Easily Strait’s worst album in over a decade.

"Progressive" doesn’t mean clocking in at over seven minutes no matter what. It doesn’t mean hitting every goddamn skin, tom-tom, and cowbell on your drum set. Being "Progressive" doesn’t justify an album cover that looks like a stoner stumbled upon a documentary on Mayan civilization. I’m not sure, but I think "Progressive" is about growth and change.

Fans of Verlaine's Television-era storytelling will be disappointed to hear him so simultaneously unchanged and unforthcoming.

Despite being four years in the making, Traffic and Weather finds Fountains Of Wayne offering more of the same and yet decidedly less, working your nerves to the point where you’ll wonder whether you ever truly liked them in the first place.

The only song worth a second listen is 'Smithereens.'

We Are the Night isn’t awful, but you can hear the rigidity of its formula, like the motorik title tune that burps up its eponymy every few seconds along a signless, moody highway.

Even The Bravery, easily the most similar band in approach to White Rose Movement and rightly derided for their style over substance rehashes of the past, at least had a couple of memorably fine songs. The White Rose Movement, on the other hand, have the style, but little substance to back it up.

An irritating listen.

Unfortunately, while Kweli’s message is spot-on, his delivery of that message is highly flawed.

Insufferably vacuous.

Completely forgettable.

One of 2005’s most thudding disappointments.

The Cost is bleached of any sort of lifeblood, stumbling out of the gate and moping towards the finish line.

Friends: believe me when I say that the combination between the two disparate elements–unbearably goofy synth-pop and sub-par commentary on various parties’ political shortcomings–is indeed a deadly one.

The realisation is obvious: a happy, contented, motherly Tori Amos is as irrelevant, sterile, and airbrushed as her face is on the cover of this album. Tori: it’s over.

A record that's so deathly serious that each of it's ten songs could be associated with its very own biblical plague.

If music is best judged by its immediate effect on the listener, this record succeeds and cannot be forgotten. In this case, that's not a good thing.

The biggest problem might be Rice’s vocal technique. On O, he had a tendency to endearingly strain for notes he couldn’t reach. Now, it sounds like he’s purposefully written songs to allow him to overextend his thin voice.

Past a handful of listens this becomes quickly uninspired.

Wholly forgettable.

No matter how many literary allusions or whimsically witty turns of phrase he packs into a verse, The Believer lacks the balance and blood of his previous work.

His beefs have become so infinitesimal that he’s started to unconsciously parody our LiveJournal culture, a minor event or misunderstanding generating reams of dialogue, running commentary and painstaking minutiae. In short, he’s no more compelling than one of those non-famous drama queens in your life you already find insufferable, just another loser who blows up non-events, and it’s transformed the long-running Eminem Show into the most myopic, hand-wringing, self-reflexive stuck-in-the-mud soap opera of our time.

If The Blueprint proved that coming back is easy, The Blueprint 2 proves it’s difficult to stay on top.

Maybe their edge was lost in the lukewarm production. Maybe it was lost in Barney’s lyrics, which are as utterly meaningless as they have been for years now. Maybe it was just lost altogether.

Mediocre to its very last note, it reminds you that mediocrity is indeed far worse than simply awful.

His career for the last decade is basically that of a chicken with its head lopped off, running around the coop unawares whilst coughing up a never-ending stream of blood. If you couldn’t guess, Eat Me, Drink Me is where the fowl finally falls over and collapses in a pile of its fellow poultry’s fecal matter.

This is the band’s most listless, amelodic effort to date.

Keane have talked up Under the Iron Sea as being bleaker, more raw than their debut album. It is about the things they have seen over the last two years, the problems, the horrors, the sin. But Keane have not been uncovering the carcases of napalmed babies for the last two years. They’ve been playing music.