Blood Red Shoes sound at their best when they manage to reign in their musical touch points and put them to work in their service.

With a bevy of somewhat indistinguishable tunes, a production aesthetic that keeps everything front, center, and earsplitting is a problem.

The lack of a unifying theme on this particular album leaves their past influences far downstream and without a paddle.

The musical accompaniment, courtesy of his more-famous friends in The Minus 5, is solid, workmanlike. Unfortunately, the vocals are placed front and center, and Harding’s inflection puts added emphasis on embarrassing lyrics.

There’s an attempt here to go back to the relative atmosphere of at least Going Blank Again, but the resulting music ends up sounding like the more reverb-heavy, turn-of-the-millennium British art-rock bands.

The Bedlam in Goliath is an exhausting and overwhelming effort that fails to leave any tangible impression.

On Tomorrow’s Hits, we place our hands against the walls, we feel the familiar texture of recording studio foam, we lift ourselves up gently only to drop back down to the ground, actions of a bored child.

Absolutely the least offensive record you will probably not hear this year.

Despite its positives, the album falls far short of the impressive musical peaks of Kelly’s discography.

With nary an aural step forward from their hitherto records, Painted Ruins ends much in the same way it begins, not with a bang, but with a drone.

On The Blueprint 3, Jay-Z, for arguably the first time in his career, sounds tired and old; too tired and too old to create a new blueprint, but not to create a third copy; too tired and too old to create new styles and ideas, but not to regurgitate them; too tired and too old to tell a new story, but not to tell an old story of a time when swagga belonged to the gods, one in particular.

This is yet another album destined to become background music in a trendy clothing boutique. Sadly, I have a feeling it'll have more than one Concretes record there to keep it company.

Full of spirituality and hope, these new songs lack a thrust.

It's rarely messy enough to be visceral, and rarely clean enough to be cerebral. Even the 30-minute running time is underwhelming. In fact, the album ends with a long electronic sigh, as if acknowledging that it hasn't accomplished anything.

It’s not a terrible album. It’s not a spectacular train wreck. It is, in fact, so remarkably unremarkable that neither a glowing nor incinerating score feel deserved.

None of the other songs are as instantly arresting, aside from “Plenty of Girls in the Sea,” which proves to be just as fruitless and repetitive as the aforementioned single.

Where xx was an album that got its hooks in you, Coexist becomes a somnolent atmosphere-in-itself, in which hooks are conspicuous by their absence. It all works best when the tempo rises (relatively speaking), as on "Tides" and "Swept Away;" still, the pulse races placidly.

Ultimately, High Places have succeeded in doing something that, on paper, seems an impossibility: they've managed to make an album that is undeniably focused around rhythms sound like an absolute slog.

Unfortunately, There’s Me and There’s You is a precipitate more than a catalyst, a document far less persuasive than a documentary about its own creation would be.

His songs are built around solid hooks and show enough dynamism to keep the listener from hitting the ‘next’ button, but when the album is through playing, there’s no pressing need to hit ‘play’ again.

That's what Cape Dory will be for many listeners--a toxic sugar rush full of empty calories.

Couples proves that Kate is no Jarvis, and, more importantly, The Long Blondes are no Pulp.

The album’s certainly well-produced, occasionally catchy, and at times even soothing in its simplicity, but it can also be dull and uninspired, like something I might put on when I want inoffensive background music for a relaxing social gathering.

Instead of in-your-face intricacy and complex rhythms, Travistan displays a much more restrained complexity that doesn't jump up and down for attention; and replacing the innovative vocal lines are cloying melodies that never seem to end.

Elephant Shell has it all if you’re looking for youthful mistakes from a well-meaning (but again, young) band that really, really, REALLY shouldn’t let the hype go to their heads.

A painful disappointment.

Content (pronounced like the noun, not the adjective) is, in many ways, a return to form for the group.

The pleasures that Pleasure describes are mundane to the point of tedium, trite beyond cliché. And the music itself is, despite the strength of Feist’s voice, mostly intolerable.