Because of You mostly reminds us of the Ne-Yo Problem. He wants to be bad, but chickens out at the last minute.

While charming, it’s still a little too forgettable to be really exciting on its own merits.

Certainly Want Two is the weaker and less tuneful of the siblings, strings, horns, pipes and choirs distracting attention from the occasionally dirgey and indulgent (but still grandiose) melodies.

While Sennett is often compared to Elliott Smith, at least vocally, there’s far more Badly Drawn Boy in his persona; his voice warbles meekly about waking up with the sun, eating butter, and smiling oceans, even while the egotism lingers.

The album’s beauty lies largely in its simplicity, but so too does its weakness.

It can get very very dull.

Decemberunderground carries a distinct whiff of missed opportunities.

Clor’s singer and main-man Barry Dobbin unfortunately posses the kind of high, straining voice that grates to the point of making you want to punch him on the nose, and when combined with the incessant business of the band’s undoubtedly clever and accomplished music it makes this eponymous debut feel like an effort to listen to.

There’s precious little to get, well, excited about here.

The price of diversity is cohesion and there are points where Maths + English veers wildly off track.

Even with Kozelek's laudable work on this outing I feel that something more robust could have emerged had the roots been original.

The result aims for a “shitty is pretty” messthetic that is more novelty than anything else.

The clear, crisp production and epic atmospheres are a huge departure from the sisters’ previous two albums... But otherwise things are ridiculously the same.

While not entirely mainstream, Tones of Town is also not all that interesting.

There's no denying that Pollock has an uncanny knack for distinctive melodies, but the album's main problem is that she often misjudges the parameters of 'pop' and in doing so errs on the side of safety.

What The Future Embrace lacks in terms of consistency, it makes up for with the feeling that Corgan has turned a corner, that his return to musical credibility is well underway, and isn’t nearly as inconceivable as it was one year ago.

Right now, it's an album I'm unlikely to play all that much now that I'm done reviewing it.

RJD2 has made an record that simply doesn’t play to his strengths.

While I’ll stop short of saying that [co-producer Neil Michael] Hagerty ruined this record, I can definitively say that I’d love to hear what it would have sounded like before he got his hands on it.

Hotel Paper treads the line between rushed brilliance and rushed dross.

This record is still an example of mediocrity.

Review 1: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1476&PHPSESSID=cae64c01fc4f0115d70d2aaefcf8ddcc" TARGET="_blank">It's as lost and macilent and alluring and eager to please and disturbingly empty-eyed as she is.</A> [Score=67] Review 2: <A HREF="http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=1477" TARGET="_blank">Ultimately, In the Zone suffers greatly from Britney's uneasy transition from teen tart to sexually powerful woman.</A> [Score=47]

Although the album is far from a failure, it rarely reaches the peak of its creator&#146;s potential.

Devil&#146;s Workshop is not awful, but its steady flow of roots rock near-misses is, at the very least, disheartening.

Again is an opportunity missed by such distance as to become pointless and even irritating.

The main, fundamental problem with this album is that as good as the melodies are, it really does fall flat in trying to get you to feel anything.

It begins to wilt with tedium as it continues, as the drum machines and synthesizers give way to unimaginative organic instrumentation and bland, stale melodies.

Is it alchemy or robbery? Inspired or insipid? Who knows.