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

A couple of times on Uncle Dysfunktional the Mondays break out of their past and attempt to come to grips with more contemporary forms, but it’s less than convincing.

Portraying the state of pop as a series of predictable formulae long since exhausted by corporate superstructure, Human After All more than lives up to its name, rendering a metaphor for failure on the grandest yet simultaneously most personal of terms.

The boys deliver the same sort of agreeable Britpop they've made their name on, wisely realizing that ambition's really not for everyone.

There’s no such dirty, beautiful reality on his new album, just grand empty gestures backed by production polish and symphonic schmaltz.

This is by no means a bad album, but to my ears, it’s worse; it’s mediocre.

If an army of songwriters and million-dollar producers can make Paris Hilton listenable, even for only 38 minutes, then no one else with a major-label budget behind them has any excuse.

Barlow has stripped away the beats that made it interesting and blurred the line between this band and his others.

God love her, but Faith and her handlers just can’t seem to tell the difference between good and bad songs.

By track three, something awful is apparent.

Kittie's most fully-realised and, for non-metalheads, approachable album yet.

After hearing the crap people have said about this album I’m bummed that people are so quick to reject what doesn’t fit their immediate logic. It’s ironic that folks would get off on shredding an album that’s about trying to be kind and honest at the same time.

It is a measure of Albion’s strengths that it can make itself heard above the crumpy distortion and shrill feedback generated by its author.

The good news is things pick up, eventually. The bad news is the album ends just as it starts getting interesting.

Sadly this isn’t the same 213 who dropped the legendary demo and this isn’t the 213 album people have been waiting for.

A big confused mess.

In attempting to show all of the things she has been doing since we heard her last, Aguilera lessens the impact of the better songs on the record. Instead, in between ten to twelve mediocre/good songs, we have eight to ten songs that would be better served as B-sides.

Morningwood does a great job at imitating, and they have spirit. But their spirit does not translate well to good listening, nor does it provoke the underwear-dancing and air guitar it hopes to achieve.

A dull, droning bit of mainstream rock.

If these songs have a certain melancholic charm, it has been obscured beneath an impenetrably bland sheen.

Sharp, intelligent, and (most importantly) highly enjoyable, Enemies Like This is probably the height of the group’s creative abilities.

The evidence now seems indisputable that Wilson is completely, totally, finally spent as a creative force—as it is, we’re treading dangerously close to “How many failed collaborators does it take to produce a half-decent Brian Wilson album?” territory (answer: you can’t count that high).

It's hard to imagine another album in 2006 doing a worse job of justifying its existence than Blood Money.

When Dunckel moves away from pop immediacy, the results are often puzzling.

Mostly, the band sticks to their strengths, making music for a party that ended sometime in the 90s, with the occasional reggae inflection to differentiate it from previous albums.

Mika makes music that sounds like vegetables with all the flavour boiled out of them. Blandness born out of a fear of doing anything new, interesting, or provocative. Blandness born from a fear of alienating a single person with a single piece of conviction in your music.

Even if this album perhaps only has one hope for a hit single, the album is much stronger and reflects that unlike many of her contemporaries, Carlton is moving forwards and towards something.

The Machine EP is a bizarre experiment for the YYYs: is this studio-glazed rocker the one that will show their true colors - or is this just a little endeavor to see what they can pull off? Either way, I’m pretty pissed.