Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces is nearly all negative space with very little beauty.

Unfortunately, with Fragile Future, Hawthorne Heights start awkwardly and never really find their feet.

Imagine the worst Good Charlotte song repeating “I fell in love with an emo girl” as a chorus. ... If anything, the more trap-infused tracks gracing the record’s back half fare better, solely because they aren’t direct copies of some of the most well-known pop punk songs of all time. Moreover, the extremely overblown production doesn’t achieve the same maximalism here, making for a comparatively listenable bunch of songs. Key word: comparatively.

The defense that it isn't trying, that it's just for kicks, would I guess be admissible if the songs weren't so entirely devoid of substance.

It’s a record so entrenched in referencing other music that it ceases to be artistic expression, and is entirely separated from expression as a concept, floating in its own sterility. Looks like it’s back to the drawing board for whichever craven startup CEO cooked this one up in the experience machine; you won’t be able to unplug fast enough.

For an album called Out of Control, it's astonishing just how bland and devoid of personality or expression this is.

Obviously, Atlantic did not rape Lupe into releasing a soulless, automated, corporate record. The real irony is that Lupe's fans demanded this garbage be released.

The main problem with most of the songs on Grand Hotel stem from The Explorers Club's inability to moderate pretty much anything.

To try and explain just how bad the "music" is on this disc is about as much of a masochistic exercise as listening to it.

Underclass Hero tries its best to be profound and musically challenging, however its only success is found, without exception, in the tracks which drop the pretense entirely and return to the formula which made the group popular to begin with.

Might Delete Later is a miscalculation at every level and may prove in time to be his version of Chance the Rapper’s The Big Day.

This band’s tedium, their mercilessly polished tones, their big bucks mastering, their humourless refusal to spotlight any glorious points of absurdity within their own writing, their algorithmic combination of the most derivative parts of how many separate genres into a no less unremarkable whole - it all makes for one of the most irksome feints at artistry I’ve heard this decade and feels oriented towards an impressionable audience with sickeningly calculated precision.

The Path Of Totality is an album that doesn't work because it tries to be something it's not; no, it fails because of not just its terrible premise but its truly dreadful execution.

Every song is so utterly devoid of energy, like they've released a record composed of the spaces between the notes in all their previous work.

The only merit to be found on this soulless revisionism is the production, which is at least serviceable. Outside of that, this is, to the surprise of no one, inferior to the original in every conceivable way.

Taylor opts for interchangeable melodies that never really threaten to take attention away from the lyrics, which function more as tabloid clarification than earnest poetry. I struggle to hum a single melody but, against my will, I can make an educated guess as to what song is a Matty Song or a Travis Song or a Joe song.