being a mess. In the end, you can’t even say you are disappointed anymore. This is who Coldplay are now, producing the most casual music for the most casual listeners possible.

Aside from its opening track, which I’ll get to, this album is essentially a blank space.

The cheesiness, loads of filler, and overly glossy production are still present and hinder much of what the album had the potential to accomplish.

Midnight Memories takes the slight progression of Take Me Home and demolishes it.

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.

The dressing is a little different this time around; a few more jokes, a couple catchy tunes (this is most definitely not the worst Weezer album ever), but once again Weezer are content with churning out sugary pop tunes that go down easy and unimpressively.