One Plus One is One sounds like an attempt to make a more serious statement, but with little substance invested in it. The result is Badly Drawn Boy's first boring album.

This album is so soaked in self-pity that a track called "Madness" seems like a given. "Stone Froze Mascot" is a bad metaphor in and of itself - more self-pity, more of the same. Sound-wise, the album could use work, too.

The most egregious offender is Planet of Ice's last song, 'Lotus,' which clocks in at close to nine minutes, thanks to clumsy feedback inserted somewhat inappropriately between the beginning and end of what must have started out as a fairly straightforward rock song.

Comets on Fire, 90 Day Men and No Doctors all released albums within the last year that proved classic rock to be relevant in today's music community. The difference between these bands and Black Mountain is that it doesn't sound like the members of Black Mountain had to crush their souls to write their songs.

Each CD is crammed to a full 50 minutes with some of the most heinous crimes against good taste since Wham's "Wham Rap! '86." [Joint review of both discs.]

The subject matter on the indistinguishably titled Love, Angel, Music, Baby is painfully mainstream throughout.

Lulu is a joyless mess, a grim, humorless record with no notion of when to say "when."

As a whole, Black Ice is a mess of tired conventions shoved noisily at the listener, as though just getting them all on record was good enough.

If Tegan and Sara were looking to release something which sounds like so much of the girl based rock, which can be found on TRL and on the radio waves, then they could most likely consider So Jealous a wild success.

They obliterate any subtle expression or connection to the listener beyond low-order thinking--the band just bludgeons the listener with generic narcissistic drivel.

The album is essentially a tried-and-true big-budget rock album gimmick writ large: smother the listeners in a minute or so of formless noise (using the artiest guitar and keyboard settings imaginable, of course), and then snap them out of the doldrums with the sweep of a heroic chord progression.

The only crime Lazaretto commits that wasn’t already covered by his misogynistic solo debut, Blunderbuss, is being really boring.

The release’s awkward format and patronizing presentation are among the least of its poor qualities: Even for the heads, Kaleidoscope offers very little not already heard elsewhere. ... In addition to the previously mentioned Chainsmokers pair-up, there is the very ungainly Big Sean feature “Miracles (Something Special),” which, wearing more than a few embarrassing, auto-generated reverential name-drops.

Like all Nickelback releases before it, All The Right Reasons was made for all the wrong ones and follows all the formulas and clichés you should be bored to death of by now.

All of this is borderline insulting to its target audience, myself included. For a moment in “Brand New,” Williams lets us see his hand, and it subtly reveals how incredibly marketed and capital-centric this album is.

Climate Change is an album about nothing. It hears nothing, speaks nothing, and sees nothing. It could be about partying, but even that subject is given such perfunctory treatment that what’s left hardly rewards participation.

Beyond all else, perhaps, think of this zero as the massive bedazzled orifice out of which our heroine has spawned a new era of popular culture.

The tracks are disaffected exercises in barren repetition and arrhythmic progressions that feel truly tossed off (improvised would be an insult to people who are actually accomplished at that) and indulgently "arty" in the worst sense of the word.

So the mission statement of this CD is clear; this is a product made by the emotionally and culturally sterile for people who either have no conception of love, depression, or any other emotional state outside of pop culture cliché, or those so desperate for entertainment that they would deceive themselves into thinking the feckless chicanery of this masturbatory ensemble resembles soulful expression in any way.

His reunion with frequent collaborators belies a rich history of discovering and championing new voices. This ostensible distance from which Kanye preaches reveals King’s true tension: Kanye, like Kendrick on DAMN., is asking for our prayers, while also distancing himself from our hands and our mouths. And it doesn’t work. ... He has artistically lost track of his audience and himself in its midst.

I have done my best to place the album, as a series of utterances, in its agony and vacuity.

The music is appallingly predictable, unoriginal, uninspiring, boring, over-polished, and vain.