It's not a complete disaster--the songs are still there, shining proud and (far too) loud--but each listen brings a constant, aggravating reminder of the sloppy production.

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

For all its tasteful craft, aesthetic unity and knowing winks to its makers’ history, it’s simply not very interesting

Little on Magic outright falters, which is why it's hard at first to explain how unappealing it is.

Over the course of eleven songs of grim predestination, virtually no modernizing or even identifying signposts are allowed to disturb the terrain.

Banhart's efforts to expand himself have left him woefully unable to play to his strengths in the rare occasions he bothers with them.

We can only parse this album as that of a brilliant group still trying desperately to reconcile its awkward youth into an identity, but only managing to hide behind a few ten-year old audio masks.

Ultimately, The Meanest of Times stumbles when the folksy frayed stitching is torn away, exposing nothing but atrophied punk muscle.

Trying too hard to mimic his band’s tried-and-true telepathy with only karaoke-level results, it's easy to see he thinks he’s run out of ways to experiment.

['Fantasies' and 'Missed' are] mere tasty morsels amidst a mass of mid-tempo gelatin resulting from nearly arbitrary song structure ('Own Your Own Home'), bland chord progressions ("Ghost"), or one-take studio dickery ('Phonytown') that renders the closer, 'Cheaper Than Therapy,' a five-and-a-half minute afterthought.

Sullivan and Cox are attentive enough to make room for understated fiddler Claudia Mogel, who keeps the band’s country flame burning when they flail and strut. None of this, though, is enough to strip the album of a staleness and fatigue

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.

I don’t like it. I don’t hate it. And that’s the truth exactly.

The one thing you can't accuse Under the Blacklight of is being boring, but it abides by an either/or sort of mentality that presumes that a complete lack of substance is the only alternative to the kind of music Rilo Kiley and their pals made in 2002.

Props for being candidly happier, but as is often the case with bands with ten-plus-years of solid material, Earlimart’s newest release serves us better as an unwitting PR campaign for the rest of their oeuvre.

Planet of Ice's cerebrally structured songs pull in too many directions to pack a proper punch.

In the act of making himself more accessible, Common’s verbal skills have slid into disrepair.

I’d argue, though, that being an expert on the group’s verbose and ragged past wouldn’t help all that much. This is a different sounding band with pretty much the exact same lyrical concerns.

Skills most often attributed to premiere MC’s like deft wordplay, vivid storytelling, emotional resonance, salient talking points? These are few and far between on T.I. vs. T.I.P., even if the man remains an impressive technician who sounds at home on any beat you can give him.

The Spree remain a vital, relevant artist only for Volkswagen advertising execs and anyone who takes the last five minutes of “Scrubs” episodes too seriously.

It would be difficult to convince yourself that The Sun is anything but meandering and listless.

Idealism has some fun with memorable new electro (“The Pulse,” “Home Zone,” “Idealistic”) and nu-rave cuts (“I Want I Want,” “Pogo”). But these guys can’t possibly think fans will believe this fifteen-track behemoth, mostly lacking in subtlety and invention, is the big party they half-seriously claim it to be, over and over and over again.

Predictably, the Orchestra works considerably better as a symphony band than an orchestral accompaniment.

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

There are dozens of bands that do this kind of stuff better, including Wheat themselves.

Were the album as sleek and steely as “Makes Me Wonder,” we would be crowning and mitering Maroon 5 as master purveyors of white-boy funk.

The downside of the Brakes development is the loss of the raw power that accompanied some of their more demented moments.

[It] continues with the middle-of-the-road, ambient pop approach that marked his last few efforts.

The Reminder is rarely exciting or thrilling, and never revolutionary.

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

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.

Pullhair Rubeye isn’t awful, but it could’ve been great.

While the music is all over the place the vocals feel pinned down and flat.

It’s a loud and cacophonous affair—where previous efforts doled out their noise in judicious restraint, Breaks responds to their need to unhinge their fractured pop.

Let’s Just Be is as poppy and willfully idiosyncratic as Arthur’s older work, but is both more conventionally arranged and more loose-limbed than ever before.

Cassadaga falters in the same way I’m Wide Awake did: by trying to present his views as universal, it just exposes how Conor Oberst can’t handle the Truth.

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

Because of the Times validates the theory that the Kings of Leon are merely the Eagles in wolf’s clothing (or the Strokes in overalls), being that the album’s collection of tales, focusing solely on hard-living and harder women, are but hokey pulp fictions disguised with mellowed sincerity, played out on mythical dirt roads and overgrown farmhouses.

Shock Value has a disturbing amount of chemistry-set mishaps.

This clearly isn’t rave, or even a reinvention of rave. They’re an indie band with a half-decent gimmick.

Brock’s idiosyncratic worldview, so much a part of what made Modest Mouse special to begin with, has left the building.

Turn the Light Out scales everything back—the drums, the guitars, the vocals—leaving us with a clean-cut, grown-up Ponys, trying to get comfortable in their own skin when they were just fine in someone else’s.

There is an immediacy and zest to the Rakes’ latest effort that is commendable, but it’s not that memorable.

The musicianship on this album retains a professional, waxed sheen, and that’s part of the problem: Hammond sticks to the basics, employing pedestrian rock setups whether he’s punking along with gusto or putzing around on the beach.

National Anthem, is monochrome and even somewhat sterile, characteristics often overcome by Whiteman’s increasingly excellent craftsmanship.

The Weirdness comes off as another solid yet daffy Iggy Pop solo album. The performances are energetic, but Watt is a virtual non-factor.

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

The explorations of Security aren’t exactly shattering, but they’re refreshing.

Their music though—and probably the reason they’re used to such great effect in “Friday Night Lights”—actually feels more compelling as an accompaniment to visual drama, in part because the internal drama of the songs themselves are really specific and their presentation is a little tired.

Perhaps due to their prominence, Can Cladders works best when the strings are actually ditched.

This is an album not entirely worthy of the patience it requires to be appreciated track by track.

A shame an NPR market supercilious of the mercenary likes of Sheryl Crow has forced her to record songs that Crow herself would consider models of autumnal acuity.

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

The second half of the album falls into a malaise as tempos slow and arrangements become more orthodox, placing Bloc Party closer to Coldplay than one would have thought possible two years ago.

Rarely does an album ingratiate itself so immediately and so quickly wear out its welcome.

The songwriting isn’t bad, by any means... But Heumann’s big-picture lyrics—faith, truth, etc.—are as ceaselessly heavy-handed as his guitar work, giving the whole of Rites an overwrought feel, one that can border on comical depending on your mood.

While lyrics have never been Mellencamp’s strongest suit, they’ve never been as clumsy and crotchety as this.

Nas caps a year of NYC-based disappointments with quite possibly the most crushing one yet.

At 11 tracks, it doesn’t exactly famish the vaults, and its instrumental-heavy tracklist prohibits it from being a good newbie recommendation.

The strange thing about The Inspiration is how it's posited as an alternative to the much-bullied "conscious rap," and yet, it's among the least fun albums released this year.

No one listens to Gwen Stefani to hear her rap. Or sing a sentimental power ballad. In fact, if there’s a Gwen song that can’t be described by putting two (or more) genres together, I’d suggest skipping it altogether.

Kingdom Come is Jay-Z at his least inspired, and, yes, that includes the R. Kelly collaborations.

Ultimately, that’s the problem: No one can really decide where to take these songs, so everyone takes them everywhere.

Jesse Lacey... still conjures up arresting images but they rarely add up to coherent songs—and nothing consistently cuts to the bone like Deja Entendu’s highlights.

The sheer amount of misfires makes Songs for Christmas impossible to recommend to anyone but the devoted Sufjanite.

When the Deftones are successful, they seem to slow down time, expanding on floating moments of doubt and mystery. When they’re not busy getting bogged down in all those mini-moments, dragging the album through dread patches of sluggishness that is.

This is a goofy record of bubblegum punk, with Queen lapping at its edges and enough good tracks to justify the smattering of empty screamfests.

Threes is their most average album yet, sounding similar to their two previous full-lengths but lacking the confrontational loudness of Wiretap Scars or the precision of Porcelain.

The Walkmen’s version is difficult to recommend to anyone unfamiliar with Nilsson and Lennon’s album.

Press Play is like an episode of My Super Sweet 16: though lavishly decorated and probably an honor to be invited to, there's a megalomaniacal presence that ensures the whole party is about glorification of ego rather than actual fun.

Rotten Apple... doesn’t try to address Banks’ shortcomings, it just buries them under tectonic plates of NYC sturm und drang and more of Banks guffawing end rhymes.

Musically the record comes off as simply a rote (if spirited) rendition of the best records from Rainer Maria or 764-Hero, which certainly isn’t saying much.

Hello Love is certainly the most hinged of their three releases, in that it sounds the cleanest—the most streamlined both instrumentally and lyrically. Too bad what it’s saying is, more often than not, familiar to the point of being trite.

Whatever Sam’s Town’s scant merits, the album reminds artists to be more careful about their role models—and to avoid Bono’s phone calls.

With Friendly Fire, we get a number of concepts and stabs at self-aware dynamics, but we mostly just see the over-privileged slacker.

His seemingly harmless overarching theme of matters extraterrestrial stitched through each of the album’s tracks somehow compromises their effectiveness.

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

The Lemonheads is full of, for better or worse, comfort music. It radiates a blunted nostalgic glow that seeps through the frequent musical languor.

Whether the songs are merely half-developed or the sugar-sheen production simply washes them of any potential grit, it seems apparent that the dreaded second album curse hath struck again.

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

It seems to prove a cardinal rule about art and ambition; if you paint in too many colors, you end up with mud brown. The Mars Volta could fill up whole galleries with canvases this color, and with Amputechture, have constructed another monochromatic monument to wild, uninhibited excess.

He calmly circles the same career themes with the same warmed-over, palatable guitar weavings: girls are scary, girls are sad, getting older is weird, home is nice.

Into the Blue Again is more stylistically cohesive than his previous works, but the songs are ossified and interchangeable; while the one-man band aesthetic of Album Leaf implies meticulous approach to craft, there's an assembly line feel that makes you feel like he cranks out a tune in ten minutes and spends the rest of the week tweaking EQ.

Always a wee bit more clever than anyone gave them credit for, the Keys are now a pretty good Zeppelin knockoff for the indie crowd, and little more.

It’s a natural inclination for LeMaster to experiment, but it makes the songs often difficult and unengaging, giving off the impression that they’re half-formed.

The growing sense that Molina released this record last year--and will probably release it again next year--is frustrating.

The songs are breezy to the point of vapidity.

It’s a trad, tried, and tested sound that they truck around town, exemplified by guest appearances by Conor Deasy of The Thrills and, a little more inexplicably, Maroon 5’s bass player. It’s the middle ground bewteen these two groups which The Tyde occupy.

Idlewild fails in the same places as Speakerboxxx/The Love Below: both feature some stunningly flat crooning and poor pop revisions straight from the mind, body, and soul of Andre Benjamin.

A bit too predictable and lightweight.

It’s abundantly clear that Ward is an indie-rock songwriter--a pretty good one sometimes--who doesn’t bring a whole lot else to the table.

In country music, it’s all about the chops--and Millan doesn’t have ‘em. Yet.

To the Races isn’t that bad. Bachmann’s just so much better.

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.

Bloated with ideas and parsimonious with tunes.

His music could be a good deal better than it is.

Genuine hooks are oddly scarce.

Kill Them With Kindness might be a rewarding listen, for example, for a Stars fan, but then again it might be better to stick with the more familiar originals.