This record is Weezer-lite, emo-lite, corporate radio, MOR rock junk.

Alright Still is nothing more than pop for people who hate pop music, poptimist Quorn, phony music for people who can't let go of their inhibitions (indie-bitions?) and have to have their music classified as REAL.

This is a dismal failure.

Sounding (at best, mind you) like an uninspired Afghan Whigs tribute band, it recycles motifs, melody lines, production tricks, and lyrics from the back catalog. Part of the problem lies in the production--it's far too muddled, loud, and flat--but even the most gifted producer would have trouble making a good album out of the Dulli-by-numbers on display here.

A boringly functional record full of tediously average songwriting.

It’s not that change is bad, but Wolf is moving into areas already well covered and away from ideas that beg for more exploration.

It’s not that Wolfmother are all that bad. It’s just that everything there is to say about them is best said by immediate reference to another band and Wolfmother always come up short in the comparison.

Its utter lack of anything approaching strong feeling relegates it to the realm of indie-flavored muzak.

It’s not that this album had to be catchy. But when an uninventive melody is rehashed ten times to the point that you wonder whether literal keys and strings are missing from the band’s instruments, what you get is a diffusion line of a product that wasn’t even selling well in the first place.

There’s no moderation on Cookies, no inner temperate telling the lads, "Enough’s enough," whether it’s following yet another crack about getting paralytic on drugs, another glammy, mascara-running-from-the-sweat-and-effort guitar solo, or that nth attempt to be cheeky.

Thickfreakness is an unrelentingly dour record - perhaps this music was best left in the past.

There are hooks aplenty, but they’re mushed into a production job that’s so caustically lacking in detail and depth, so over-inflated and etch-a-sketched in timbre, that it’s almost unlistenable on anything but the most rudimentary of laptop speakers.

Relentlessly benign.

Facelessly competent, they make self-important, self-consciously literate guitar rock past its sell-by date via a simple recipe: mix together some late-period Death Cab for Cutie, some OK Computer-era Radiohead, and add in a few Doves and some Decemberists.

Doves’ strength lies in their careful sculpting of the sonic and the emotional, and here they’ve restrained their palette and scope so much that the result is grey.

The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living is an exercise in empty nothingness. But it’s not Bacchanalian coked-out excess nothingness, it's the joyless hollow-eyed actions of a man who is waiting for the next fix and doesn't care what bullshit has to come out of his lips in order to get paid.

All but a couple of tracks here are dipped in the melodramatically thick strings of the opener- and the sum result is that it’s almost too much to take the whole LP in one sitting.

Man Mountain is a poor album. It feels forced (the worst kind of feel for this kind of music), it feels cheesy, and sadly it doesn’t conjure many more feelings beside ‘I think I know what they might have been going for with this…’ Unfortunately they never get there, and it’s a chore to hear them try.

A dull compromise of artistic intent and marketability.

Muse write... the same way Metallica write, i.e. just compiling bits of ‘music’ then sticking them together, except they’re more impressed with their fragments (though they’re simpler and duller and even more remarkably similar to each other than Metallica’s), so they make them go on longer and repeat them more times.

The little things are annoying, of course, like the “that'll do” pointless pop culture punnery namedrops that litter (“Starz in Their Eyes”/”Alicia Quays”), or the way they take up so much time with vocal samples from (old documentaries/self-help tapes) in the same way that a struggling student quotes increasingly large and irrelevant passages of text in a desperate attempt to meet a word count.

Hocus Pocus is comprised mostly of fleeting moments of brilliance where it all just coalesces for a moment, and then returns to its MOR state of undeveloped garbage.

The Horrors aren’t horrifying and Strange House is nowhere near strange enough.

They ape New Order's "Movement," surely that combo's most static and dullest album. Dengler and rather good drummer Sam Fogarino don't get many chances to shine, letting guitarist Daniel Kessler create the kind of textures that often get mistaken for progress.

Spit-shine production, passionless instrumentation, (extremely) laid back grooves and laughably awful lyrics all conspire to do this once explosive band in.

This album is flat boring musically and sonically.

There’s just not much to get; these 9 tracks awkwardly move from one improvident moment to the next, collectively assembling a record that might elevate the mood of an extreme skiing video but does little to lift conciseness.

New Young Pony Club claim they can give us what we want, but they haven’t got a clue what we need.